Approaches to Learning
By Lindy Braithwaite – Assistant Principal, Curriculum
Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a couple of those moments that remind you why you love your job. The first was on Year 7 Camp. Spending quality time with Year 7 students as they faced challenges, made new friends, and shared good times was a privilege. It wasn’t all sunshine (literally), but we all laughed a lot, and in that setting, every student came back with new skills that they will continue to draw upon.
The second (and third moments) were conversations with parents who approached me to express how powerful an exchange had been between their child and a classroom teacher around our new Approaches to Learning feedback, which replaces Interim Reports (more on that later). These moments highlighted to me how important relationships are. I think we would all agree that with the right relationships, students can develop the skills and attitudes to thrive. So, you will notice changes in the way we communicate student learning and growth this year. Each method is designed to build relationships between the student and all those invested (teacher, mentor, parent).
Seizing the opportunity presented by our new LMS, Nexus, and on the back of the recommendations of our 2021 Reporting Review, we have aligned the style and timing of feedback to provide a complete picture of student progress. Our core values remain central, so there will be a mixture of academic and pastoral progress information, with a move to increase feedback in other areas too, for example our camps program. We have more formally incorporated student (guided) self-assessment in a number of ways. We want students to develop the ability to be self-aware and have accountability for their learning.
For these changes to have traction, we need to arm our teachers with learning too. In our pre-term January professional learning time, the Secondary School teachers worked with Professor Martin Westwell (Flinders University, Chief Executive of SACE) and Dr Shyam Barr (University of Canberra) as part of our self-regulation project. Both focussed on supporting teachers to embed learning, meaningfully measure (assess), and report progress on student Personal and Social Capabilities, in other words, the skills and attitudes mentioned earlier. Our Assistant Principal, Teaching and Learning, Mrs Louise Wallace-Richards, discussed the focus on self-regulation in her recent Bulletin article. We are also undertaking a year-long commitment to professional learning on mentoring, led by Assistant Principal, Students, Mrs Claire Melloy.
Approaches to Learning, our new Interim Report
In the past, we published Interim Reports at this time of year. These gave a brief summary of student effort, however, feedback from student and parents alike in our Reporting Review, indicated they needed to be updated. In their place, students will complete ‘Approaches to Learning’ (ATL) rubrics for each subject (with exception of Year 7 who will be doing this more wholistically). These ATLs will evolve over the next few years, with an initial focus on self-regulation. Teachers have developed the ATLs as evidence-based progressions, reducing ambiguity and providing a positive growth focus. You will also notice that although they all stem from the Australian Curriculum – Personal & Social Capabilities, there is an intentionally different emphasis and flavour to these rubrics across subject disciplines, as each contributes to skill development in different ways.
With the student making the assessment, they need to reflect on their own behaviour. Of course, teachers and mentors guide this reflection, and it opens the door to productive conversations, with you too. The ongoing check-ins on this are designed to build capacity, and as I mentioned earlier, relationships [Parent Guide to Approaches to Learning].
Assessment for Learning
The other area we are focusing on is more subtle. There has been much research and renewed emphasis on the deeper purpose of assessment in schools in recent years. Essentially, assessment should be for learning, as the feedback it provides gives the teachers and the student vital information about where they are, and adjustments can then be made. It is important that feedback is given in a way that students focus on this constructive feedback, the ‘what next’, and that it is timely and contextual. Nexus will be a key repository for this feedback.
There are three key processes in learning:
- Where the learner is right now
- Where the learner needs to be
- How to get there (Dylan Wiliam 2011 p16).
If assessment is to be for learning, the student, especially as they move towards independence, must be given the opportunity to be a partner in the learning, rather than being passive. Likewise, how it is measured is crucial to that learning. For example, ‘Learner Progressions’ and criterion-based assessment are now commonly used across the world, such as in the International Baccalaureate. As a result, you will see a more prominent use of Grade Descriptors and Rubrics, and less overt numerical ‘marks’ which can be unhelpful as a form of meaningful feedback or ‘feed forward’.
The Learning Summary
Finally, what used to be our end-of-semester report will now be a ‘Learning Summary’. It will be designed to capture a snapshot of retrospective information that will be useful for scholarship applications and the like. We’ll reveal the design and more on this in future Bulletin articles. In the meantime, we hope you join us for the Parent – Student – Teacher conversations coming up in the final weeks of term, and that you find the navigation and look of Nexus much improved from its predecessor.
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Wiliam, D (2013), 'Assessment: The bridge between teaching and learning', Voices from the middle, vol. 21, no. 2, p15-20.