Greetings all in the Ivanhoe East Community
This will be the final chapter of three parts focusing on our Annual Implementation Plan. This week Engagement is in the spotlight.
Term 2 Goals
We were looking to trial Compass as our platform for sharing and communicating work with students. Our starting point would be the Grade 1 area, and then share expertise beyond that. It was also important to access information from schools currently working in this space with Compass and develop collegiate partnerships.
School Council was looking to establish a Community Engagement sub-committee which would build connections between school and families.
Term 2 Outcomes
The commencement of the Grade 1 trial of sharing work on Compass started up although delayed a little due to lockdown interruptions. The Community Engagement sub-committee of School Council was constituted but was restricted by the fact that events that draw our community together have not been able to go ahead.
Future Planning
Going forward, our steps would be to extend our Compass trial to include a senior school class in the back half of Term 3. The Grade 6 team have put their hands up to be next cabs off the rank (thanks to Natalie and Ashley - the Grade 6 team). Once our trials have been concluded we should be in a position to extend the use of Compass to share student learning school-wide in Term 4.
With the School Council Community Engagement sub-committee, the focus could be on ensuring that the Art Show planned for Term 3 goes ahead as much as possible. There could also be work done around operationalising the School Values to include students, teachers and community.
A bit about feedback
Intro
There is a fantastic publication from the American Psychological Association that outline twenty principles that teachers can apply to promote learning. Although written as “teacher - student” the ideas extend well beyond that to cover pretty much anyone learning something from another person.
Key Ideas
The feedback teachers offer can be most effective when it provides students with specific information about their current state of knowledge and performance as related to learning goals. For example:
- Teachers can tell students what they are (or are not) understanding and the strength of their performance by relating their progress to specific learning goals
- Feedback can also incorporate information on what students can do in the future to achieve those goals. For example, rather than general remarks, such as “good job” or “you do not appear to be getting this,” teachers can make more directed comments, such as “Your topic sentences provided a good summary of the main idea in each paragraph. In the future, you also need to address the meaning of the text as a whole by generating and explaining a few points that consider how all the main ideas interact with one another”
- Providing feedback in a timely way (e.g., as quickly as possible after a quiz) assists learning and is usually more effective than providing delayed feedback
- The tone and targeting of feedback affect student motivation. Students tend to respond better if feedback minimizes negativity and addresses significant aspects of their work and understanding, in contrast to feedback that is negative in tone and focused excessively on details of student performance that are less relevant to the learning goals.
References
A copy of this report is available online at
http://www.apa.org/ed/schools/cpse/top-twenty-principles.pdf
Brett Millott.
brett.millott@education.vic.gov.au