Overview

In this video the Russley leadership team consider how they currently report to parents, how they monitor progress and whether they need to modify their approaches to reporting.

Reflective questions

• Where do you think the best place is for your school community to use the reporting tool? At the beginning or the end of the self-review process. Why?

• Which groups of students in your school need a greater focus?

Go to the reporting tool

Transcript

Using the tool for reporting at Russley School

Effective reporting to the board and parents in plain language is a key element of helping students, parents and whanau understand about student achievement in relation to the national standards.

So today we’re going to be talking about the self review tool portion which in a way works to pull the three other tools together. So let’s look at the tool itself and you can see the structure is very similar, there are key questions down the side and then the bullet points lead us through from basic through to developing through to integrated. So the first concept of it, if you like, how do we ensure our reporting clearly describes student’s progress and achievement? So where would you place yourself on the first row?

Developing.....so, I don’t know whether we’re integrated, but I don’t think we asked them about the timing, and it was more what do you understand this

Well no, it’s about all of our progresses, and whether they’re happy or are there any alternatives that they would rather have? So it’s pretty open ended. I feel really comfortable with integrated except that it’s not against the national standards".

Working with the self review tool for reporting allowed school leaders to have a more in-depth conversation about key ideas like pace of progress and under achievement.

How would that sit with the other teams, the other syndicates? Believe that’s consistent across the school is it happening everywhere?

Well we’ve been given time for moderation but also we’ve only had one of our days I think what it’s also done is it’s built that relationship within the team to discuss your ideas more and ‘hey I don’t actually get this’ and you may have been sitting on this for the last year thinking maybe I should know that and hey someone else doesn’t know that either and so it’s given us that chance to put it all out on the table and come to a shared understanding and then it’s strengthened the relationship to ask those questions within your team and go to someone for that support...don’t know if that makes sense?

About building a climate of trust, and say I need some help her.

Charlotte said we’ve all had the moderation days, as the years gone on we’ve become better and better at consulting what level we think children are at and the evidence, giving evidence to why we think that and sometimes when there is a discrepancy having the time to talk through, well why did you think that? Then why did I think that? And who’s right? Or is it one sub level and that’s ok if it’s more than that really getting down to the nuts and bolts of it and asking well why are we having different opinions here?

And then so what? so those discussions are as valuable as the end product aren’t they? Have you found that?

Yes it’s been good and I think it actually made them look hard at their class and where they’re at, we’ve just had one of the teachers this morning with their reiki around the writing looking at the levels and it was really interesting because he based it on his top writers and he said, ‘once I looked at everybody else’s I knew mine weren’t anywhere near where they should’ve been and he said that’s what I’ve worked really hard on for a few weeks now to get them up to that level. Now without that discussion on that day he probably would’ve just left them where they were.

So remember at the beginning we were talking about what does critical inquiry look like? And one of the key things was multiple perspectives, so the same process of critical inquiry is supporting those moderation processes and your OTJ your multiple perspectives.

Yesterday we met with our ICT class and I was with 3 other year 7 teachers looking at what they’ve done in literacy, involved with ICT but it was really good to be able to see what their children were doing as far as literacy in comparison to mine as well as working with the team so I found that really valuable, that next step across another school as well.

We’re actually talking about the pace of progress , which is a question I had to discuss before I’m assuming is how we gather the data and what we do with it, how the children move through their progressions, is that what it is?

Yeah I think it was a concept that came out in the teacher’s one and the leader’s one. We’ve always had, this is where the child started, this is where they are now, and we’re able to celebrate that. Now we’ve got these sign posts out in front and what is the pace of progress required for the 5 year one month child to get close that next signpost and if they’re slightly behind there what’s the pace of progress required to keep meeting those signposts? Because we know the gap tends to get wider and remember the term probing more deeply into persistent under achievement, we came out in the teacher tool as well so that’s my understanding of it, how would you interpret it?

We have been happy if our kids have met the appropriate level even though they’re actually very capable students, now that’s not enough, now we will be wanting to track that not just are we shifting the kids who have accelerated progression we need to be shifting the kids who are coasting who are sitting perfectly happily in this, and we’ve actually set setting our targets around that, so our targets for the school for the last 2 years have been about shifting the children at the bottom end but also when you look at our demographics we should have far more students operating at those top levels and so our second target was the shift upward of those kids, the kids have got potential sitting but shifting them up.

It’s about challenging teacher practice in order to do that and if we know we’ve got this group of kids are we keeping on doing the same thing with them as we’ve always done? And keep doing it and keep doing it when we know it isn’t working. And that’s teacher inquiry out of NZC isn’t it, what can we change in our practice to make a difference? If we looked at your current reporting process, your sheets that you’re developing how do they stack up against these requirements do you think?

I think the attention is there, the thinking we’ve done behind this which has been to be really transparent with our parents and to show progress over time, so I think this with some tweaking so here instead of reporting against this one tool which is what we’ve done these will be our OTJ’s so you’d still want to make in explicit to parents that this is where they’re assessed to be and to show where we’re assessing that they actually are. The challenge is to find a manageable progress reports.

So if you can see that the reporting phase brings a lot of the whole other pieces together and you can’t jump straight to the reporting without knowing the underlying things that support it and contribute towards it.

I think two next term on our programme we played with a whole lot of assessment tools, we played with a whole lot of ideas and next term we’re going to sit down and populate ok so what information do we actually need? And I guess it’ll be about what information do we need in order to make our OTJ’s to be able to report against the national standards, what tools will we use to gather that information? And that will be our assessment framework. And from there we’d use that to then do the reporting, review the reporting, timeline and format. So it kind of fits nicely we’ll have more of an idea about the standards and the OTJ’s and hopefully the mapping process will have finished as well so we’ll know each of those tools maps against the standards and what we’re already using we can just incorporate that into what we’re actually doing rather than making major changes all over the place.

At our next session we’ll be pulling together the outcomes from the four tools and we’ll be considering ways of, how do we pull those smaller pieces into key themes? Is student voice one of the key themes coming through, is reporting to parents, involving parents more in the learning is that a key theme? So we’ll be constructing some key themes out of your four self review tools and then we’ll be looking at ways we can prioritise those because we are at this stage here in the flow diagram, we have facilitated the four tools and we’re coming up with professional strengths, learning needs and then we’ll start looking at what are some short term goals and what are some longer term goals and then at the end of that you can be constructing your learning plan for next year, so we’re doing well.

I think the good thing about all of this is that its making us all analyse ourselves as teachers, analyse our classrooms, it’s making us include the parents where our whole team meetings are so different now, they’re so more in-depth, more probing we learn off each other far more than we used to. Before perhaps it used to be perhaps a senior teacher talking saying ‘do this, do that, now it’s a whole discussion package, so I’ve been quite inspired by it.