Monday, April 30, 2012

Organisational Values - Making them Visible

Over the last eighteen months the Staff and Board have been brainstorming and drafting the organisational values for our recently established School.  Rather than norms to underpin 'how we do things around here' we have developed a set of values and mindsets that underpin the culture we wish to establish.

We have a very clever designer (Visual Evolution) who helped bring these values to life as shown below.


This shared language is already helping us to further deepen the culture we set out to establish.  It is powerful at informing our practice and behaviour when faced with decisions, problems and opportunities.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Capturing Shifts

A big challenge for us this year is showing shifts in students understanding in areas other than reading, writing and mathematics.  Historically many of us have collected lots of data in these areas and have many assessment tools to draw from to help inform judgements about students achievement.  What I believe we haven't been so good at is measuring (or showing growth) in learner dispositions, conceptual understandings or learners ability to sincerely collaborate for example.  

Each of our teams has been backward mapping the understandings they would like their students to develop during the term to show growth in students acquisition of the macro concept being developed. Much learning evolved last term from capturing student voice, reflections, completed thinking organisers etc to see shift occurring in the concept being developed across the term.  Quite qualitative by nature however powerful evidence when analysed to highlight shifts.

 More recently we have created a frame to show the developmental progression highlighting growth in the conceptual understanding being developed and secondly detailing the evidence to be captured to measure growth and inform next teaching steps. Here is a sample of the scaffold we are using to make the progress visible for the learners.


We are keen to work with and share with other Schools on similar journeys.