Risking self in formative practice for shaping learner agency - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Fight or Flight?

Risking self in formative practice for shaping learner agency

• Dr Bruce Addison
• Mrs Jody Forbes
• Ms Ruth Jans
• Mr Stephen Woods

DISCUSSANT: Dr Lenore Adie

Presenters

Dr Bruce Addison

Changing Curriculum Structures in an Era of Systemic Change: A Reflection on a School's Transition into a Year 7 Noticing Learning Space.

• ….. all that matters are the results!

Results are not everything to everyone!

• Apart from wrong, it is dangerously, ignorantly
• wrong. It is wrong in many ways. As Macbeth

remarked ‘‘it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’’ (Bright 2018). (SMH 17/8/18)

Shakespeare was on the money!

• 2017 NAPLAN ... not good enough..... we need to

focus on evidence-based measures that will get results!

Yes Minister!

Simon Birmingham

• Punditry is not the same as expertise ( Scott, 2018).
• Need to re-introduce the concept of expertise back

into education (Hattie, 2018).

• We must be very wary of this word evidence (Hattie,

2018).

Some voices: ACER Research Conference

It’s all about lenses!

Everything depends on the lenses through which we view the world. By putting on new lenses, we can see things that otherwise would remain invisible. (Palmer, 2007, p. 27).

What we have tried to do …

We have endeavored to harness our expertise and the expertise of others to examine the evidence through a number of different lenses!

It’s all about the cosmos…

Out of the darkness came some signs – curriculum signs!

A space was starting to emerge …

• We are an older school but not conservative in thought!
• This cosmic conflation provided opportunities for some

counter cultural thinking.

• Advent of Year 7 in the secondary school space.
• Long lingering demise of internal-school based assessment.
• The appointment of a new Principal and Senior Leadership

team just as all this was happening.

We are 143 years young!

• Leadership is an overused word.
• Creative leadership, respectful of corporate memory, is so often the key.
• Part of our ‘success’ is extremely strong and experienced middle

leadership led by our Heads of Faculty and Curriculum Leaders.

• Strong, experienced and effective middle leadership creating a 'can do‘

culture in schools and in ensuring quality practice at classroom level

(Flemming, 2013).

Leadership is essential

Introduction of Year 7

• This was huge for Queensland
• Especially for secondary schools.
• At BGGS it added approx. 240 new students + ˃ 20

staff.

• Put strain on fitting everything into 10 week terms.
• Bad enough with 5 cohorts nigh impossible with 6!

• Once the first Year 7 cohort finished in 2015 we could refashion a few

things based on what we learned.

• Some of our long established practice needed a slight ‘pivot’.
• Simultaneously, the QCAA was starting its journey into designing the new

QCE/ATAR view of the world.

• We were also working with Drs Adie and Willis – both then of QUT.
• Noticing learning/formative assessment became present in our thinking!

Year 7 was a gift!

• An essential part of our thinking was to build structures

fostering creativity, learning and teaching practice congruent with our foundational belief in the importance of a genuine broad-based liberal education!

• Did not want the QCE/ATAR model to contage everything.
• This was and is a deliberate strategy!

The new QCE/ATAR Model

• Dr Jason Fox
• He warns of default thinking – he calls it Default

Thinking and the Kraken of Doom!

• Change, progress and growth only truly happens

when we challenge our thinking, and explore alternative options (Fox, 2016, 1.)

Hosted some visitors …

• The Expert Learner
• Experts take risks in their practice. For teachers, risk

taking may involve going beyond the conventional routines of test preparation to ensure a deeper understanding of the domain of their students (Stobart,

2014, 74).

Professor Gordon Stobart

Professor Hattie’s work

• Hattie’s work on feedback is well known, especially

his work on effect size.

Six very significant educators …

Two Phase/Four Pillar Model

• Evidence of learning: Changing the role of teachers

and students to improve learning (ACU)

Some noticing learning projects

…the journey into a formative assessment/noticing learning mindset

Conflation of issues:

• Professor John Hattie’s work.
• Had introduced a course called a Philosophy of Learning at Year 8 now

Year 7 – all about learning how to learn.

• Inkling that 20th century concept of reporting at the end of every semester

was perhaps obsolete.

• Reports were online but the only difference was the absence of a postage

stamp.

Formative assessment ….

• Formative assessment refers to frequent, interactive

assessments of students’ progress and understanding to identify learning needs and adjust teaching appropriately (Looney, 2005, p. 21)

• We did not want the new QCE/ATAR model to contage everything.
• We want to try and decouple assessment and anxiety where we can.
• Noticing learning has become a very important foundational strategy.
• Assessment load is much lighter, especially in Year 7. Term 1 Year 7 is assessment

free or assessment light.

• Led to the introduction of continual reporting – online task by task feedback. In

time, student focused. Available to both parents and students.

• Change the idea of end of semester reporting – relevance?

Fundamental to our thinking …

• Greater student mastery in assessment is established

by enabling students to do more than tinker at the edges of assessment; it requires students to engage in developing the guild knowledge of assessment connoisseurship to recognise quality in their work

(Sadler, 1989 in Adie, et al. 2018. p. 7)

Doing a lot of preliminary work in student agency

• In high performance cultures, student agency may

not be seen as desirable, and parents and students may resist teacher efforts to move away from historic notions of the roles of teachers and students (Adie,

2018, et al. p. 7).

It’s all about slow looking

• ‘The definition of slow looking is straightforward. It

simply means taking the time to carefully observe more than meets the eye at first glance’ (Tishman, 2018,

p.2).

• For Tishman, slow looking ‘is an epistemic virtue: its

value has to do with gaining knowledge’ (2018, p.46).

It’s all about slow looking!

• Assessment in English during Semester One has been
• formative. Feedback has been given both at Parent

Teacher Interviews and through the continual reporting process. Summative assessment in English will be introduced during Semester 2.

Semester Report Comment English

It’s all about slight pivot of practice for significant change!

Jody Forbes

The importance of holistic care in the support

• f student learning

Holistic Student Care at BGGS

• Student Care Structure
• BGGS Girls: An Overview
• Student Counselling Data
• The Case of Perfectionism
• Integrating Holistic Care into

Academic Setting and School Community

Student Care Structure at BGGS

Deputy Principal (Students) Heads of House (9 Houses) House Group Teachers (54) Classroom Teachers Director Of Student Counselling & School Psychologists School Nurse Associate Dean (Student Care) Associate Dean (Academic Care)

House System

Student Care Structure at BGGS

Deputy Principal (Students) Heads of House (9 Houses) House Group Teachers (54) Classroom Teachers Director Of Student Counselling & School Psychologists School Nurse Associate Dean (Student Care) Associate Dean (Academic Care)

Student

HOH Director of Student Counselling Associate Dean - Students Associate Dean – Academic

Holistic Conversations

Educational Institution Wellbeing Institution

• Curious
• Principled
• Adventurous
• Balanced
• A leader

BGGS Girls – A Grammar Girl is…

• Exceptional scholarship
• Strong co-curricular investment

Work hard & Play hard

• Compliant
• Joyful, excited & enthusiastic
• Motivated & committed
• Prone to stress & anxiety – ‘fight or flight’
• Perfectionistic

Who are our girls?

National Context

Total Presentations to Student Counselling Service Term 2, 2018

20 35 39 32 29 77 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 7 8 9 10 11 12

Student-described Presenting Issues

10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90

Diagnostic Impressions

10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 Anorexia AnxAndMood Anxiety ASD Behaviour Learning Mood Stress (blank)

– Concern about external expectations – Comparison to others – Fear of failure and fixed mindsets – Perfectionism – unrelenting high standards – Anxiety disorders – generalized anxiety (worry about lots of things); social anxiety; specific phobias (e.g. oral presentations)

What kinds of anxiety do we see?

Perfectionism

• 1. The relentless striving for extremely high standards
• 2. Judging your self-worth on your ability to achieve such unrelenting standards
• 3. Experiencing negative consequences of setting such demanding standards, yet

continuing to go for them despite the huge cost to you. Healthy striving VS Avoiding failure Self-criticism VS Contentment

Student Care in the Curriculum

Year Level Ethics Topics Year 7 Resourceful Adolescent Program Being Friendly Learning Well Year 8 Confident Me (Body Image) .b Mindfulness Year 9 Positive Education (Gratitude, Kindness, Personal Strengths) Empathy Year 10 Being the Best You. Community Service Year 11 Leadership Year 12 Transitions

• Planned ‘conversations’ within the House Group encouraging positive academic

habits- personal bests, healthy striving

• Aligns with Cultures of Thinking
• Builds academic resilience
• Emphasises positive learning habits and processes
• Encourages students to take responsibility

for their learning

Academic Care Conversations

“Paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non- judgmentally”

• Kabat-Zinn

Mindful ness

– One-off supportive counselling sessions – Developing helpful cognitive strategies – Managing strong and overwhelming emotions – Taking adaptive, meaningful actions

School Psychologists

Ruth Jans

Understanding the adolescent brain to inform formative assessment

We want to avoid:

White, D. (2013) A Pedagogical Decalogue: Discerning the practical implications of brain- based learning research on pedagogical practice in Catholic

• Schools. Conference

Proceedings – Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) Conference, 2013, p68-78.

Brain-based research for the classroom

In essence, brain-based education involves ‘designing and orchestrating lifelike, enriching and appropriate experiences for learners’ and ensuring that ‘students process experience in such a way as to increase the extraction of meaning’ (Caine & Caine, 1994, p. 8). Excerpt from Dan White’s “Pedagogical Decalogue”

The limbic areas are the major ‘gating’ systems that allows the brain to discern any perceived emotional threats before upshifting (the ‘ladder’) to any form of high- level thinking activity or downshifting (the ‘snakes’) to a ‘fight or flight’ response Dr Dan White (2013)

How the Limbic system affects learning

Key Point: The importance of appropriate levels of challenge…

Thinking about our pedagogical practices

How much time does the average teacher wait after asking a question?

And what sort of questions require less than a second to process and respond to…?

• A. 10 seconds
• B. 1 second
• C. 2-3 seconds

D.5 seconds

Lower-order / Recall questions

Some research indicates 2-3 seconds (Ben-Hur, 1998), whilst

• thers suggests teachers wait

less than a second (Rowe, 1987) before they do something – identify a respondent, rephrase it or answer it.

“Think time”

Other key ideas…

• Chunking

Intense concentration + neural recovery time + intense concentration = highly effective learning Less Chalk’n Talk Teacher direction should be limited to 20%-40% of the class time BUT studies show that we do the opposite.

Focus on imbedding

• pportunities for Formative

Assessment

Techniques to engage students and avoid “fight/flight/freeze”

• Think – Pair – Share: talking for 30 seconds (to a minute) with a partner

and then invite students to share an interesting point their partner made

• Peer Assessment  “Two stars and a wish”
• What did we learn today? (end of lesson review)
• Pre-flight checklist
• Traffic lights or Red/Green discs

Harvard Project Zero: Cultures of Thinking

Harvard Project Zero: Cultures of Thinking

• See Think Wonder
• Micro-lab
• CSI
• Sentence Phrase Word
• Family Dinner = Chalk and Talk + Step Inside + See Think

Wonder

• I used to think; Now I think
• Connect, Extend, Challenge
• Headlines

Assessment Changing a culture of thinking

2015 year 7 students’ visual representations of assessment

If assessment was a creature, what would it look like?

Academic Care

Associate Dean of Academic Care – Student Care Team

• Goal setting
• Mentoring

Year 12 Buddies; Study Buddies; House Group Teachers; HOH; Teachers

• Personal reflection
• Term Planners
• Master Classes

2015  2018

This year we trialed Semester 1 English assessment = no marks

2018 year 7 students’ visual representations of assessment

If assessment was a creature, what would it look like?

By taking away a letter grade for 1 semester in year 7 English…

• Student anxiety levels regarding English

assessment decreased

• Students’ focus AND Parents’ focus on Feedback

increased

• Student engagement with and understanding of

descriptors in criteria increased

But…

• Academic Awards
• OP  ATAR

Still a system which ranks students

• Published NAPLAN results
• Expectations

Parents’ & Students’

Stephen Woods

The grades/feedback nexus: See the formative forest rather than the summative tree

Seeing the Formative Forest, (not the Summative Tree)

A humble strategy for changing the dreaded handback from fraught showdown to segue to formative learning.

The Premise

• Handing back summative assessment often creates a

tense, and potentially damaging situation.

The Premise

• Handing back summative assessment often creates a

tense, and potentially damaging situation.

• Recipients can be smugly complacent.
• Recipients can be disappointed or outraged.

The Premise

• Handing back summative assessment often creates a

tense, and potentially damaging situation.

• Recipients can be smugly complacent.
• Recipients can be disappointed or outraged.
• Not much learning happens, either way.

The Premise

• Handing back summative assessment often creates a

tense, and potentially damaging situation.

• Recipients can be smugly complacent.
• Recipients can be outraged.
• Not much learning happens, either way.
• Recipients’ supporters can become involved.

The big context in broad [research-based] brushstrokes

• Grades are unrelated—if not inimical to—learning
• Feedback can advance learning
• Grades with feedback do not advance learning
• The handback is a time of anxiety for students, teachers—

and the parent receiving the almost instantaneous text

My Faculty context

• We cycle around four genres

across six years: Analyse, Persuade, Create, Reflect.

• We use the same sets of

assessment descriptors in 7-9, and in 10-12.

Yr 8 C-A-P-R Yr 9 R-A-C-P Yr 10 P-C-A-R Yr 11 R-A-P-C Yr 12 A-R-C-P Yr 7 A-C-P-R

My Faculty context

• This gives us the scope to take a

long view and to develop skills incrementally.

• Our girls tend to take their

assessment seriously.

• So do their supporters.

Yr 8 C-A-P-R Yr 9 R-A-C-P Yr 10 P-C-A-R Yr 11 R-A-P-C Yr 12 A-R-C-P Yr 7 A-C-P-R

What gets handed back (2010 Syllabus)

What (certainly) gets noticed

Grade Myopia

• The grade prompts an immediate

emotional, visceral response

• The grade obscures all else
• There is no clear path from B+ to

learning

What (maybe) gets noticed

The handback challenge

• To make summative assessment for learning

The handback challenge

• To make summative assessment for learning
• To apprentice students (and their parents) into the guild of

teacher-assessor-learners

The handback challenge

• To make summative assessment for learning
• To apprentice students (and their parents) into the guild of

teacher-assessor-learners

• To co-opt students as agents and owners of their own

learning

The handback challenge

• To make summative assessment for learning
• To apprentice students (and their parents) into the guild of

teacher-assessor-learners

• To co-opt students as agents and owners of their own

learning

• To turn the handback into a productive segue from

summative to formative

Our aims

• We wanted the students to:
• Engage meaningfully and productively with feedback

Our aims

• We wanted the students to:
• Engage meaningfully and productively with feedback
• Respond more effectively and less affectively

Our aims

• We wanted the students to:
• Engage meaningfully and productively with feedback
• Respond more effectively and less affectively
• Be able to identify skills to focus on to improve their
• utcomes

Our aims

• We wanted the students to:
• Engage meaningfully and productively with feedback
• Respond more effectively and less affectively
• Be able to identify skills to focus on to improve their
• utcomes
• We also wanted to find a way to inculcate parents into this

culture

Step 1: There is no ‘we we’ in handback

• Teachers impose the Laur-Littler Protocol, aka ‘Don’t ask,

don’t tell’.

• Students are glad of it
• Limits ego involvement and risk
• Emphasises the seat of ownership and the locus of control

Step 2: Transcrib ibe the feedback fine detail

Transcription of Feedback: From Tasksheet to Tracker Sheet

Focusing on the Feedback

• Brains and hands
• Forces close attention
• Tacitly creates a 5-10 minute space for non-emotional

reflection

• Depends upon and consolidates assessment/criterial literacy
• Unique, bespoke combination of micro-outcomes gives the

lie to the one-size-fits-all ‘B+’

A Cumulative Process: March

A Cumulative Process: May

A Cumulative Process: June

New System; same approach (2019 Syllabus)

After one piece

After two pieces

After three

What the tracker sheet says

• Nothing about grades
• Everything about skills

What the tracker sheet says

• Nothing about grades
• Everything about skills
• Learning is an iterative process
• It identifies areas for improvement, and provides a means

to check whether this occurs

• It says that each task is connected to each other task in a

learning process

PT Night: Then & Now

PT Night: Then

• Reference to individual

pieces

• Atomistic and discrete data
• Focus on grades rather than

criteria

• Time-inefficient (5 minutes)

PT Night: Then & Now

• Reference to patterns in

learning

• Data in an overarching context
• Develops parents’ criterial

literacy

• Clearly visible answer to the

question, “what does she have to do to get . . . ?”

• Time-efficient(er)