What’s your mission?
‘My mission is to change the common belief that the essence of our professionalism is our right to teach as wish to the belief that the essence is our right to collaborate with others to see our impact through the eyes of our students.’
Hattie Feb 2016
Our first blog serves to highlight the critical importance of the beliefs and practices we select as leaders to improve the achievement and wellbeing of each of our students in our schools and preschools.
Fundamental to this is the notion that the only way to improve learner outcomes is to improve the effectiveness of teaching in every setting in every site every day through a collaborative culture that builds teacher capacity to understand and respond to the diverse needs of our children and students. Experiencing a good teacher every other year or now and then just doesn’t bring high achievement or equity for all. The following summary from a recent Grattan Report article outlines the case.
Invest in Improving Teaching Practice
Outside the home, nothing influences student outcomes more than effective teaching. High-performing education systems have learned these lessons. They relentlessly improve classroom practice by building teacher capability. Principals are central to this process.
School Culture and Collaborative Work
Teaching works best when leaders work to build a school culture that allows teachers to enact their collective professional responsibility
Teachers are resourced to work in teaching teams rather than in isolation, when they rigorously discuss and use data; and when they receive feedback and meaningful appraisal.
Targeted Teaching
Students learn faster through “targeted teaching”, when teachers identify what each individual student is ready to learn next, teach them accordingly and track their progress. Targeted teaching is a positive feedback loop that improves teaching and student learning.
Targeted teaching is vital because student achievement varies widely within a single classroom. For example, in a typical school the top Year 9 students are seven years ahead of the bottom students in literacy and numeracy, i.e. levels of achievement are not always related to age.Targeted teaching is challenging to implement with rigor and consistency in our schools and indeed it requires a lot of support and resourcing to embed at a site level.
Future blogs will expand on these elements and what they meant for us as educators in positioning our schools and preschools to consistently deliver the best in 21st century learning and teaching to our young people. From Targeted teaching: How better use of data can improve student learning, Grattan Institute 2015 http://grattan.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/827-Targeted-Teaching.pdf