Monitoring

Principal, Justine McDonald

Now we are at the stage of formalising how we monitor the key competencies and the progressions that the students have made. It’s very easy for me, going in to a class from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, to actually see the change in conversations and the learning conversations, and how the key competencies are actually intertwined into them. For example, in a junior class, where once they may have stood up and said ‘I made this’ or ‘I drew this picture’; they are now starting to say ‘I helped this person by doing this’. So the conversations that the juniors are having moved away from the actual task into key competency speak, which was happening in class.

Student:

Well probably at the start of the year I was really… not negative, but had tunnel-ly vision – I could only look at things that I wanted to look at. But now I have opened up windows and I can see that there are more possibilities for me.

Principal, Justine McDonald

As far as recording the progress for monitoring the key competencies, having now explored and experimented with the work we’ve done in our action research and the intertwined triangle, we have got to the stage now when we know that we don’t want to sit down and do checklists and things like that. The way that teachers are this year reporting to parents on the key competencies is that within the general comment boxes there are direct references to how that child has progressed from the beginning of the year to now, in relation to the key competencies that are appropriate to the student. So each student wouldn’t have been reported on against every kc, but just the ones that are either particularly good or perhaps those that need work that would be reported on or commented on within the report. So we don’t have a separate section in the report identifying the key competencies, it’s like our triangle and everything else we are trying to do this year in linking things, it’s actually embedded within the written comments.