Consideration 1
Lessons and learning opportunities need to be explicit and engaging. Individually and collaboratively across the community of small schools, teachers will need to evaluate the effectiveness of their teaching practices.
We are continuing to develop our formative and summative assessment practices to be more consistent from Kindergarten to Year 6. More work needs to occur in aligning and matching our internal assessment data to external data. Professional learning in designing quality assessments and consistent teacher judgement within the school and across schools will be a focus. A greater understanding of stage expected outcomes in literacy and numeracy will support planning and data analysis. PLPs will continue to be used for each student to promote growth and self-directed learning with structures put in place to support students with additional needs.
Draft Strategic Direction 1: Student Growth and Attainment
Consideration 2
The wellbeing and engagement of our students remains a priority. This will be a strategic direction as a reflection of the school’s work in this area. Tell them from me will provide an ongoing data set pertaining to student voice and community perceptions and expectations around wellbeing and engagement. Underpinning our next steps will be the analysis of the Wellbeing Framework self-assessment tool.
The implementation of quality communication structures will provide both qualitative and quantitative data on student and parent engagement.
Draft Strategic Direction 2: Wellbeing and Engagement
Consideration 3
External validation highlighted that planning, programming, assessment and data use in teaching are areas of focus. As the school staff attempt to teach across K-6 in one classroom it is evident that the school’s curriculum provision and evidence-based teaching practices do not always provide a high expectations framework within which all students effectively develop their knowledge, understanding and skills. Continual monitoring of student performance data will determine areas of need and success at an individual and whole school level, especially in our target areas of reading and numeracy.
We need to develop systems to monitor and review our curriculum provision to meet changing requirements of the students. Teaching and learning programs are showing some improvement with the change to online visible programming. The area to next develop is ensuring these teaching and learning programs meet all requirements of the Department of Education and the NSW Education Standards Authority including describing expected student progression in knowledge, understanding and skill and the assessments that measure them.
Draft Strategic Direction 3: Explicit teaching through evidence-based practices.