Making Learning Visible
Our junior school staff have been partaking in professional development each week on teaching strategies that have the greatest impact on improving student learning.
John Hattie has completed the biggest ever educational study on the effects of different teaching strategies and what methods have the greatest impact on student learning. His research is based on over 68,000 studies and 25 million students.
Our Junior School staff have been studying John Hattie’s book Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximising Impact on Learning (2012). Visible teaching and learning occur when teaching is explicit and has a transparent goal, which is appropriately challenging for all students. Mastery of that goal is reached through effective feedback from the teacher to student and student to teacher. The students are able to articulate what they are learning, see errors as opportunities for further learning, and explain the next steps in their learning.
Our Year 3 and 4 students have been using some of these strategies in their writing lessons. Students had to write a description of a picture and their writing goal was to write an imaginative, interesting and thoughtful text.
Mrs Galanopoulos shared a WAGOLL (What a Good One Looks Like). She then explicitly taught each of the writing strategies that students could use to achieve the goal. Students gave her feedback about their progress throughout the lessons, so Mrs Galanopoulos was able to guide each student at their point of need throughout each writing stage.
Our students wrote exceptional descriptions, and we’d like to share one below, which is from Ava (Year 3).
“The wind screams at me, as the old murky trees start to sway side by side, as if they’re alive. I see my shadow…boom! Thunder strikes as the leaves rustle around me. I carefully tiptoe around to identify what was surrounding me.
I notice that the old, rusty bridge has large cracks as gloomy phantoms glare at me. Some old, green moss gradually starts to hang from tall, mouldy trees, but it’s so scary like a Halloween horror movie, even worse!
Whoosh! A huge gust of wild wind rapidly pushes me around. All of a sudden, I realize the wind shoves me onto the wobbly bridge I scream as loud as I can, but the loud echo of my scream makes the swaying trees angry. I know they are definitely alive.
Before I could run anywhere, I see the old, rusty and unstable bridge collapse, I fall onto the hard-concrete ground, will I die now? How will I make it out? What am I going to do? I stand back up and stumble a few times.”