Hattie defines Visible Learners as students who can:
- Articulate what they are learning
- Explain the next steps in their learning
- Set learning goals
- See errors as opportunities for further learning
- Know what to do when they are stuck
Our expectations have always been that teachers would share learning intentions and co-construct success criteria, provide feedback for students, and work with students to set their own goals.
What has changed since we joined the Manaiakalani whānau is the introduction of the Learn, Create, Share pedagogy. This structure has taken a couple of years to embed at St Francis but finally we are seeing consistency across our school about what Learn, Create, Share looks like.
Visible teaching and learning places the students at the centre and when this becomes the default it guides decision making in a school.
How will the students make their learning visible? Blogger is the platform that was chosen for this. The students share their learning to a global audience.
How do the teachers share their planning? Each Hub has a google site where all planning is uploaded and accessible not only to the students but to whānau as well. It is accessible, available and there in advance!
It is also very worthy of note that it is available to any other teacher as well and not just those at our school. Any teacher can access, make a copy and adjust for their learners. This has expanded our professional learning network immensely.
Making teaching visible makes so much sense - we are not trying to keep what the students are meant to be learning a secret from them, they need to know what they are striving to learn otherwise how will they know when they get there? We need to remove the barriers in every way we can and making teaching and learning visible is a huge part of this.
This Week's New Learning
One of the ways that teachers can make learning visible is the use of Google Sites. I have dabbled with sites before but it was fabulous to get a deep dive into this tool. Thanks to Vicki Archer and Dorothy Burt for the sessions on this. I loved this session - so much so that I finished my site over the weekend and was able to give it to our Year 7/8 team to use this week. I aimed to motivate the learners to engage with the curriculum, and provide multimodal opportunities to engage with the learning - I will be interested in the feedback from the teachers and the students in due course!
Click here to enter the site.
I really like the point you make about "expanding our professional learning network". Being able to see into a teachers planning and classroom via the site is a great opportunity to share practice. Making learning visible has so many advantages for everyone in the puzzle.
ReplyDeleteI also like that you have chosen to create something for your senior students to access and give you feedback on. The links to the curriculum and the break down of Learn, Create, Share make your site easy to follow. I am intrigued to hear what the students thought!
Hi Jo.
ReplyDeleteYou raise some really good points in your post. I think that the statement 'visible teaching and learning places the students at the centre and when this becomes the default it guides decision making in the school' is so succinct, yet powerful. You have encapsulated in that one statement, everything that we are striving for at St. Francis. Thank you for stating it so clearly.