Newsletter – 03 November 2023

Teachers are currently composing report comments and undertaking assessment for their 2023 Semester Two reports.

At RGLPS, teachers collect a range of student learning samples and data from various assessments to inform their professional judgment when determining progression points. (Progression points are the dots on your child’s report and reflect where your child’s teacher/s have judged their achievement to be against the Victorian Curriculum Achievement Standards)

It is important that teachers use information on student achievement and progress from a range of sources when making their judgements. This ensures that teachers have an accurate and comprehensive picture of each child’s learning. Use of only one source of assessment data is unreliable; the child might be unwell; have not had enough sleep; experienced family or friendship issues; rushed their work; or a combination of any of these factors and more. Hence, our teachers aim to use at least three sources of data, as well as their professional observations to arrive at judgments, particularly in Reading, Writing and Number.

For example in Reading and Viewing, a professional judgement may involve a combination of the following:

• Fountas and Pinnell Reading Assessment (assesses student decoding, comprehension and fluency)
• PAT Reading (a standardised comprehension assessments used across Australia)
• Essential Assessments (standardised comprehension assessments against the Victorian Curriculum used across Victoria)
• Reading Portfolio samples annotated against our RGLPS Developmental Learning Continuums (these may focus on decoding, fluency or comprehension skills)
• Teacher anecdotal notes from small group reading and 1:1 conferencing sessions
• General teacher observations eg. participation/understanding demonstrated in class discussion about class novels or other texts

As you can imagine, gathering and sorting through this data is time consuming and can be somewhat subjective. To minimise this, RGLPS, year level and cross level teams also meet regularly to moderate student learning samples to ensure that teacher judgments are consistent between year levels and across the school. What I mean by this is that what a Year 2 teacher believes to be an end of Year 3 level writing piece is consistent with Year 3 and 4 teacher judgments of a writing sample.

Hopefully, I have provided the community with useful information about the work that goes on behind the scenes to create semester reports and arrive at the progression points for each child. Teachers will continue to make adjustments and finalise their judgements over the next few weeks as they incorporate more recent data into their decision making. Reports are then buddy read by a team member and someone from the leadership team before they are released to parents. This whole reporting process takes 6-8 weeks each semester. Our RGLPS teachers will be using the Curriculum Day on Monday 6^th November for report writing to compensate them for the considerable time that goes into writing comments and making judgements.

2023 Semester Two reports are due to be released to parents on Compass on Monday 18^th December.