Newsletter – 04 September 2020

As you all get to know me better, you will discover that I am a bit of an education fanatic. I love learning about and implementing theory and practice and I love being in a role where I can reach so many and make a meaningful difference. I devour the works of the experts in the field and genuinely enjoy spending time interrogating data sets and using everything I have learnt along the way to improve. A few years ago I was lucky enough to be part of the Bastow Institutes ‘Leading Pedagogy’ program. The program consisted of a lecture series and an action research project for your school. On the first day of the lecture series professor John Hattie was the lecturer. Professor Hattie is certainly a numbers man. He has developed an effect size for student learning where the greater the effect size, the greater impact it has on the students’ academic, social and emotional growth. His research synthesises findings from 1400 meta-analyses of 80,000 studies involving 300 million students. During the lecture Hattie stated that anything below a .4 effect size was useless. Then he said to everyone in the room that they should turn to their principal and tell them that they are useless as the effect size for leadership was .32. Not my favourite memory but certainly food for thought as I look to support our school to implement what the evidence tells us is best for education and our students.

The evidence tells me that the effect size for collective teacher efficacy is 1.57. This is why it is so important to be collegiate and collaborative with our teachers as key stake holders. The evidence tells me that parental involvement has a .5 effect size. Just another reason to continue to have community forums and encourage our families to have a say and be part of the change that we want to engage in. The evidence also tells us that for students, self-efficacy has a .92 effect size. This means we need to value the insights our students have about their learning and what they want to do. The evidence in terms of our whole school levels of achievement led us to determine that we do want to improve and we may need to add things or alter some of our practices. We are by no means going to alter 1 thing and be contented with that because improvement is a continuous journey. We simply believe that engaging with our key stakeholders about significant changes will assist us to improve.

As we continue on our journey we will always use the data and evidence to propose changes. In the community forum I spoke about what our school data tells us and the areas we want to improve upon. This coupled with the effect size of multi-age classrooms (.04) led us to question our class structure. After reading through and examining the data collected during our community forum we are extremely pleased to be able to present a summary for you here today. When combining the PMI’s we noticed that for every comment in the minus column, there were two comments in the positive column. The comments in the plus column could largely be attributed to the academic benefits, the social benefits, the ease of implementation for teachers and the benefits of straight grades in the current COVID – 19 environment.  Some comments included;

•  – Children would know the people in their year level better. Would lessen anxiety around going into new grades each year.
•  – We can better extend the kids at the top end of the class.
•  – Better able to recognise students who are struggling.
•  – Less repetition of content with some students not engaged because they have learnt it before.
•  – Teachers would be able to better target students’ needs.
•  – Full support for the single level classes, both academically and socially.  
   – Less complexity for the teachers within the classroom and opportunity for kids to meet most students within their own year      level.
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The comments in the minus column were also largely around the social and academic areas of student development. The following were some of the comments made;

•  – Students get to experience being in the ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ academic levels of a class in composites. Straight age grades can        lead to students only experiencing being ‘top’ or ‘bottom’ and not moving.
•  – Less mixing in the school yard – as students will stick to year levels rather than mixing with those ‘above’ and ‘below’.
•  – If your child is less mature split grade gives the child opportunity to mix with younger children.
•  – Opportunity to consolidate learning by seeing the material twice, over 2 years.
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 There were also many comments in the interesting column that will assist us to develop our structures in the future and we greatly appreciate your time and community spirit. I would also like to take the time to thank all of those parents who were unable to attend the session but felt strongly about contributing and sent me an email. We have used your comments to compile our data also. This morning we worked with our students to ensure they have a genuine voice when it comes to significant decisions such as this one and we will work with our student leaders to compile these results. I anticipate we will have a decision by our next newsletter.