COL PD: Valued Learning Outcomes

WFRC: Aaron Wilson

As part of our second CoL Meeting of the term, we had an opportunity to once again hear from Dr Aaron Wilson from the Wolf Fisher Research Centre.  Dr Wilson pointed out the importance of recognising patterns and identifying Valued Learning Outcomes. Below are my notes and take aways from the session. 

Recap of Session 1:

Don’t focus your inquiry on the low hanging fruit things...what are the stubborn issues in your classroom and what can we do about it?
Teaching as Inquiry should not be an individual thing. In order to effectively change the cluster, we need to be grouped together more often to discuss our challenges and successes to ultimately make change for everyone.

Point of thought: Are our inquiry groups too small? Should we be focusing on our whole class or a larger group of students within our class?

Pattern Recognition: we need to come together as educators to see the patterns in our successes and failures so we can ALL learn from them.

Identifying Valued Learning Outcomes (VLOs):

• Achievement
• Progress
• Māori learning as Māori
• Key competencies
• Participation
• Affective outcomes

We need to focus on obtaining an holistic picture of our students.

Reading VLO’s:

• Able to read and comprehend unfamiliar, age appropriate, texts independently - PAT/asTTle
• Develops in reading ability at an at least expected rate of progress - PAT/asTTle
• Reads regularly in and out of school
• Loves reading
• Has strategies for selecting texts for particular purposes
• Knows that some texts will require resilience and persistence to make meaning from
• Has a toolbox of strategies that s/he can use deliberately
• Can synthesise across multiple texts
• Considers connections between oral, written and visual language
• Can read critically and is hyper-aware of authors’ positioning of readers
• Appreciates aesthetic properties of language and literature

When you value things that are not texted in standardised tests you need to look at things much differently.

Point to Ponder:
For the problems that we are looking at, in order to build a really rich picture of student LEARNING (achievement and progress) what is that we need to know and how will you measure it? How can we find out what children CAN do?