Chapel Hill State School:
Head of Curriculum Meeting:

I had the opportunity to meet with the Head of Curriculum to talk about assessment and evaluation.  She introduced me, in more depth, the to Australian Curriculum and how it impacts learning, instruction and assessment at Chapel Hill State School. 

Australian Curriculum Highlights:

• All schools in Australia are required to fully implement this curriculum by the year 2020.  
• Achievement standards for grade level.  The standards tell teachers what students need to know and do by the end of each year of learning.  Like our common core or the national health and physical education standards.
• Outlines what content must be taught and identifies descriptors to show what needs to be learned.  There is some room for elaboration on how you can teach the content descriptors.
• Assessments by content and grade level.  Like our common core or the national health and physical education standards.
• General capabilities which are the skill areas to be covered (i.e. literacy, numeracy, personal and social capability, critical and creative thinking, information and communication technology capability, intercultural understanding and ethical understanding).  This makes me think of our Transferable Skills.
• Cross Australian curricular priorities (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures, Asian and Australia's Environment with Asia, and Sustainability)  

Grades in the Australian Curriculum:

• A = Evidence of learning demonstrates outstanding achievement at this year level
• B = Evidence of learning demonstrates high achievement at this year level
• C = Evidence of learning demonstrates sound achievement at this year level  Proficient for Vermont
• D = Evidence of learning demonstrates limited achievement at this year level
• E = Evidence of learning demonstrates very limited achievement at this year level

She spoke of this type of grading system as a "Ladder or Pole" instead of a rubric.  She spoke of rubrics in the past, where you can highlight some of the areas under each column in the rubric and then you needed to look at all the highlighted areas to determine what was highlighted "most" to determine a grade.  In this ladder/pole system, you need to meet the bottom step or tier and keep moving up the ladder or pole.  You can not move up to the next step if you have not meet the one below.  We then looked at some sample assessments from the curriculum together. 

Question and Answer:

Then I asked her a few questions that I had create ahead of time and one specific question that I felt needed to be asked after my informal discussions with a couple of classroom teacher at "tea time" that I spoke about in a previous blog post.

Q:  What other assessments are used other than the ones in the Australian Curriculum?  

A:  Classroom teachers can use observations, check lists, writing samples, book work samples and such as formative assessment to guide their instruction, but summative assessments are from the Australian Curriculum.

Q: Does this mean that the Australian Curriculum drives the types of assessments teacher's use and the purpose behind the assessments?  

A:  We like to say it does not, but it does was her response.  She then told me about the NAPLAN Test (National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy).  This test is given in years 3, 5 and 7.  She confirmed that a lot of instruction time is used to prepare students for these tests.  

She further told me that this is good and bad.  Chapel Hill consistently scores high in one of the literacy areas (83rd - 87th percentile) and lower in the other literacy area.  Because of this discrepancy, they looked further into the data from the test to discover that the boys at a certain year level (grade level) were having difficulty with the creative part of writing, so they were able to target some instruction to these students for this area.  That is good.  However, it does drive the instruction and limit the assessments they use within the classroom, which is not always viewed as good by the students and teachers.  They feel it takes away the fun and creativity of learning is what I was hearing from the classroom teachers at "tea time".

Reporting to Parents:

Twice a year, they report out grades A, B, C, D, E per the Australian Curriculum areas.  Twice a year, they conference with parents - she did not use the word conference, but that is what she was implying.  Then, of course, parent teacher communication as would be expected based on student needs.

Things I Learned:

• The Australian Curriculum and NAPLAN Test drive instruction and assessment (especially summative assessment).  I feel that in the United States, our State testing does drive our instruction and assessment to an extend, but a much lesser extent than Australia is currently experiencing. 
• Student's in Australia will truly be on the same page educationally once this curriculum is fully implemented.  That is a nice feeling.  I know that we are working so hard to put our Supervisory Union on the same page, let alone a whole nation.  We have our national standards, but the push to implement them uni-formally is not there in the U.S., there is not true accountability for that.
• I learned a lot about the details of a curriculum by looking over just the year 1 level for just literacy in detail with the the Head of Curriculum at this school.  I am thankful for that as I am one of the staff who is working on updating our health education curriculum for my school district.  This learning will be helpful in that group work.
• I have so many mixed thoughts regarding the ladder/pole assessments verses rubric assessments.  It makes sense that you need to complete step one before getting to step two so to speak when looking at a ladder type assessment, but I like that the rubric can show students that although you might be missing one thing, you have three others and you just need to focus on that one missing link to make it to proficient.  I have been enjoying teaching with proficiency rubrics.  A big change I made from my last assessment and evaluation course with SNHU was to give students the criteria for Proficient only and have them work toward that until they get it.  Then they are not caught up in all the language below proficient, they just know they are not at proficient yet and you can say with them in a conference "you need to do ............. to be proficient".  Then we talk about what they can do if they which to make their proficient an advanced.  I can see the pros and cons to both grading systems.  
• If there is a gap in learning based on assessment results, take the time to look closer at that data to see what population, specific content or skill, or concept needs to be focused on more and why or how to best do that.  Sometimes is so difficult to take that time, that you don't realize how much time it might save in the long run.  I need to remember that.
• I learned that I am thankful that health and physical education have national standards that we must follow, but we are not assessment driven to the point where it takes the fun and creativity out of our instruction and assessment.