22 June 2020
Student Free Day - Staff Professional Development
On the Student Free Day, Friday 19 June, teachers at MBHS engaged in a full day of professional training and development centred around formative assessment, differentiated success criteria and providing feedback. The morning session was focused on revisiting formative assessment, identifying opportunities for incorporating 'check and act' strategies in the classroom and discussing shared agreements around assessment. This led in to our work on writing differentiated success critiria, aimed at allowing students to recognise when they have achieved 'proficient', 'extending' and 'mastery' levels of each skill.
After recess, teachers engaged in two short, interactive sessions where they learned new strategies to provide feedback. We focused specifically on giving students feedback around writing, ensuring that all staff are using the same language for students; to reduce confusion and improve outcomes. We also ran a session on verbal feedback, using the differentiated success criteria from session 1 as a vehicle for creating dialogue with students when delivering feedback.
Our final session was run in faculties, with experts in each learning area educating staff on our new resources to teach command terms. These experts shared a range of strategies they have implemented in their classrooms, with the goal of creating greater consistency across learning areas.
Overall staff were very engaged throughout the day and each made a commitment to action, choosing a new strategy that will be implemented in their classrooms before the end of term 3. We will come back together in the final weeks of term 3 to share our success stories.
