3.+The+Journey

 Student Portfolios were on the School Strategic Plan when I started at the school however there was huge inconsistency and the staff as a whole didn't seem to understand what they need to do. In my first year of teaching at Glenferrie I hadn’t collected samples of work and I knew the people in my team did not as well. Some teachers had collected samples of work while most others hadn’t. I thought it might be a good idea to have a consistent approach to what a portfolio was and the reasons for doing them or not doing them. I spoke to our ICT and Transition Coordinator who said that she would bring it up on a leadership day. The outcome was that everyone was to collect samples of work per level until further notice. I was confused by this response, at one staff meeting one of our teachers showed samples of children’s writing in a scrapbook but it was unclear what the point of it was. From this idea my Assistant Principal hatched an idea about having the children at the parent interviews talking about their work. He had publicly voiced this idea at a staff meeting before. He enlisted me to attend a two day Professional Development course on a step by step way of how to implement authentic student portfolios and student led conferences into schools. It was called Assessing the Whole Child. He could see that this could be my Action Research Project. I was inspired and keen to get into it. After this Professional Development course the first step was to stop all current portfolio work and to make it clear that if the students attended the upcoming interviews they were not to lead it.

My assistant principal gave me a day release to plan a whole Day Professional Development Day. During this professional development day I reported back what was said on the course in an interactive way and gave suggestions of where we can head, but most importantly created an open discussion to create some original ideas. I felt it was important for the staff to be involved so that they felt some ownership on where the school was heading and how it could be meaningful for them. Having reflected on this whole process I originally thought to have the students leading a parent interview was an unachievable outcome in the immediate future and it was going to take a lot of up skilling of students and ourselves before it could go ahead. How could we expect children to jump in and self evaluate their learning when they have little experience of doing so?

Since my last growth plan reflection I have run PD with the whole staff, sought external PD and begun goal setting with my Preps. I am extremely happy with how it is all going as the staff now have a greater understanding of what student portfolios are and what our expectations will be at our school. Some staff have begun experimenting with student goal setting and goal setting portfolios which is very exciting for me. We have also begun our journey with the parent community by running an expo style evening where the students presented their learning to their parents. This was an extremely successful evening with lots of exciting feedback from the parents. Roberts and Pruitt state, “A school learning community is one that promotes and values learning as an ongoing, active collaborative process with dynamic dialogue by teachers, students, staff, principal, parents and school community to improve the quality of learning and life within the school.”p13.(2)

I have tried to link it in with the implementation of e5, especially the evaluative dimension. In 2010 I have been given a day in our school P.D days to work with the staff on setting up criteria and templates for our Student, Teacher and Parent Conferences hals way through the year. The big push will be getting teachers to get our teachers to selfevaluate their learning more regularly so they are able to articulate where they are at in numeracy and english.