A deep dive into the Assessment Waterfall Chart

The session started with self-reflection and team commitments

On an Assessment Waterfall chart staff were asked to rate themselves 1-5 in how they were traveling at implementing and how the team was going.

Staff left the space writing a commitment for themselves in one envelope and one for the team in another.

Program exemplars were shared. Staff had time looking through and talking with members of staff how the programs had embedded the Assessment Waterfall into the learning experiences. From discussions, staff realised the need for an agreed practice and blurb for the Learning and Teaching program which the Action team developed at a later point in time.

In the next session, we followed the protocols of presenting a 'minds on',  revisiting our norms and setting the Learning Intentions and Success Criteria for the session. We reviewed what we explored in our last Staff meeting which is where we looked deeply at Learning Intentions, assessed where we were last year, this year and made commitments regarding ‘where to next’ for our classroom practice.

The Principal and Leaders Network meeting that Aggies hosted earlier in the term affirmed much of our work. The leaders also left 'wonderings' in an effort to help us maintain momentum with the work. 

The leaders especially focused on asking students the 5 questions about Writing. The overall findings were that students were unable to articulate past the first two questions. This data collection became the reason for going deeper into the Assessment Waterfall with staff.

Staff Success Criteria was handed out (document below). This was used to gauge where staff's current reality was around using the Assessment Waterfall chart. Staff highlighted what they thought as a teacher they were doing well in the 5 areas of the chart and what they think their students would be able to do. Another colour was used to highlight areas for improvement. When completed, staff were able to identify some clear strengths and areas for growth.

Staff then watched the following video and using a poster were asked to document the inter-related nature of the Assessment Waterfall Chart. 

One person from each table then shared the group’s thinking using at least one of these sentence stems:

One lightbulb moment in my team was…

One thing we were very clear about was...

Some new thinking was…

We got stuck thinking about…

There was a great question asked about…

When we first started we…

It was challenging to…

We were left wondering...

We read through the following to refresh our understanding of Success Criteria:

 

We then provided staff with the Learning Intention and asked teams to work in pairs to co-construct the Success Criteria for Stage 3 based on an Imaginative text. We covered the Success Criteria we had already created in the slide.

Teams then were given a sample. The Learning Collaborative team modeled how they would use the Success Criteria to give descriptive feedback. They were able to give one instructional point and one way they have met the Success Criteria. Staff were asked to self-reflect on a piece of writing from their program last year/term. Did they give verbal or written feedback? How did they facilitate this feedback in the classroom?

 

Here is how the Success Criteria were used to give feedback.

Staff were placed in pairs and given another student sample. They were asked to be a student and a peer. They had to tell each other what is star and stair for that piece. We then started to share how do we build our student’s ability to be able to have these conversations? What did we model, I do, we do, you do. How can we do this with our own students so that they are assessment capable? How will we check to see if the feedback has been implemented? Staff used highlighting to show how they gave a star and stair.

Staff were shown how the Assessment Waterfall chart assists with Curriculum design.

At the conclusion of the staff development day it was agreed that we needed to review our Whole School Agreed approach to the teaching of writing.