1. Teaching as Inquiry 2017:  We are evaluators. We assess our impact.
 Our collaboration focuses on the things in our practice that will make the most impact for our learners.
… there’s a whole huge world movement with professional learning communities and collaborations and networks and it’s all based on this notion of collaborative efficacy. But they forget: the topic’s got to be about the impact.
And so many of them, they get networks together and professional learning communities and they talk about all the things that don’t matter John Hattie

2. How can I make learning more visible in my classroom and develop students’ skill, will and thrill, so that the educational achievement of all learners is improved?

3. A process throughout the year:
Cycle of inquiry get us to look at what’s going on for our learners and how we know that.
Reflections in Appraisal Connector recording each phase
Depending on how you have recorded your inquiry, print this out for your Appraisal Report or collate it onto one page

4. Teaching as Inquiry Presentation
Friday 8th December 2017:
Use your inquiry report to create a presentation, which you will share with randomly assigned groups of six the morning of Friday 8th December.

5.  Introduce your learners.  Explain your hunch(es).
Criteria:
 Introduce your learners.
 Explain your hunch(es).
 Summarise what you learned.
 Describe the specific strategies you implemented / used.
 Explain how your new strategies caused learning and impacted on student achievement (skill, will, thrill).
 Outline where you think you will go next with your inquiry.
 Take no more than 7 minutes to present your Teaching as Inquiry.

6. July and September 2017: Senior Leadership Group Inquiry
To what extent are the elements of Visible Learning already present at our school?
At the end of 2016, the school committed to making Hattie’s Visible Learning as a key teaching and learning goal.
Our vision is that teachers and students at St Andrew’s College will have a shared understanding of how learning happens in the classroom and use this to develop more effective learners.

7. Skill, will and thrill as the key inputs to learning
We have spent the end of 2016 and 2017 introducing some key aspects of Visible Learning to staff:
Teachers as agents of change
Knowing your learners and knowing your impact as core elements of teaching
Clarity and confidence, through clear learning intentions and success criteria
Skill, will and thrill as the key inputs to learning
We needed to develop a clearer picture of what our students already know about what makes an effective learner prior to developing any further goals beyond 2017.
We needed to test our assumptions about what we thought we were doing and gain student voice about what was happening.

8. What did we do?
SLG were involved in two one-day inquiries in Term Two and Term Three.
The questions we were asking were:
To what extent can our students already articulate what makes an effective learner? 
To what extent does our data show progress? 
To what extent are teachers using class profiles to track progress? 
To what extent are our students receiving quality feedback?  

9. What does it mean to be an effective learner at St Andrew’s College?
Actions:
We videoed 10 students in each year level across Years 7 to 13, asking them the following question:
What does it mean to be an effective learner at St Andrew’s College? 

10. What do the most effective learners look like in your classroom?
b) We surveyed two tutor groups per year level (Years 9 to 13: approximately 30 students per year group) and asked them the following questions:
Visible Learning:
What do the most effective learners look like in your classroom?
(think about what you see them doing and hear them saying)

11. Inspired and Passionate teachers:
Think of the teachers who are the most effective in helping you learn here at school.
List the types of things the teacher(s) said and did to help you learn more effectively. We don’t need specific names, just what they do to help you learn.
Feedback and progress:
How do you know you are making progress with your learning here at school?

12. What do the most effective learners look like in your classroom?
Activity
What’s your hunch?
Turn to your neighbour and discuss what you think the students’ answers were to the following question:
Visible Learning:
What do the most effective learners look like in your classroom?
(think about what you see them doing and hear them saying)

13. What do our students think?
Click here for the video of our students talking about what they think makes a learner effective.

14. What did we learn? Visible Learner
Students identified attitude (73%), focus, and hard work (57%) as being important factors in learning effectively.
33% of students, particularly in Years 7 to 10, were more likely to identify behaviour and the teacher as a key factor in learning effectively.
Many students didn’t see themselves as agentic (their own learners), instead focusing on what the teacher does or says.
Students struggled to identify specific strategies for learning effectively (neither SOLO nor Learning Values were explicitly mentioned by students).
Some students saw achieving a personal best as important.

15. Inspired and Passionate Teachers
Positive relationships are valued by many of the surveyed students.
Clarity is valued by many of the surveyed students.
Feedback / Progress
66% of students identified external factors (results, better grades, for example) as a measure of feedback on their learning.
17% of students used internal factors (an increase in confidence, for example) as a measure of feedback on their learning.

16. Evaluation of our impact
Where to now?
Consolidate our understanding of the mind frames needed to be an agent of change:
Clarity
Feedback
Evaluation of our impact

17. Acquiring and consolidating surface knowledge
Unpack the science of how we learn by learning about the three key phases of learning:
Understand how specific strategies work at each phase of learning and embed these into our planning.
Explore how SOLO can be used to make progress visible for teachers and learners.
Understand how the science of positive psychology can help develop a student’s will and thrill for learning.
Acquiring and consolidating surface knowledge
Deep learning
Transferral of learning

18. “Teaching students how to learn is as important as teaching them content, because acquiring both the right learning strategies and background knowledge is important - if not essential – for promoting life-long learning”.
John Dunlonsky, Professor of Psychology Kent State University, Ohio

19.  A shared language of the science of learning (teachers and students)
Our vision is that teachers and students at St Andrew’s College will have a shared understanding of how learning happens in the classroom and use this to develop more effective learners.
 A shared knowledge of the science of learning (teachers and students)
 A shared language of the science of learning (teachers and students)