28 August 2024

In this episode we explore how Naracoorte High School’s work with the New Metrics Project is impacting equity and excellence in education and reshaping the future for students. Principal Lynette Corletto and Senior Leader Felicity Slotegraaf share their insights on this innovative partnership with the University of Melbourne, which aims to expand the ways student learning is assessed and recognised. Plus, Year 12 student Eliza discusses the benefits of increasing students’ agency.

Show Notes

- New Metrics Project

Transcript

Dale Atkinson: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to Teach podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name's Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education and today we're heading down to Naracoorte High School, which is one of 40 schools from across Australia and New Zealand participating in an ongoing research practice partnership with the University of Melbourne.

It's known as the New Metrics Project, where educators are working with researchers to explore new ways of assessing and recognising student learning, which goes beyond traditional academic achievement. Today we're joined by Lynette Corletto the Principal, Felicity Slotegraaf, the Senior Leader of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Year 8 Cultural Studies Teacher, and Eliza who's a Year 12 Student and House Leader.

Hello to you all.

Lynette Corletto: Hello.

Felicity Slotegraaf: Hi.

Dale Atkinson: Now, Lynette, first to you, what is the New Metrics project?

Lynette Corletto: So New Metrics is a research practice partnership. Essentially, it's a collaborative venture between the forward-thinking schools that have been selected and the University of Melbourne. We are undertaking research projects that lead [00:01:00] innovation and development in the assessment and credentialing of complex competencies.

Dale Atkinson: So what does that look like in Naracoorte High School?

Lynette Corletto: So for Naracoorte we have been working intimately with developing frameworks for agency and learning. Our teaching staff over the three years have trialled and tested the frameworks added to them and utilised them within their planning for student learning and then assessed the complex competency to test its validity.

We feed that back in to the university at points across the year and then we get some feedback from Melbourne Uni and we keep developing practice. So for us, it's about the teachers engaging in the thinking, moving beyond the traditional academics, and the measures for academic achievement to capture the full range of student competencies in the learning activities that they design.

Dale Atkinson: So I think it's quite a good week to have this conversation [00:02:00] because you've just received your NAPLAN results as all schools have across the country, which obviously focus on a narrow pan of academic outcomes. How does it shift the mentality, Lynette, by looking at things in a broader sense for your school?

Lynette Corletto: We’re really looking at supporting our educators to confidently teach, assess and report on the things that matter. So we assess the things that matter and unfortunately (maybe, that's my take on it) in Australia we have been locked into this narrow thinking around literacy and numeracy and what we know about our young people is there is a range of skills and capabilities that they need to develop to be able to thrive.

So we're challenging our teachers to look beyond an A to E grade. It's not about getting rid of an A to E grade, but to actually create opportunity for that capabilities development. We want our teachers to use the curriculum [00:03:00] as a tool and really dig deep into learning design rather than teaching to the test or teaching to the achievement standard, which is how we were taught for a very long time through teacher training, curriculum area, PD, pull the achievement standard apart, look at the existing structures. We're not interested in continuing in that way because it actually doesn't represent the whole learner. It doesn't show what our young people are capable of and it doesn't have any utility beyond year 12.

Felicity Slotegraaf: I did want to pick up on what Lynette was talking about there because I know we've talked a lot about teachers and learning design and those sorts of things. But one of the key drivers for us is actually, we believe that our purpose here is about developing the whole person. So when students leave us, it's not just about developing their literacy and numeracy. It is about that, but it's not just that. It is about developing what traditionally were the soft skills because we know that we've got students here who, [00:04:00] when they leave us, what they leave us with doesn't fully represent who they are as a person. Those skills that they have that perhaps aren't academic base are not being recognized in the traditional sense of the way school's set up at the moment. So that's part of our driver here and why it's important for us, because we really feel like all the young people who are here, should be able to leave us with a representative of who they are as a whole person, not just their grades or the numbers that they get at the end.

Dale Atkinson: So to support them in that work and support you in that work, you've, you've come up with a set of complex competencies that support the assessment. What does it look like for Naracoorte High School in terms of what's unique to you, do you think, and what would be universally applicable across all schools?

Lynette Corletto: What would be unique is that we are an agricultural school. You know, we're based in the Southeast of South Australia and our young people come from a broad range of backgrounds. We have a very large community of new arrivals to Australia. We're working with meeting young people where they're at we had another one just this week arrive with [00:05:00] no English, in a new community, halfway through high school. There's so much that that young person is developing on a daily basis that we need to nurture and capture and represent. That young person and all of our young people, our kids, our town kids are all going to go on and thrive and our community wants us to be able to develop proud, resilient citizens and to empower them to be valuable members of our community, whether they stay in Naracoorte or they move further afield, to still be positive contributing members.

The unique nature of being regionally located and sitting in Naracoorte, but the transferability of everything we're doing is, all our kids, and the kids are actually telling us this, and the young people who've come out of high school are telling governments and telling policy makers very clearly ‘we are more than a grade, recognize that and actually support us to be able to represent the whole of who we are’ because nobody cares [00:06:00] what grades you got, when you're in the workforce, they care about whether or not you're effective at communicating, whether or not you can collaborate with the people in your teams, whether or not you are ethical in your decision making. These are the skills, these are the competencies that we want to develop and we want to be able to represent.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it's a powerful message, I think. Felicity, you've been, as the Senior Leader of Curriculum and Pedagogy, sort of instrumental in piloting this with students in years 7 to 10. What's this response been like from the students?

Felicity Slotegraaf: When you kind of turn things on its head a little bit, which is kind of what's going on here, there's a lot of things to look at. There's learning design, there's logistics about what you can actually do in the existing structures of your school, do you need to change that? There's teacher knowledge, there's student knowledge, there's student thinking. It's been quite interesting and students have actually been challenged on what they actually think school is about and what you actually do in a classroom.

Traditionally, it's been a look of, okay. You tell me what to give you and I will do it and I'll produce it and I will give it back. This is kind of [00:07:00] changing that viewpoint so students, especially our senior year students as well, have really taken on the fact that it's about a process and it's not just about your product at the end and it's about who am I reflecting on yourself. Some students have really taken to that actually, rather than leaving it as just being ‘I produce something for you’. It's really thinking about the process. Who am I as a learner? What do I need to know? That's something that's really come out of the various pilots that we've done across year 7 to 10 and some that we've done in 11 and 12 in a different capacity. It's students really reflecting on themselves, who they are, what do I bring to the table, and then how can that help me? So it's really looking at learning as a process, not just as a production.

Dale Atkinson: It's probably a good moment to bring Eliza, your year 12 student in on this. Eliza, what's the feeling like, what's your experience of this been like?

Eliza: Being able to have a choice in my learning. I'm doing an ag course at school and we get an assignment and it's quite a [00:08:00] broad, like there's a broad range of topics we can choose from. So for example, we've just gotten an agri business assignment where we actually have to choose what enterprise we want to run and then like figure out: what do we know from that, what do we need to know, what do I need to learn to be successful in that business? And I think having that choice in what to do makes it more interesting.

Dale Atkinson: Does it feel a bit more connected to what you want to do when you leave school?

Eliza: Yeah, I think definitely it feels more connected to what I want to do when I leave school.

Dale Atkinson: In terms of having some sort of influence over what you're learning, what difference has that made in terms of how you feel about coming into the school day to day?

Eliza: I feel like it's maybe more excited to come into school knowing that I'm learning about things that actually excite me and I'm interested in.

Dale Atkinson: Back to you, Felicity. Is that something that you've kind of noticed across like the whole student cohort, that kind of enthusiasm being inserted?

Felicity Slotegraaf: I think initially students are a little bit, they withhold themselves a bit because it's different. It's not something that we usually do, the structures are different, [00:09:00] but once they get comfortable with it, for example, in our year 8 cohorts, we actually introduced volunteering in the community. That was part of what they were doing in our futures program where they had to go out, find somewhere they'd like to volunteer. Do all of the background communication behind that to get that up and running. Do the volunteering, reflect on it when they came back. They were really excited by that because they felt like they were part of the learning, it wasn't something that was just done to them. I sit in my chair and I produce this thing for you and then I get to go home. Once students get in there and have actually had an opportunity to show their competencies, to be able to be active in their learning and be a part of it, they're actually getting really excited about it.

It's just that initial stage because anything new, or slightly different, we all get a bit nervy about that. I think once they've had that opportunity, it's been really good to see students get enthused. It's been really great to see that, especially in our middle years, 7, 8, 9.

Dale Atkinson: Eliza, has it taken a bit more effort up front to undertake learning in this way, or does it feel like it's been pretty [00:10:00] smooth and easy to do?

Eliza: I feel like from a student's point of view, it's been pretty smooth. Like, there might have been a few changes where you get more variety in an assignment, but other than that, it hasn't, yeah, it's been pretty easy to transition to.

Dale Atkinson: In terms of organising the school day and organizing education components, Lynette, how's that felt as a leader embracing this approach?

Lynette Corletto: When we started three years ago, it was something that was unknown to the broader teaching group. We started off with some small scale pilots at Naracoorte High School, and we did that intentionally because you can't just roll a new pedagogical approach in a school without upskilling and providing opportunity for people to engage in the thinking. So we were quite strategic in creating collaborative spaces for teachers to engage with the research, to engage in the thinking, to explore learning design and to talk about curriculum in a [00:11:00] different way. There's been resistance. It's quite funny cause we've just come off the back of another professional learning day with the entire partnership and our teachers have come out of that and they've gone, ‘Oh yeah, we're so far ahead of the game. We just listened to Martin talk and this is what we've been doing for the last two and a half years’ but they were resistant and we had to change structures, we had to change the way we interacted as professionals.

There's been a lot of collaboration and a lot of reflective practice and we've been quite intentional in creating the space for that and the time for that. We've opened up classrooms so people are more comfortable to get feedback from their colleagues. We've opened up the way we plan so that we're collaboratively planning and we've tried to break down the silos between curriculum areas and moving into next year, our Science and HASS faculty teams, curriculum teams, held a collaborative planning meeting last week to actually look at environmental science and [00:12:00] the connections to geography and the science curriculum at year 7 and 8. And so they're now the champions of doing things differently.

Dale Atkinson: So there is a degree of having to be really methodical and thoughtful about this, isn't there?

Lynette Corletto: You can't do to people. Whether that's teachers or young people, we can't do to students and unfortunately schooling has been done to young people for a long time, but teaching to some extent has also been done to teachers with this top-down kind of approach in, ‘this is how we do things.’ And we've done a big piece of work around agency in learning that had to come with agency in teaching.

And we had to give the power back to the teachers and people are uncomfortable about it. ‘Just tell me what to do Lynette. Just tell me what to do’ Well, I'm not actually going to tell you because I'm not in that class with those kids and I don't have the relationships and I can tell you, based on the data, where they're at, but at the end of the day, you're going to have to take them from where they're at to where you need them to be next, or where [00:13:00] actually they are telling you they want to go. So this is your work.

Dale Atkinson: So there's a degree of trust in all of that as an approach. I'm interested, Felicity, in your view on how that environment is created where Lynette's been able to give people confidence to lean into this thing and how you've been able to work with your colleagues on that.

What does that look like and feel like?

Felicity Slotegraaf: One of the major kind of challenges was having the different headset around learning design and providing opportunities for not just reaching the achievement standard and the content descriptors. That was probably one of the major things we were looking for the alignment between our ambition, which is what everyone, and the South Australian public education direction at the moment is about, you know, developing these well rounded citizens, contributors to society. And then how does that match in with what we're doing in the classroom, our classroom practice? So to me, that was a big challenge and it's really been allowing teachers the freedom to trial things, [00:14:00] without having the, the fear of it going wrong, because it's actually okay to trial things out. And then you go, ‘Oh dear, that perhaps didn't work exactly the way I wanted it to, but I learned a lot from that and our kids actually still learned a lot from that experience’ And we have actually created this year along with the home group care pastoral care program. There's two sessions a week in year 7, 8 and 9. And we call it futures because we're talking about who are we going to be now? And who are we in the future? Where teachers have been given that freedom to be able to go, Okay, so if we're looking at trying to help our students have agency or to collaborate with each other or to communicate effectively, what sort of learning, design experiences can we have?

That we can actually allow students to practice these skills and then demonstrate them. And I think that's actually been quite positive because it's taken away the traditional Australian curriculum side of it that's sitting there, that pressure's not there. So it's allowed teachers to have a go with their learning design and now [00:15:00] what we'll be able to do going forward, which is what we're doing in this semester is looking at, okay, so then how do we assess that now that we're looking at our learning design? How do we assess these competencies? And then from there, we'll be able to roll into actual learning areas, the curriculum areas, and go okay, so it's possible here these are some of the activities that work. These are some of the tasks and learning design opportunities that we found have worked. So what might that look like when we're in our English class? What might that look like when we're in science? It's given a bit of a venue for teachers to have freedom to be able to use their ideas. I think that's been really important.

Dale Atkinson: What sort of conversations do you need to have with the parent community in this space? Has that been a challenge at all or has that been relatively smooth?

Lynette Corletto: We have a very supportive governing council and they are a fierce advocate for our school. I've been quite transparent with them about what we're doing, how we're doing it, why we're doing it. We report back in to them [00:16:00] about, you know, this is the pilot, this is what we learnt. This is where we're going next. They ask questions. What we're finding, however, is that people who choose to not send their children to our school need to justify their decision to go elsewhere. And so unfortunately that creates a narrative in the community that the things that we're doing are not beneficial for young people, even though the parents of the young people who are experiencing it can quite confidently articulate that their kids are thriving.

Dale Atkinson: It sounds like one of the many challenges of working and leading in a small country town, which are unique to small towns, but not always unique to leadership in school settings.

So all three of you, how would you summarize? Just quickly, in sort of three to five words, the experience of undertaking the new metrics project. I'm trying to see who looks most comfortable in this space. I'm going to go with…

Felicity Slotegraaf: Nobody, right?

Dale Atkinson: Nobody at all. Everyone's kind of leaning back. I'm going to go with, I'm going to go with [00:17:00] Eliza first. So how would you describe the experience?

Eliza: I would describe it as more of a choice in my learning and the way I get to undertake an assignment or the approach I have towards my learning, like, is it relevant to what I want to do? How can I make it relevant to what I want to do in the future?

Dale Atkinson: So building on that Felicity, what would you say?

Felicity Slotegraaf: I'd say, so being in the New Metrics Project, I feel like has made us focus on students as individuals and as whole people. And to me, that's nearly the most important thing that's come out of it, that students are individuals, and we can develop them as whole people. I think that's really important that's what's come out of it for me.

Dale Atkinson: Lynette, anything to add to that?

Lynette Corletto: I love seeing the shift in teachers and I love seeing them embrace the young people in their classrooms or in their charge and really digging deep and finding what lights that student up and what connects that young person to their learning and then watching the [00:18:00] deep thinking from both the educator and the young person that comes out of that.

Felicity Slotegraaf: It's about people, isn't it? That's really what we've all talked about.

Dale Atkinson: It's about people, not content, which I think is a pretty good summary of the entire approach. Lynette, Felicity, Eliza, thank you very much for your time.

All: Thank you!