Every Thursday after lunch, the busy minds of the Alawa Learning Commission are working together to create positive change for students at Alawa. The Northern Territory Learning Commission was founded nearly 10 years ago. It’s about students as partners in their learning and giving student voice a platform. The Alawa Learning Commission's working minds have been flying through DATA wondering what we could do to improve our school. We knew that we had to choose a line of inquiry to keep us on track. We narrowed the options down through persuasive speeches, debating and voting. This year the Learning Commission’s line of inquiry was… How do Alawa students engage with their data, are they Data literate and does it help them reach their full potential as 21st century learners.
After we chose this, we dove deep and questioned ourselves, “What does it mean to be data literate?”. We watched videos on data literacy and had open discussions about what it might mean. We eventually came to a conclusion, and we now know that to us data literacy means to be able to read, understand, create and communicate with data.
We broke into three groups. A group to conduct interviews, a group to do classroom observations and a group to conduct a focus group with teachers. From the data we received we developed our findings.
· Alawa students have an understanding of data and benchmarks.
· Alawa students are still learning to set SMART goal, identify next steps and the strategies for improvement.
· Alawa teachers are fairly confident in using data to inform their teaching however they are still developing their skills to help students become data literate.
We used these findings to form our Recommendations.
· Use current data sets to set goals which are relevant to individual student’s abilities, in consultation with the teacher.
· Set SMART goals, ensuring everyone is aware of and understands the SMART acronym.
· Use our Goal-Setting Guide to help set your goals- Teachers & Upper Primary.
· Use teacher instructional videos to guide your goal setting session.
We made SMART instructional videos and now they are here for you to watch and learn how to set SMART goals in the future. We have also created posters with the SMART goal acronym. You will see these in your classrooms and in your data folders. We hope you find these tools useful in helping you to set SMART goals to become data literate.
To celebrate the year all Northern Territory Learning Commissions came together last Wednesday at the Darwin Convention Centre to showcase their year’s work to each other, The Chief Executive of the Education Department, the Minister for Education and several other Government Ministers. This was a great opportunity for the Alawa Commission to discuss our Line of Inquiry but was also interesting and informative to hear about the other Learning Commission’s journeys.
Felicity, Grace, Niluh & Ms Katie
