As you may know, I work in different classes throughout the day for different reasons. While working in these classes I teach different concepts and ideas and then I assess the students on what they have learnt. Recently, after a word identification assessment, one student didn’t seem happy with their result. They were looking at a number based result, for example 17 / 30. I asked why they weren’t happy and they told me that they wanted a better result, a higher number. I then told them what their result for the same test was at the start of the term and we discussed growth. They were much happier! This is what we, as educators, look for - not just a number on a page but the growth we see in our students.
If a student starts on Reading level 4 and by the end of the term has moved to a level 8, we celebrate the growth. If we have a student in the same class that starts on a Level 15 and moves to a level 16, we might start to question why there has not been as much growth and investigate what we can do to help that student make the same growth as others.
This is something that you could be looking for in your own children. We cannot compare one child to another, they are all individual and all achieve at different rates. What we can look at is growth. Is your child developing new skills from one term to the next? Are they able to do things now that they couldn’t before? Some questions you could ask your child, such as, ‘What are you most proud of in this piece of work?’ might give you some insight into what they think they have achieved. This semester we will not use ‘Letter based’ gradings (as directed by NESA and CEDP) so between now and the end of the year it would be important to look at what your child can accomplish now and how they have grown by the end of the year. I’m sure you’ll be impressed!
Mrs Willard
Assistant Principal
