Today our team read and discussed an article on the AITSL website where Professor John Hattie was on the couch discussing his first 100 days as AITSL Chairman.

After reading his responses about helping practising teachers to increase their impact on student learning at a large scale, I started to think about how we as a school are working across levels to implement best practice. John Hattie went on to say  that

‘Teachers must be supported to implement practices that have been shown to improve teaching – evaluating their impact, seeking feedback about their practices, working together, and engaging in effective professional learning.’

In the junior levels we have been working hard to ensure that we are implementing the WLA approach as best as we can however I think the whole school needs to be involved in a conversation about how the learning experience in Investigations is helping or hindering our students as they move up the school. We know that the WLA has been proven to help student learning but is it the best way we can positively impact our students? I know as a 1/2 team we have been discussing whether it is effective for all our students and trying to weigh up the positives and negatives. It would be interesting to take John’s idea as working as a team to our school and look at a whole school approach and work in teams to create a cross-level plan of learning and student expectations for each new year.