Small steps to make a big impact at Tecoma primary school
Lisa Hoskins-Faul
In 2021, Tecoma Primary School (TPS) in Melbourne’s outer eastern suburbs was honoured to be the only primary school amongst secondary schools, that became a finalist in the VicSRC Student Voice awards.
We have been taking steps as a school community towards transparent and embedded voice, agency, and leadership since our review in 2019. At times this was challenging through remote learning. But since the return to face-to-face learning, we have continued to take small steps, slowly consolidating practices that will eventually make a big impact in how our students are heard and respected as change makers and co-collaborators in the school and in their learning. We have made inroads but have clear goals ahead to ensure these aspects of our students' involvement at TPS are intrinsic to their experience.
Our continued focus moving forward will be on agency. Since our involvement with the VicSRC in 2019, we have been consolidating feedback from the students across all levels, prior to our planning day, to reflect on their learning and to discuss the ways in which they want to learn about different curriculum areas in future, primarily in inquiry-based subjects.
How do we do this?
A consistent feedback/reflection template has been created for all year levels. This assures the questions asked are based on the whole school focus for the term, so we are getting authentic feedback on areas we have been working on. It includes celebrations and challenges for the students. In tying these areas in with our goals in our school strategic plan, we can use this as anecdotal evidence and fidelity for our Annual Implementation Plan (AIP). Our questioning centres around literacy, numeracy, and student engagement, as well as our inquiry topics.
Prior to our planning day, each class discusses the following term’s inquiry topic:
What interested them?
How would they like to learn?
What would make an authentic assessment/project at the end of the unit?
On the planning day, one student is chosen from each class to participate in a feedback session with the Professional Learning Communities (PLC) team. For example, in our year 5/6 team we have three Year 5 classes and three Year 6 classes. These students join the team at the beginning of the day and give their voice about the term that has ended. They discuss specific lessons or instructions and what worked and what didn’t for them. They have an opportunity to share ideas for how they think they might learn more effectively.
Students are very honest in these sessions! The template is filled out by each team on this day, so we have record of the conversation to look back on when required.
Students have had the voice to change things over the years in the classroom, such as creating a class library of our level-led novels in the senior classrooms, rather than rotating a set of books each term. They were concerned that many people didn’t get the opportunity to finish a novel in a term and it wasn’t fair to have to stop part way through and begin a new book.
What do the children share?
Our Preps have recently completed an inquiry unit about animals. They reflected on the enjoyment they had in hands-on activities and learning about different animals. Their challenges included some writing tasks. Looking forward to the next term’s topic about fairy tales, the Preps had many wonderings: Are fairy tales real? How do fairies grow their wings? How did the fairies come alive if they weren’t in the world before? What things are in fairy tales? This gives our teachers some rich starting points to ensure the unit encapsulates the interest of the students.
Our Year 1/2 students have completed an inquiry unit: “Are You Game?” Their reflection focused on the hands-on learning, the excursion to the MCG and the ability to make their own games as their assessment piece. Their challenges included making the instructions for their own game and having ‘brain blocks’ when trying to come up with ideas for their own games. Their upcoming inquiry is “On with The Show”, tying in through whole school production. Students expressed they would like to learn about this by learning songs and dances, including drama in the classroom and the use of technology to watch and make videos.
Our Year 3/4 students have learnt about Australia’s First Peoples over Term 2. Their reflection of their learning included immersion through a kit from Museums Victoria, which students felt helped them to understand more about how tools were made and how the First Peoples lived. They also mentioned a walking excursion into the city to Birrarung Marr, where they learnt about symbolism and bush tucker. In Term 3 they will be learning about “Habitats”, and they suggested a real focus on animals, climates and where different habitats are in the world.
Our Year 5/6 students have completed a unit about democracy, called 'Rule the School'. Each year level had different experiences, as the Grade 5 students had the opportunity to go to Parliament House as a part of their camp, whereas the Grade 6 students had an incursion to learn about bills and laws. Challenging feedback included the comment that homework based around democracy didn’t assist in their learning. They had the opportunity to create political parties within their classrooms and made party policies and platforms, to teach their class for a day. This included preferential voting. The students were in agreement when they said this authentic learning helped them to understand the democratic process. Next term we look to our ‘Invention Convention’. We had thought about changing this, but the students’ ideas were to make an invention, to learn about inventors and to present their invention to the community.
As you can see, our students have voice in their learning about these topics. Our next step is to ensure students have more agency in this process; to have them begin to assist us in creating rich assessments for each level, including rubrics and the co-creation of success criteria. We have just finished the next review process at our school, and this is a clear path for us moving forward. The areas we have slowly worked on over the past four years are embedded into our classroom culture, and our next steps are apparent.There will be professional development later in the year through the Victorian Academy, focussing on Rethinking Assessment to Build Agency in Learning to help us on our way. We look forward to learning and growing with our students!
Lisa Hoskins-Faul
Year 5 teacher, Student Voice and Agency leadership leader, Tecoma Primary School