Welcome back

I would like to welcome families back to Term 3 and hope everyone had a relaxing and restful holiday together. It is important to recharge the batteries and a great opportunity to spend quality family time together in our beautiful community. Staff and students have settled back into the school routine and are actively engaged in the work for the term ahead. Last week, we celebrated NAIDOC day with a range of learning and fun. The culminating event was our school parade. Can I thank Karenne Williams, Danielle Upkett and Alison Conway for their organisation and local Juru and Girudalla representatives who came and supported the activities.

Feedback and SMART goals

This term we are building on our Explicit Improvement Agenda and continuing the work around reading and maths. We have seen positive growth in our data across the school. This is pleasing to see that the work we are engaging in is having a positive impact on our students. Weekly conversations around the next steps and feedback has seen a positive response from students and accountability to improve their knowledge.

This term we are continuing to ensure that students receive regular feedback. We know that the research tells us that when students are receiving feedback that is needs to be Timely, Specific, Understandable to the learner and Actionable.

A great quote by researcher Hattie (2012) I recently read around this states: feedback needs to be “just in time, just for me”. We know that the learning and next steps must be diffentiated to every child’s needs.

As part of giving feedback, setting goals for the next steps is important. One of our key strategies in our Explicit Improvement Agenda this year is Students can recall their reading goal and explain their next step in learning.

Goals are part of every aspect of life and provide a sense of direction, motivation, a clear focus and clarify importance. We believe by setting goals, students are providing themselves a target to aim for. When guiding our students through the process of goal setting, we talk about SMART goals. SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.

Teachers are using recent data to set new goals with students and we look forward to ways we can share these with our families. Students will be working hard to action their goals and improve their reading and problem solving skills. Check in with your child around their goal this term and use these as part of weekly homework tasks and reading in the environment