Day 2 WRSC Entry Tickets

St Joseph's Know Do Be

St Joseph's Know Do Be (KDB) - Ensuring students are learning with their head, heart and hands 

As teachers, we design the KDB for our teaching and learning experiences with the students. We share this at the beginning and throughout our lessons and refer back to it during reflection times. Our wondering around the KDB is, could we provide more voice and choice around the KDB development?

We invited some students to discuss this wondering and if they had the opportunity, what would they change about the KDB. Our student data was driven by boys, interesting enough, they are students who do not have a sense of learner agency; regularly mucking around and disrupting others as well as not completing work tasks. After discussing with them what learner agency means, we then led into a discussion around our continuums (DO) and our learning dispositions (BE). The students made the comment that they understand why we have our KDB, but do not use it often to see where they could improve their learning. We posed the question "Would you refer to the continuums more if you helped to make them?" The students said yes, as long as the teachers really helped them (scaffolding). One student also said he would like an emotional continuum or a tracker to show others and the teachers how he was feeling during the day. Our discussion continued, and another student said that he likes the continuums but he finds he doesn't always need to prove everything on the continuums as it isn't relevant to him.

Further thinking:

Could we give student access to our learning continuums, where through technology students are using them as a journal to show their thinking, provide evidence and share with their teachers? How would we ensure this is visible?

Can we trial allowing the students to create the learning disposition, getting them to articulate their thinking of what they needed to BE, and what skills, strategies they used as part of their success? Would this allow other students to be more willing to develop their own dispositions in learning and to improve their learner agency?