Welcome back to school for Term 4. It will be a busy term for everyone as we move into warmer weather and the summer break.

We had a busy Term 3 here at Teach Well!

Participants in our High-Impact Teaching Practices Toolkit Series graduated in Canberra, including a group of school leaders who completed a dedicated Lead Group.

Our dedicated cohort of Literacy Leaders from Melbourne Archdiosese of Catholic Schools Continued their enthusiastic participation.

In Geraldton, our team delivered Masterclass Series workshops to two groups of dedicated teachers across K-2 and Years 3-10. We also continued our work with incredible teachers, leaders and classroom assistants in Geraldton, Mount Magnet and Kalgoorlie as part of the Scaling Up Success project, in collaboration with the WA Department of Education to support student literacy in regional WA.

We are looking forward to a busy Term 4!

Our next Alumni Webinar Using Elastik to Create Longer Cadence Reviews will be held with Elastik on October 22 at 3:30pm AWST. Registrations for this event are open to all Teach Well alumni, as well as to your colleagues and broader networks. Registrations are limited, so register now to hold your place.

We are also delighted to announce that registrations for our 2025 courses are now open! Teach Well will be continuing our work here in WA, with the Masterclass Series in High-Impact Instruction for educators from Kindy – Year 2, and dedicated Year 3-10 Cohorts, starting in Term 1 and Term 2, 2025.

Next year, for the first time, you can join the Masterclass from anywhere in Australia. Teachers and leaders will be able to access an entirely online version of the Masterclass Series.

Our leaders’ program, the Instructional Lead Fellowship, will also start in Term 1. This course is crafted for leaders, and is a great next-step for graduates of the Masterclass Series.

Please keep in touch and keep us updated on your brilliant work.

Best wishes,
The Teach Well Team

Masterclass Series in High-Impact Instruction: Kindy-Year 2

The Kindergarten-Year 2 Masterclass Series works from a robust research and evidence base with concrete techniques educators can use immediately.

Apply now.

Masterclass Series in High-Impact Instruction: Year 3-10

A 9-month course supporting teachers and school leaders to build more high-impact instruction into their classrooms.

Apply now.

Instructional Lead Fellowship

A 4-month course supporting school leaders and Masterclass alumni to build more high-impact instruction into their classrooms.

Workshop dates:
Monday, 24 March
Thursday, 22 May
Wednesday, 30 July

Register now.

Interesting News for the Teach Well Network!

James Pengelley on the impact two different mediums, used by students, may have on results

Masterclass Series graduate, teacher and adjunct lecturer at Murdoch University, James Pengelley, recently spoke to ABC National Radio on the impact two different mediums, used by students, may have on their results when completing assessments.

You can listen to the ABC interview here. 

Finalists announced for the WA Education Awards 2024

Congratulations to all schools named as finalists for the WA Education Awards. See below finalists which are Teach Well partner schools, or read the full list here.

Excellence in school leadership
Morawa District High School

Excellence in teaching and learning (primary)
Morawa District High School

Excellence in teaching and learning (secondary)
West Australian College of Agriculture – Cunderdin

Excellence in cultural responsiveness
Bannister Creek Primary School
Rangeway Primary School

Excellence in disability and inclusion
Atwell College
Beachlands Primary School
Dowerin District High School

Excellence in wellbeing and learning
Makybe Rise Primary School

Winning schools will be announced at a presentation breakfast on Monday, 11 November.

Using Elastik to Create Daily Reviews 

Our next Alumni Webinar will be held on Tuesday 18 June 2024, 3:30pm-5pm (AWST). The webinar, Using Elastik to Create Daily Reviews, will be delivered in association with Elastik.

Daily reviews are a fundamental vehicle to achieve spaced practice with our students. We know that creating effective Daily Reviews can take time, so come along to learn how to utilise Elastik and your student data to make the most of your reviews.

Registrations are now closed.

We are very excited to announce that one of our alumni and Head of Middle School at Port School, Matt Hopkins, has received a 2023 National Excellence in Teaching Award!

Matt received the NEiTA Apple Award for showing a strong commitment to advancing education through implementing explicit and innovative teaching practices.

By providing students with structured and systematic learning experiences, Matt has helped them improve their academic results and renew their passion for learning.

It’s wonderful to hear that he is making such a difference in his community, reengaging young people and building their trust in the education system – well done Matt!

To learn more about Matt’s achievement visit Port School.

In partnership with the National Catholic Education Commission, Ochre Education has created a full year’s worth of comprehensive curriculum resources for Years 7 and 8 Mathematics. All lessons embed high-impact, evidence-based teaching practices and can be adapted by teachers to suit their students’ needs.

Term 1 resources are available now, while the remainder of the year’s resources will be available in advance of each school term.

Ochre Education is also running a professional learning webinar session on Thursday 15 February  to support teachers to navigate the Mastery in Maths resources.

For more information, visit Ochre Education here.

If someone asked you to guess their height, how accurate do you think your estimate would be? How about if two people asked you to say who was taller? Which question would you find easier to answer?

This highlights a crucial fact about humans, which is that we are not very good at making absolute judgements (estimating someone’s height). However, human beings are very good at making comparative judgements (comparing two people’s heights to see who is taller). In August this year, Teach Well were delighted to host an alumnus webinar, led by Daisy Christodolou of No More Marking, to learn a bit more about comparative judgement. Daisy highlighted this example as an analogy for how we currently assess students’ writing in English, and how this could be approached more effectively and efficiently through comparative judgement.

As a standard practice in English, each teacher marks their student’s writing responses using a marking rubrik, to assess whether the student’s writing meets the relevant standard set out. Some moderation may be done by groups of teachers, but around 95% of responses will only be seen by one teacher. Comparative judgement involves teachers comparing two students’ writing responses side-by-side and simply judging which one is better, left or right. This process (which takes about 20 seconds on average) is repeated multiple times by multiple teachers, so that all student responses are seen 20 times.

We know that the workload of English teachers is sky high, and marking is a large contributor to this, but what if it didn’t have to be? Instead of each teacher individually reading and marking each student’s writing, using an assessment rubrik, followed up by moderation, Daisy suggests comparing two pieces of writing to decide which one is better (in a much shorter time frame than traditional marking) and then repeating this several times. As a result, students’ writing is ranked and awarded a comparative score against all other students. This process has been proven to not only reduce the margin of error in marking, but also to significantly reduce the length of time needed to mark students’ work.

In this webinar, Daisy ran us through a simple demonstration of comparative judgement (available on the No More Marking website) and also assigned us some actual student responses to compare. After we completed the exercise, we looked at the level of accuracy we achieved in ranking and scoring these responses, and it turned out this bunch of novices did a great job, far better than the accuracy of large assessment organisations! Daisy led us through how to set comparative judgement up, upcoming Australian projects, the levels of membership available to schools (yes, there’s a free option), how to give effective whole-class feedback and how to teach good writing skills, based on common issues seen in thousands of student responses.

A secondary English teacher who attended the webinar said “This workshop was fantastic! Comparative judgement is such a logical and time-saving way of marking, and we should all be using it more. Daisy also provided some practical, easy to use methods for improving students’ writing that nicely align to the strategies taught in the Masterclass. The workload of an English teacher is always so high so anything we can do to lighten the load is something worth listening to!” Once again, we would like to thank Daisy for so generously sharing her time and expertise with us.

We will be following this up with another No More Marking webinar in early 2024, led by Jeanette Breen, who will introduce comparative judgement, and discuss the No More Marking Australian project launching in February 2024. Even if you already attended the webinar in August, you are more than welcome to attend this one too, particularly if you are interested in getting involved in the 2024 school year! You can register for the session here.

We are delighted to announce that we are partnering with Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic Schools (MACS) and Ochre Education to support teachers in delivering high-quality mathematics resources for F-2 students across Victoria.

Working from a robust research and evidence base, Teach Well is collaborating with MACS schools as they implement Ochre’s new F-2 Mathematics lesson resources and Daily Reviews. Feedback from MACS teachers was that workloads were high, and teachers wanted more high-quality mathematics resources to create more sustainable workloads, whilst promoting equity and excellence across their schools. The Teaching for Impact in Mathematics (TIM) Series, delivered by Teach Well, is a tailored, professional learning series that will support teachers and leaders to build more high-impact instruction into their classrooms and schools, to accelerate learning for all students in mathematics.

The TIM Series workshop day will cover some key aspects of student learning, including:

• An introduction to the Science of Learning
• How to achieve a full participation classroom
• How to effectively check for understanding in the classroom
• The key componentry of high-impact lessons
• How to best utilise the principles of spaced practice and Daily Reviews

The TIM Series will include an in-person workshop in Melbourne for teachers (and an additional workshop for school and mathematics leaders), as well as a self-reflection and video feedback cycle, and structured opportunities to collect and reflect on student outcomes data along the way. A big congratulations to the MACS team on the roll out of the innovative approach to the TIM Series. We look forward to working alongside MACS schools in 2024 for the benefit of all teachers, leaders, and students.

When do students (and their teachers) find out they can’t retrieve or apply grade-level content? In many instances, teachers and students are left wondering if they truly know key content right until they sit an assessment. At this point there is so little time to address any gaps and move students forward in their learning. It is exactly this kind of challenge that longer cadence reviews can address.

Barak Rosenshine’s ’Principles of Instruction’ not only states that we should ‘begin a lesson with a short review of previous learning’, but that we should also ‘engage students in weekly and monthly review’. We know from the research that providing students with spaced, retrieval practice is vital for ensuring strong encoding into long-term memory. We also know that some teachers will decide on a different cadence for their reviews, (fortnightly or bi-termly instead of weekly or monthly) so at Teach Well, we refer to these as Longer Cadence Reviews.

In September this year, Teach Well was excited to host a joint webinar with Elastik, to explore Longer Cadence Reviews in more detail. The webinar covered how to best use Elastik to create Longer Cadence Reviews, saving teachers’ time, whilst providing instant feedback to students.

From the research, we know that effective Longer Cadence Reviews take the form of a low-stakes (or no-stakes) quiz, consisting of grade-level retrieval and application questions, and can help students to develop their own metacognition. They should also include a full teacher debrief, ideally within the same lesson as the review itself. Whilst some teachers might select questions from textbooks or practice exam papers, and others may put together a selection of hinge-point questions, any ability to help reduce teacher workload is worth investigating further.

Dahmen Higgs from Elastik demonstrated how to create different types of reviews, including Daily Reviews informed by PAT/NAPLAN testing data, and also Longer Cadence Reviews. By manually selecting questions from a bank of multiple-choice questions organised by year level, subject and strand, teachers can build short assessments to assign to their students, saving them time in creation and printing, and providing them with an overview of which questions students struggled with to give feedback on within the same lesson. Instant feedback is also provided to students on which questions they answered correctly and/or incorrectly.

A secondary Mathematics teacher who attended the webinar said “As someone brand new to ELASTIK, this was very informative. I think the most useful part was the walkthrough on how to create custom reviews and the fact that it can support teachers to better use data to inform teaching. I really loved Teach Well’s recap of spaced practice and longer cadence review!”

We hope those of you who attended the webinar found it useful and informative, and if you would like more information on using Elastik in your schools, you can find it here. We will endeavour to hold another alumni webinar with Elastik next year, so if you missed out this time, keep checking back.