Month: November 2019

During much of Term 3 of 2019, there was a conscious decision by senior leadership at St Luke’s Catholic College to increase our engagement with parents and to hear their voice through surveys, Engagement Events and Learning Walks. As an aside, for more insights into Parent Learning Walks, feel free to watch this video produced by Linda McNeill.

As a result of the engagement with parents, we acknowledge that many expressed their need for better and more regular information about their child’s learning and growth. This is not limited to St Luke’s. In fact, a number of principals have commented to me that the desire for information from parents about their child’s learning has increased over time.

This increased level of parent interest in their child’s learning and growth occurs in a world where there is rapid technology developments. This conditions us to a world of instant information provided by many sources through social media updates, mobile notifications and endless emails. Ease of access to information, engagement with curated news sources and particaption in online communities, is a part of our life. We only have to see the explosion of online shopping to know how technology has impacted on the retail sector. In that same world, machine learning and artificial intelligence have impacted of many professions including finance, law and accountancy.

With such change there is a strong argument that the education sector has not maintained the same levels of engagement with new technologies. This may explain the emerging question from some parents as to why schools cannot provide more insights about their child’s learning and growth on a more regular basis – and that is a fair question!

It could be argued that education has not maintained pace with other sectors when it comes to technology. In response to parents voicing their need for better and more regular information about their child at St Luke’s, we are supported by Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta (CEDP) and engaging with external agencies to develop a ‘student dashboard’. The online dashboard will provide an updated snapshot of a child’s progress in areas such as:

Any student online dashboard will need to be far more interactive than a semester report. It will need to provide more information and be far more more readily available, more often. However, 24/7 access will not be something that St Luke’s will provide. The last thing any child needs is a parent or teacher hovering over them for incremental steps that may take days or weeks to notice and record.

When appropriate, we will invite parents to test and trial a draft prototype. We have the data at the ready; however, much of this data is stored in silos. These silos are not connected. The objective is to connect . these silos and personalise information for each child with student friendly visuals and parent friendly language.

Over the next few weeks and months, we will iteratively develop prototypes after engaging with teachers, parents, and, of course, students. I am most looking forward to seeing how our commitment to explicitly teach and assess general capabilities looks along side the traditional data sets associated with reading, writing and numeracy growth.