Today’s session focussed on “Annotating Evidence”, and was introduced by Belinda Radcliff from the Performance Standards and Certification Team at DECD.
As with last session, Belinda did a great acknowledgement of country, including reference to the Recognise movement, which is well worth checking out.
After a brief meet and greet, we viewed an animated summary of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers. (link to the longer version) in order to reacquaint ourselves with the standards.
Language of the Standards
The bulk of the workshop focussed on unpacking the language of the standards. The “lexical patterns” are quite revealing of the differentiation amongst the career stages. The table below shows the frequency of certain phrases within the standards.
Quite clearly ‘supporting colleagues’ and ‘working with colleagues’ are a key parts of being a HA teacher, but are not explicitly mentioned at the proficient level.
We then worked in pairs to examine the increased syntactical complexity across the career stages within one focus area.
You can see simply from the length, but also the complexity, that the demands are increasing.
Personally, I found the exercises and discussion relating to deconstructing the Descriptors to be very useful. It allowed me to unpack their content, and gave me insight into the evidence which would be required to meet the standards which my partner and I had examined.
Using “Illustrations of Practice” Videos to Understand the Standards
In the final segment, we watched and discussed a series of four Illustrations of Practice from the AISTL website which looked at Focus Area 2.1 (Know the Content and How to Teach It) at Graduate, Proficient, HA and Lead level.
It was evident from the videos, working along with the Descriptors, how each of the teachers showed increasing competency for that focus area, and how the requirements for each career stage differ.
Annotating Evidence?
In the end, we ran out of time before getting into the details of annotating evidence. Quite convenient for most of us, who needed a little more time on our homework anyway – developing an evidence set to annotate.
We should be covering that in the last and final session in two weeks. Watch this space.
[Link to Workshop 1]
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