End of Quarter 2 & Progress Reports
Today is the final day of Quarter 2 in the Elementary School. Our teachers are putting the finishing touches on the Q2 progress reports. These will be available next Friday (January 26) and will be accessible through PowerSchool. The Q2 progress reports are narrative reports, giving you detailed information about your child’s progress across the range of subjects.
Transfer of knowledge is our goal
When reading a progress report, it is easy to place too much emphasis on individual skills and whether a child "knows it" or doesn't; whether they can do something or not. However, at ISA, we aim for a deeper level of conceptual understanding. Whether a child (or, indeed, and adult) knows or can do something is truly demonstrated when they must apply this knowledge and skill in new or unforeseen contexts.
The students at ISA are probably all-too aware of my love of the game of basketball. I have played, coached, watched and discussed the sport for many years. Not only do I love it for its speed, dynamism and as an outlet for my competitive nature, it has taught me a critical thing about the nature of teaching and learning: if you can’t transfer your skills and knowledge beyond the practice court, you haven’t really developed or learned in a meaningful way. Or, to put it another way, there is no point in simply perfecting decontextualised skills in drills if a player or team can then only react to an opponent if they line up and play exactly as rehearsed in practice. Or, to put it yet another way, a truly skilled basketball player isn’t one who only dazzles during specific drills; a truly skilled player is one who can transfer their skills to unexpected or novel game situations in ways that help their team.
In education, we also value the ability of our students to apply their learning, especially to transfer their understanding of a concept or skill to novel situations. Grant Wiggins, an advocate for authentic education, described transfer as the aim of education: “The point of school is not to get good at school, but to effectively parlay what we learned in school in other learning and in life.”
In our class lessons, teachers are aware that transfer doesn’t occur just because content is covered. A perfect score on a worksheet about a particular topic doesn’t necessarily demonstrate understanding of a concept or its connections to other ideas or how to apply a skill in a novel setting.
Students can only prove their understanding of a topic (like classifying quadrilaterals as squares, or rectangles, or parallelograms, etc.), if they are given opportunities to use their learning in different and unfamiliar tasks. Classifying quadrilaterals is best understood, and indeed assessed, if learners have to complete assignments that challenge them to make sense of past learning in unfamiliar tasks or that stretch them by posing counter-examples.
At ISA, our goal is not to simply ask students to learn stuff and then be tested on that learning. Our goal is for children to develop a deep understanding of topics and concepts, which can then be transferred to new situations and unfamiliar contexts. As parents, when your child comes home to share a piece of individual learning, try to challenge them by creating new and unfamiliar scenarios/tasks to see if the learning has been transferred. Don’t be fooled if this challenge gives them reason to pause or stops them in their tracks. On the contrary, this shows that they are thinking and are actively piecing together a deeper understanding of concepts.
Closing the school - Our decision-making process
This past week has been unexpectedly disrupted by the "predictably unpredictable" weather of Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire. The decision to close the school is never one that ISA takes lightly. In case you missed it, Nick Little included this explanation of our decision-making in a recent email to parents/carers.
"Closing our building is a difficult decision to make. We always strive to be transparent about how we make decisions, so wanted to share our approach.
We are balancing the safety of students and staff with a desire for in person teaching.
When we make a decision for closure we take into consideration that our students and staff come from a wide area, the city and the shire. City roads may be safe, the shire roads not.
We don’t ask only those who can make it in safely to come in, while others stay at home. This can put a pressure on some families to take risks - especially if their children have exam classes. We also feel it is unequal: some students are in class learning, others are at home. For many of our grade levels, it is far preferable for all students to be present online (or for all students to have the chance to engage in suggested home learning activities) than only some in person.
The ‘come in if you are safe’ advice can also create staffing problems; many of our teachers live in the shire. If we have a lot of absence, the quality of in-person teaching will be less than that of online classes with the appropriate specialist. We would also face significant challenges in making sure we had enough teachers to work with our youngest students on site.
We also haven’t announced delayed starts. It means we lose the opportunity for learning in the first lesson (or more) of the day - whether that would be in person or online. More importantly, it makes communication with hundreds of families more complicated and less clear. We don’t want to change our mind through the day. We prefer to keep a clear, single message for the day.
Every school has to decide the weight it will put on different factors when decision making. At ISA safety and wellbeing will always rank high in balancing considerations. We may not always be right, but if we are wrong it should be for the right reasons."
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