Success Stories about goal progress

28 July: Orientation meeting to discuss how the project could run (with PPS and BSIS) Agenda drafted with PPS

• • Stage 1: School coordinators will champion the project. They will first test new strategies to engage with parents so that their success stories can be shared with their team when explaining the spirit of the project to other educators.

  • Stage 2: Educators meet for a Professional Development day to collaboratively:

    • Fill in information about goals/Signature Strengths/Well Being which amplifies student voice and is needed on the Working Together document

    • Discuss strategies to re-engage with parents about core knowledge on their children’s progress on their goals

    • Agree on how these strategies will be tested, evaluated and developed

  • Stage 3: Educators and Student Voice facilitators will:

    • Follow up on parents engagement with their children’s goal progress

    • Evaluate the various (re)engagement stages

    • Summarise the learning from the teacher-led project

3 August: First co-design meeting with the 3 coordinators

Discussion topics:

• When do parents step in and act to achieve goals?

• The importance of finding out what is important enough to parents to encourage them to partner with educators

• Using opportunities or create 'communication moments' from observations at school. When an educator harnesses a particular opportunity (i.e. child making progress on goals) they can use it to share this with parents. Communication moments are to educator-parent pair what 'teachable moments' are for educator-student pair.

• Working Together Agreement (WTA) principles and using different communication platforms to share goal progress with parents

• The role of Teacher Dashboards in monitoring goal progress

• Next steps: building a decision tool for teachers to trial and monitor engagement stages. Because this engagement is specific to the communication styles of each parent-educator pair, we suggest to draft a general map with alternative decision points to adapt to circumstances.

Note: The Educators' Student Voice page: https://sites.google.com/view/studentvoice2020/teachers-project-plan includes a Teacher Dashboard Professional Learning section with a clip recorded by Sophie, PPS. As per Chalmers Road school coordinator's request, we are creating a set of PL resources for educators to learn from in their own time. One educator explained how she uses her Teacher Dashboard to record and monitor a child's progress on goals. One week into the term, there is already learning to implement.

This clip was recorded to be shared with teachers as a quick "how to" in order to speed up the tool adoption. At Punchbowl Public School and Bankstown South Infant School, teachers have adopted the Teacher Dashboard as the one PLSP/IEP tool they are working with - both recording and monitoring progress and great to share with parents, SLSOs and relief teachers - at a glance, everyone knows where the child is at with their progress and everyone can contribute towards the next stage!

5 August: Second co-design meeting

Discussion topics:

• Barriers to family engagement and overcoming them... for instance the mindsets that 'goals are school business' and to be worked on at school because 'teachers are the experts'.

• Schools workload is heavily weighed on goal planning, however educators have no specific training about engaging parents and their success with engaging parents is subject to large variability [hence educator PL is needed]

• The importance of building a relationship with parents that will support ongoing communication about goals. Judy shared her experience in building relationships with parents using 'communication moments'

Agreed Action points: in the next 2 weeks, each coordinator will pilot new ways to engage with parents based on student progress with their goals. This is different from their usual information sharing. This involves harnessing 'communication moments' (see above) to share with parents. Coordinators need to build leadership in this domain so that they can share back with their team the result of the co-created innovation. Coordinators' stories about their experience and them advocating to their team will form the basis of PL materials.

• Punchbowl Public School and Bankstown South Infant School will build on the knowledge gained about communicating with parents via their online platform

• Because Chalmers Rd does not have a virtual platform, the school coordinator suggested to test a novel idea about piloting new engagement with parents, without adding to teacher workload: she will create and pilot a template for educators to easily communicate with parents specifically about goal progress. As many of their PLSP goals are curriculum based, it will be important to carefully choose child communication or personal hygiene goals so that parents can collaborate on these goals at home.

Next co-design meeting planned for Tuesday 18 August, 1-2pm

18 August: Third co-design meeting

Attended by the 2 schools who work with an electronic platform the meeting focused on the trial protocol to engage with parents (above on this page)

2 Sept: Meeting with Chalmers Rd school [Re: teacher dashboard]

• We compared notes about the number of students remaining in the program. We have 14 remaining students. We include a student whose father participated in all sessions and we would like to invite him to session 5. We will discuss later whether it was possible for teachers to collaborate with the family on his goals towards the end of the year, in case he does return to school.

• We offered to help with entering in Teachers Dashboards the data that we collected in sessions

• Natalie will support the teachers to engage parents through Student Voice data as follows:

  1. Where teachers do not have Student Voice data from the families, we advise that teachers reflect about the student's Signature Strengths and wellbeing factors and enter them in their Dashboard as a starting point,

  2. Teachers then support each student in achieving his or her goals as they embed Signature Strengths and wellbeing factors in their educational intervention - i.e. teachers assist the student working on their goal whilst amplifying student voice,

  3. Teachers communicate with families about the progress that their child is doing at school and how Signature Strengths and wellbeing factors are contributing to the student making progress on their goals,

  4. Teachers record families' engagement and families' reaction as they receive the teacher's perspective about their child's teacher voice.

For our first newsletter, we are collecting:

1. Parents' learning as they understand how their child's voice can be amplified in the process of working on their goals

2. Teachers' learning as they share feedback with parents about amplifying student voice.