What will I do to establish and communicate learning goals, track student progress, and celebrate success?
1. Providing clear learning goals and scales to measure those goals
2. Tracking student progress
3. Celebrating student success

Initially it will be important to establish where students are on the learning continuum. I will do this by referring to previously gathered information (standardised test results from last year and report grades), students self assessments and goals for the term/ year, and parental survey/ feedback. This information will mainly focus on reading, spelling, writing, and mathematical knowledge, skills and understanding. Opportunities to also monitor Health and PE, music and language skills will be important to acknowledge strengths of students in these areas.

Recording this information in one central location (Mark it), will be important. A copy in the back of my day to day program book has also been well utilised and easily accessible, so I would like to continue this.

Involving students in the process of identifying their strengths and needs will be important throughout the year. I will endeavour to do this through the use of rubrics, and the SOLO framework (Structured Observable Learning Outcomes – Pre-structural, Uni-structural, Multi-structural, Relational and Extended Abstract).

Resources to help with creating rubrics are:
EALD -Language and Literacy Levels – particularly for writing ( but also useful for reading) and oral language development
Australian curriculum- Maths, English, Science, History, Geography
Reading Comprehension Strategies Level Guides – Here, Hidden, Head, Heart
Words Their Way continuum – spelling, word knowledge

Using the rubrics to provide relevant, useful feedback to students will be important. Allowing time to process feedback and act on this will also be important. Encouraging students and parents to actively engage in this process should see further benefits for student learning. An easy to access, easy to manage system needs to be set up. The use of Evernote could be one tool that could support this process. Up until now I have used an Assessment Portfolio, which has been a record of feedback, and assessment of work. This will still be relevant and useful, as I want to continue to use this easily accessible tool as a way of students visibly showing their thinking. Past students have used these as mini-whiteboards, with various blank proformas at the ready.

Class Dojo might also be a way of keeping parents informed. I will need to investigate how much this can be customised, and if this could be used to give feedback.

Bento has been useful in the past, a data base program, although I haven’t been able to sync data between all devices.

Involving students in setting specific goals, keeping these in mind (and easily accessible) and self monitoring will be a priority. Using graphing systems and regularly checking in with students throughout the day will be managed with the help of proformas available in student Assessment portfolios.

Celebrating student successes?
Encouraging students to share their learning achievements with parents will be done throughout the year by:
* highlights regularly celebrated and featured on our class blog,
* setting up opportunities to share/ show Assessment Portfolio or online work with parents (regular homework will foster this regular review and feedback from parents)
* Class Dojo will also be explored as an option to share successes
* Evernote – this didn’t work last year when I tried to use it at school, but hopefully the computing issues have been fixed, so I will try again. This will allow both teachers to add notes, photos, videos to a folder for each student which could then easily be shared with parents.
* students’ successes will also be regularly shared as acknowledgements and achievements
* last year by having student goals posted in the classroom, I could help students to monitor and assess their achievement. I would like to continue this, but also get students to keep a copy which is easy to refer to (Assessment Portfolio).

What will I do to establish and maintain classroom rules and procedures?
4. Establishing classroom routines
5. Organising the physical layout of the classroom for learning

Some of the main routines I will want to establish quickly are:
* getting students to effectively work with each other – build from pairs, triads, to bigger groupings gradually
* sharing responsibilities – setting up a regular system to rotate roles and responsibilities (fortnightly)
* ways to walk around the school as a class in an orderly way
* setting up in the morning – reference point (list of jobs)
* packing up at the end of the day – reference point (list of jobs)
* Monday morning procedure – Team Meeting
* English – Word Work, Literacy Block, Guided Reading,
* Maths – Mental Routine, Problematised Situation/ Strategy Lesson, Reflection
* Science – working in triads with a set role
* Daily Fitness- students responsible for setting up, explaining game/ activity with support of the teacher, and packing up
* Workbook expectations
* What to do if you finish early. What to do if you don’t know what to do. What to do if the task is too easy or too hard.
* Visible Thinking strategies – mini-whiteboards, fingers (ABCD), thumbs up, down, middle to show level of understanding, five finger rating system – relate to on-task time, or personalised goal (recorded regularly on a self monitoring chart), physically moving to different points in the classroom to show opinion/ thoughts, Think-Pair-Share, Think Board,
* regular reflection on thinking/ learning / achievements – through talking, blogging, journal, reading log, sticky notes
* meta language developed/ used to communicate clearly
* goal setting – modelled- SMARTAR ( specific, measurable, achievable, realistic , time oriented, agreed, reviewed)
* use hexagons to relate to SOLO taxonomy

Physical layout of the room?
I need to make space for:
– whole class instruction with access to the whiteboard, and electronic whiteboard
– small group instruction,
– small group work in different parts of the class
– paired/ independent practice (tables organised in pairs or groups of 4, with clear expectations on noise level and table talk – focused/ on-task only) – signs to remind students of working noise level? – silent, whispers, table talk, whole class, small group – one at a time
– access to class resources (textas, paper, calculators, scrap paper, maths equipment)
– access to and routine for borrowing from class and school library
– drink bottles and fruit snack
– book boxes for Daily 5 – Read to someone, Listen to someone, Read to self, Word Work, Writing
– computer trolleys
– display space for student work
– display space to use as a reference point for learning – Word Wall, Wonder Wall, CAFE ( Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency, Expand Vocabulary)
– visible thinking – poster sectioned off and numbered to represent each student to hold sticky notes, exit passes, etc.
– reference materials A3 laminated sheets, personal word wall (Sheena Cameron idea), POOCH, personal thermometer (individuals or everyone?) SOLO reference points