Verso Check-in and the General Capabilities

Overview

The general capabilities play a significant role in the Australian Curriculum in equipping our students with the knowledge, skills, behaviours and dispositions essential to thrive in and outside of school, as successful learners, confident and creative individuals, and active and informed citizens.  

To support this process, Verso check-in has been designed to support teachers in meeting the requirement that they teach, assess and provide opportunities for students to develop and apply these capabilities to the extent that they are incorporated within learning area content, where they can support deep thinking and learning.

Fig 1: Verso reflection prompts can be filtered to focus on year level, learning area and capability . Simply select your subject area and the year level of your students. Select the learning outcome and use our filters to select your desired prompt.

Reflection prompts are questions that require students to think critically about what or how they have learned. They are designed to support synthesis and analysis, the forging of connections between ideas, and the development of knowledge, skills, behaviours and key learning capabilities.

Focus: Critical and Creative Thinking

The key ideas for Critical and Creative Thinking are organised into four interrelated elements in the learning continuum:

• Inquiring: Identifying, exploring and organising information and ideas
• Generating ideas, possibilities and actions
• Reflecting on thinking and processes
• Analysing, synthesising and evaluating reasoning and procedures.

Verso check-in supports teachers in developing each of the four elements through the provision of banks of more than 250 carefully designed reflection prompts that can be filtered for a variety of contexts and purposes, providing an appropriate lens for student to develop capability in critical and creative thinking as they learn to generate, organise and evaluate knowledge, clarify concepts and ideas, reflect on their journey as a learner and connect their learning to new and existing concepts.

Inquiring: Identifying, exploring and organising information and ideas

Verso Check-In Inquiry prompts have been organised into 6 sub sets, aligned to each stage of the inquiry cycle Each set contains :

1.Activate. Sample prompts include:

• Share one example of both an open and a closed question that helped your learning.
• What do you need to put to one side to ensure that you approach this inquiry with an open mind

2.Discover . Sample prompts include:

• If you wanted to find out more, which keywords would you use in your searches
• How could you determine the reliability of your sources?

3.Analyse. Sample prompts include:

• How would you categorise the information you have found?
• What evidence have you found that supports a different way of thinking.

4.Organise. Sample prompts include:

• What are the three most important points that you wish to share?
• Who will be the audience for your work?

5.Evaluate. Sample prompts include:

• On a scale of 1 - 5, how reliable are your conclusions? Justify your rating
• Do you have sufficient evidence to support your conclusions?

6.Implement. Sample prompts include:

• What is your call to action?
• What changes have you made to your thinking?

Generating ideas, possibilities and actions

“This element involves students creating ideas and actions, and considering and expanding on known actions and ideas” Australian Curriculum

Sample Prompts:

• Think about how you went about completing this work. What would you do differently next time?
• How does this work connect with skills or knowledge you have learned before?
• What new questions have emerged from your inquiry?

Reflecting on thinking and processes

“This element involves students reflecting on, adjusting and explaining their thinking and identifying the thinking behind choices, strategies and actions taken” Australian Curriculum

Sample Prompts:

• Share a statement for each of the following: I'm most satisfied with... I'm least satisfied with... I'm still having problems with..
• What was your most powerful learning moment? What made it so powerful?
• Which moments were you most proud of in terms of effort and success today?
• Describe an obstacle you faced on this learning journey and share how you overcame it.

Analysing, synthesising and evaluating reasoning and procedures

“This element involves students analysing, synthesising and evaluating the reasoning and procedures used to find solutions, evaluate and justify results or inform courses of action”. Australian Curriculum

Sample Prompts:

• What are the 3 most important ideas from your learning?
• Which headings would you use to bucket today's ideas?
• In order of importance, rank the 3 most important ideas in terms of our learning objective.

Finally

In order to meet the priorities of individual schools and develop the broader capabilities of students, Verso Check-in Prompts also allows teachers to generate prompts of their own or quickly and easily search for prompts under the following additional headings:

• Reflection on process: E.g. 'What was your learning superpower today? When did you use it and how did it help?
• Metacognition: E.g. What was your personal aha moment in terms of your understanding.
• Mathematical thinking: E.g. List each of the mathematical skills that you used to solve the problems you encountered in today's lesson.
• Self awareness: E.g. What have you discovered about yourself as learner while working from home?
• Mindfulness:  E.g. Think about how you are feeling and write down three things that you are grateful for.
• Remote Learning: E.g. Give an example of one way remote learning helped and one way that it made the work more tricky

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