A fantastic conversation with Year 4 teacher, Emma Wasson, where she talks about the power of using Verso Check-in with her students.
“I feel like a more capable contributor, not only to my classroom and to my students but also to my team”
It is so powerful to hear Emma sharing the importance of finding time to seek, value and respond to the voices of her students, and the tremendous value she places on diagnosis and discovery. As a reflective practitioner Emma is ready to learn with and from her students. She is committed to building agency, making learning visible, and developing her students’ capacity to monitor and advance their own learning and well-being.
Emma sees her students’ responses to the check-in as feedback on her practice, noting that it allows her to evaluate her impact in the classroom, giving her confidence in her own ability and the data she needs to develop and plan appropriately challenging activities that meet the needs of all learners.
“We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.” John Dewey
When we ask students to respond to a Verso instant Check-in, we are asking them to reflect on what and how they are learning. They are then required to consider the extent to which they felt challenged by the learning experience before sharing how they are feeling about their learning.
Research tells us that this cognitive and metacognitive process is a vital part of learning, but in action-oriented, fast-paced, classrooms, working within the constraints of the timetable, reflection is often the first thing to go.
This short video discusses the importance of planning dedicated time for student reflection and explores the additional advantages of using Verso’s advanced check-in feature to direct and deepen student thinking using a series of open ended reflection prompts.
These prompts have been organised in 8 distinct collections; each offering a different lens on student capabilities, thinking and understanding. Furthermore, all of the prompts in the collection can be adapted by the teacher to meet their formative assessment requirements more closely, or teachers can design and add prompts of their own.
“Student voice’ is the intentional collection of students’ thinking and feedback on their learning, and the use of these voices to inform and improve teaching, learning, and school-wide decision making.”
Prof Helen Timperley
The "My Impact" Dashboard provides access to classroom data capable of informing professional inquiry. The profile dashboard allows teachers to evaluate the impact of current practice on the ability of students to take ownership of their learning, as assessment capable learners, sharing real-time insights into the ability of each student to:
It also provides valuable insight into cognitive and emotional wellbeing, feedback on student perceptions of challenge, and the ability of students to apply appropriate verbs to discuss what they are learning.
Unlike the Teacher Check-in Dashboard, which provides an essential source of data from an individual lesson, the Teacher Profile presents data from the last 5 check-ins alongside school averages. When used together, these dashboards allow the intentional collection of students’ thinking and feedback on their learning to guide next learning steps for students and decisions about content and approaches by teachers and the addition of the Teacher Profile now informs the development of professional goals and broader decisions about teaching and learning.
Teacher Profile data can also be filtered to show differences between classes and used to support professional conversations about the impact of aspects of a teacher’s practice with coaches and learning specialists, and the work of PLCs.
According to Hattie’s analysis, students’ ability to report thoughtfully on their own performance has a massive effect size of 1.44.
Verso uses Machine Learning (ML) to code student-voice from the classroom to help teachers understand their impact and support student engagement.
Verso Learning has used the data from over 4.3 million student responses to inform the development of a supervised machine learning algorithm. This unique application has been designed to automatically code and display student reflection data in a way that helps teachers to instantly connect student feedback with their contextual expertise in order to understand their impact and meet the needs of individual students.
The supervised machine learning reads each of the student responses in the Verso Check-in and displays the extent to which individual students:
Teachers around the world are using the Verso dashboards to instantly identify the individual needs of their students and inform rapid adjustments to practice. Using this data in PLCs, teachers are developing a shared understanding of what works in the classroom, setting professional goals and measuring the impact of their practice.
It is critical to the process of learning that students have the same understanding as the teacher in terms of what is going on in any lesson and what they should be learning as a result of doing. Without this critical insight, students become confined in a world of completion and compliance. It is important that the teacher articulates learning goals in language that is accessible to all students, and that they are referred to frequently, and used by students to monitor and advance their own learning.
The capacity of students to meaningfully reflect on their learning journey hinges on their connection with the learning goal. It is essential that we invest time in building connections with the how, what, why (verb, noun, context) of the lesson and develop a shared understanding of what students need to be able to do or share in order to demonstrate that they have been successful.
With this in mind, Verso uses data from over 4.3 million student responses to constantly inform the development of a supervised machine learning algorithm, designed to automatically code and display student reflection data in a way that helps teachers to instantly connect student feedback with their contextual expertise in order to meet the needs of individual students and gain insight into the precision and impact of their practice.
The following video explains the key elements that Verso’s algorithm looks for when coding student written responses, and shares how the real power of the teacher dashboard as a catalyst for change is only fully realized when it is viewed through the lens of each teacher’s context, experience and expertise.
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