Aussie Teacher Standards: Keep on learning!

Today we sat down as a whole staff and led by our principal went through the our new (although we have been practising quite a bit of it already) Performance and Development process. The whole process that each teacher undertakes is based upon our schools teacher performance and development plan. This plan set out two main whole school goals. Currently our school’s goals are:To improve individual learning outcomes for all students with a focus on literacy, numeracy and curiosityTo develop a student centered stimulating learning environment that motivates and engages students in their learning

With these over-arching goals we have then formulated a series of SMART goals. For more information about SMART goals visit my classroom blog here for a post about SMART goals. (Yes, we use SMART goals with kids too!). We then reviewed our schools performance and development plan. Which included SMART goals in each of the following four domains of teaching four domains (more info available here) :

1. Student Outcomes

2. Professional Knowledge

3. Professional Engagement

4. Professional Practice

Our whole teaching staff managed to read through the SMART goals that were set and discuss strategies that we can implement to achieve these goals. There was also a robust discussion about the evidence that we can collect to be able to validate our claims to have achieving all of our goals. This was a very interesting session and one that I feel we all left feeling a little more informed (or at least reassured) about the whole process. We found that a lot of our current performance and development practices are closely aligned with the future direction that we are taking, so in a way our journey is very much already on the way and we think we are travelling in the right direction.

There are some absolutely fantastic resources on the aitsl website including loads of information about the standards and what the requirements of teachers are. They even have a very well laid out smartphone/tablet app, where you can register an account and keep a record of artefacts of evidence and directly attach them to the aitsl standards. It also has illustrations of evidence for each of the teacher standards, it really is a great tool for any teacher in Australia and is well worth checking out.  Here is a animated video explaining the standards and a little of the research behind them:

The Aitsl website has loads more resources including a self assessment tool, which allows you to diagnose your current progress on each of the standards and gives you direction for individual goal setting.

What do you think of the AITSL Website? What is one way you could use the website to help you in our performance and development process?