uLead 2016

According to Hattie (2014), a narrow focus on high achievement as the major outcome of education can lead to the wrong questions and the wrong answers. It can also lead to the misplacement of scarce resources at the cost of other reforms. In line with research conducted by the Assessment Research Centre at the University of Melbourne (Griffin ed. 2014), this paper reports on an initiative that eschews deficits and sources of failure. Instead, in a school where high ‘achievement’ is already entrenched, it focuses on how a narrative of growth and progress for all can point the way forward for an individual school, and even perhaps, by inference, the nation. Reporting on the promising early impact on teachers, teaching practice and students of a whole-school project (ELC to Year 12) to create and implement developmental progressions describing what growth and progress look like in all subject disciplines, the paper wades into the debate that all students can learn and improve if teachers identify what they are ready to learn (Griffin ed. 2014), and act accordingly. In addition, the alignment of the project’s principles to its methodology, whereby teacher readiness is identified, monitored and targeted with developmentally appropriate support (Krathwohl, Bloom & Masia, 1964), will be shown to support universal take-up.