A couple Mondays ago I spent a day at the Auburn West Public School on the outskirts of Sydney. The school came highly recommended, yet it surpassed my expectations. The students' autonomy was particularly impressive; the school puts data to good use, and kids embraced their work with joy.
At Auburn West, many students are of Lebanese, Iraqi, and Turkish descent, some having arrived in Sydney multiple generations ago and others more recently. The school seems to work to sustain their students' cultures through the development of their native language, as some students take English classes while others take Arabic or Turkish.
The school is mostly low-income and at times has struggled on federally mandated tests. In a U.S. city, this might generate calls for drastic reform. In contrast, The New South Wales state government provides Auburn West lots of leeway and significant funding, Relieving Principal Leanne Hodges said. For a school of 730 students, the school has two deputy principals, five assistant principals, an Instructional Leader, three learning and support teachers, five ESL teachers, three Reading Recovery teachers and a number of other literacy/numeracy specialists.
Armed with significant capacity to support students and teachers, the school has mapped out a clear vision for teaching and learning. If students own their learning and keep track of their growth, the school's decided, then students will be much more likely to progress.
As I stepped into a Kindergarten classroom, two students emerged from a small learning support classroom where they'd been working with a reading specialist. I asked them what they'd been working on, and they held their papers out to me. "The cat made a big problem," a boy read haltingly. Two stickers sat at the top of his work. One said "I can put spaces between my words." The other read "I can write full sentences." A smiley face was circled on one, while a 'working on it' icon was colored in on the other. Everyone in their school, an older student later explained to me, is working on their own goals.
Students' progress towards learning goals was featured centrally in nearly every classroom. In a fifth and sixth grade classroom, a boy led me to a wall that exhibited all of the students' names. Across the top were the many areas of mathematics students would be working on that year. Nearly all students were at the highest level in whole numbers; in multiplication and division students were more spread out.
I asked one teacher whether the public nature of students' achievement and homogenous grouping by goals created status issues in the classroom, but she insisted that wasn't the case. The students, she explained, really support each other. Kids help others who are in lower groups, and everyone's trying to improve.
The data, I observed, seemed to be put to good use. In nearly all of the classrooms I went in to, students were abuzz with activity. In a first grade room students were scattered about working in groups. Three read the same book together on bean bags in the corner, while another four worked with the teacher at the kidney table. Two recent arrived students worked on an app targeted at beginning English speakers. I saw very little whole class teaching. At times, this was on purpose; "Why teach the whole class when everyone needs something different," one teacher told me.
Auburn West seemed to couple their focus on student progress with a well-rounded educational experience. The previous Friday, a children's author visited; many students told me they were trying to write stories like hers. The science teacher is teaching 3rd and 4th grade students using Big History, a curriculum that leads students through the history of earth from the big bang towards the present. In an era of shrinking recess in the U.S., and particularly for poor schools, students at Auburn West have twenty minutes of mid-morning recess, then nearly an hour more for lunch.
I've been wary of the focus on data-driven instruction in education in the U.S. I fear that at times it strips meaning from learning in an effort to quantify, and diminishes the joy in learning for those who need to feel it the most. If there's a way to use data well, I thought as I left school for the day, Auburn West Public School might very well be doing it.