Visible Learning+ school awards are the brainchild of one of Australia's top educational academics, Professor John Hattie.
It champions the concept of shifting educators’ thoughts from teaching to learning and moves away from a traditional model of education.
It is delivered via Corwin Australia and acknowledges the exemplary practice of schools that develop visible learners and recognises their success in being evaluators of their own impact on student learning.
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The Visible Learning School Awards recognise the progress, as well as the achievement, of schools that have made the commitment to initiate the Visible Learning journey and to embed the Visible Learning principles within their organisation.
The School Awards have been designed as one way of keeping schools motivated through their Visible Learning journey, and to assist other schools in deepening their own Visible Learning implementation practices.
St Joseph's has been on a three-year journey towards this goal and Deputy Principal Leigh Symons said everyone in the whole school community was extremely proud of this achievement.
“Professor Hattie did the biggest study of educational history and actually did meta-analysis of actually what works,” Mr Symons said.
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“Not what we think works, but what has actually been proven to work.
“So a lot of the thinking around visible learning is making learning visible to our students.
“They understand what they’re learning. They understand what strategies they need to use. They understand what kind of feedback they can actually give, and receive, and what they do with that feedback.
“So it’s actually making it all visible and not the teacher having all the information, but the students actually driving their learning and having a consistent language across our whole school.
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“We have achieved the highest level of accreditation, international level accreditation, which is brilliant.
“Corwin is our facilitator and they’ve got schools they work with throughout Australia and internationally as well.”
The process involved St Joseph's putting forward a proposal using evidence of what they have achieved during the three-year journey.
“Getting the highest certification puts us right at the very top of schools of visible learning within Australia.
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“There’s only a handful of schools here, North America has about 15, and there’s about 10 in the UK.
“The accreditation gets ticked off by Corwin Australia, then Corwin International and finally by John Hattie himself.
“So it’s actually a really big deal. Every single Catholic School in Melbourne actually went through this process of accreditation as well and there’s only one other school in Victoria that is certified.“Every Catholic School in the Melbourne Diocese went through the three-year process and only one got the certification so we’re lucky to have done some pretty good stuff.”
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Mr Symons said after focussing on this accreditation for three years it was an incredible source of pride for him, and the school community.
“It’s been a whole of school process – not just a certain area of the school.
“Even the consultation with our parents when we went through the process around the language of learning, they had input into that as well, which was great.
“So that buy-in from our whole school community has been immense – we still have areas we are still working on – but we’ve made significant progress as a school community and are really proud of what we’ve done.
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“And John Hattie is the biggest name in education, to follow his path and get his words of wisdom and congratulations is massive.
“So for a country school we're doing pretty good.”
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