At Larrakeyah Primary School, we want students to become strong writers. Through robust writing programs, and use of tools like Brightpath, teachers and students work collaboratively to achieve excellence in literacy.
At Larrakeyah Primary School, we use Brightpath as a tool to assess our students writing. It provides the students and teachers with information about where they are at and where they are working towards.
Writing at Larrakeyah has been a focus for a good number of years. It started many years ago when some teachers went over to Singapore and they saw how Writer’s Notebook was introduced over there and used and they brought that back to our school. We’ve implemented that pretty much daily into our classrooms.
We also wanted to build assessment capable teachers and it was important that we were all on the same page when we were looking at a piece of writing.
So Brightpath was introduced into our school, we built up our teacher’s expertise and students have benefited greatly over the years.
Brightpath is completed each semester by all students. All students, regardless of their grade, are given a prompt or a topic to write about, and they write that response in a specific text type. So, it could be a persuasive text, an information report, or a narrative.
We are giving them the skills to express themselves eloquently, verbally and in writing. Through the assessment, they are able to understand where they are and where they need to be. We are giving them the skills to lift their writing from the mundane to the exciting.
Students learn to create written work by learning how to analyse and interpret mentor texts. These mentor texts aren’t limited to just published books. We can also use written work that’s created by teachers or students. Websites, newspapers, magazines, newsletters, and more. They’re a really good tool to help students understand what strong and quality examples of effective writing look like.
And they really benefit the students because they’re more likely to take risks in their writing because they’ve seen that style of writing, or that tool, used in a confident way.
Once they have developed their skills, they can write more sustained texts, particularly as they’re getting older. And, part of the writing process that occurs is that not only does, the child review their work, their peers review the work, the teacher also reviews the work.
We create learning goals and learning experiences that help them to move forward and improve on their previous writing. It is all based on what the results of the Brightpath assessment showed us as teachers and students.
Importantly too, assessments are seen as valid and they see that as a potential for growth. Students aren’t crushed by any peer feedback or teacher feedback because they realise that what is being said is for their benefit and it’s manageable and they feel excited to grow.
We use that information to work with the students to set and work towards personal learning goals.
Students are very open and honest about the skills that they have and the skills that they need to develop and they set their goals accordingly to achieve.
When it comes down to it, we want students to understand that they are all authors. We want them to develop a lifelong interest in writing that they can carry throughout their lives.
And BrightPath is a great tool to help us work towards that.
Writing is very much alive in our school. Students write because they want to write. They come prepared to write every day. They love to share their writing in the author’s chair. And the students celebrate the growth that they hear when the students share their writing. They give feedback to them. They always say what worked well, “even better”. They become authors and they become skilled authors.
