Pedagogy
Bump-It-Up Walls in Classrooms
At St Paul’s Catholic College, the Learning Collaborative Team is working to support teachers in best practice within our classrooms across the school. One such strategy supported by Sharratt (2019) is the use of Bump-It-Up Walls in classrooms.
Bump-it-Up Walls are visual displays of rich performance tasks (exemplars) that explicitly show what low-level work (E to D graded) looks like compared to medium-level (C graded) and high-level work (B to A graded).
Students and teachers collaboratively develop success criteria and discuss ways to improve work samples so that students can move up the grading system, providing students with the opportunity to achieve excellence.
The purpose of Bump-It-Up Walls is to show students through self assessment:
- Learning is iterative - it gets better with feedback and successive attempts
- Improvement is possible
- Work can always get better
- How to improve so they never settle for the first attempt
Bump-It-Up Walls help teachers communicate clear expectations and help students develop the thinking skills required to become evaluators of their own work. They provide a visual representation of the success criteria and enable students to use self-assessment and goal setting in order to improve.
Bump-It-Up Walls will be installed in classrooms across the school as part of our 2022 School Improvement Plan (SIP) Learning and Teaching Goal: To support classroom environments that allow accessibility of learning for all students based on a culture of engagement and data led improved student learning outcomes.
Bibliography: Sharratt, L. (2019), Clarity: What matters most in learning, teaching and leading, Corwin A Sage Publishing Company, California.
Ms Maria Littlejohn - Leader of Pedagogy
maria.littlejohn@lism.catholic.edu.au