How Kingswood Primary school has embraced AI with no plans of looking back.
A progressive, innovative and forward-thinking school has decided to upgrade its technological adoption to match its ambition. Situated on the outskirts of Melbourne with a student faculty totalling close to 600, Kingswood Primary School prides itself on mirroring techniques and processes from some of the most prestigious educational institutions from around the globe.
The only state school to send teachers to Harvard, Kingswood Primary are not short on ambition, but they were short on technological support in certain processes.
Headteacher, Josh Velez remarks, “the school is a really friendly community. Everyone works hard with teachers having a lot of pride in their work. Our teachers make decisions based on the kids and not themselves, which I think is our biggest advantage.
Setting the scene
“Frankly, we were trying to find a better way to moderate our writing sample”. Josh and his team were looking for ways to improve their assessment of student writing. The progressive nature of the school meant teachers were trialling several rubrics and even sharing ideas from neighbouring schools to home in on the right moderation tool for Kingswood. For over a year, Josh and his team had been toying with multiple techniques and solutions before finally settling on a moderation process that most of his colleagues were happy with. The problem? Not every teacher was 100% sold on the process they had created.
It can’t hurt to ask
Josh and his team decided to see what products were out there. After meeting with Jarrod, and having a demonstration of its abilities, the team were sold. Josh remarks, “we knew we didn’t really want what we had, but it was the best that we had until we got Writemark and instantly we’re like, hang on, this is way better”.
Success lies in the implementation
Now the school was confident they had found a solution to the challenge they were facing. However, as with any new platform, how do you make sure you support every teacher and every student using it? How do you ensure buy-in that lasts in the long-term?
In Kingswood Primary School, Writemark is used a lot, but it wasn’t always like that. Josh had carefully planned an implementation tactic to make sure everyone was on board. He recalls, “We actually did a bunch of little litmus tests where I uploaded NAPLAN samples into Writemark. I wanted to see how close it was to what NAPLAN had marked them. Almost like a Man vs. Machine!”
Step 1 = “We had we had teachers grade three or four samples, manually, like they would normally do on the NAPLAN rubric.
Step 2 = “Then we had those same teachers run those same samples through Writemark. We made it really fun. I had a live result going on so we could see the difference between each one.”
Result = “Depending on the teacher or the team we only had a 1% or 2% difference. It was nothing”.
In Kingswood, the buy-in was achieved through demonstrating the objectivity of Writemark, “it’s objective and that was my way of convincing everyone that it’s really accurate. Some teachers remained sceptical at first but after using it three or four times in a row, the feedback is it’s amazing and the workload that it takes off them is around 20 something hours!”
AI and Us
During our conversation with Josh, we were reminded of the caution and trepidation that many of us have when it comes to introducing artificial intelligence into our lives and work. Josh told us about that people within the school were worried that student work may get overlooked and not read at all.
He went on to say, “we have good processes in place for that. Our teachers still read student work and do a double check. Most of time they never change anything, or they might change one thing here or there, but they’ve learned to trust”.
The teachers at Kingswood even involve the students with the AI. After written responses have been marked, the teachers will go through the contextual feedback with the students to make sure they are up to date with their performance and progress.
The impact
There were two notable examples of Writemark’s impact in Kingwood Primary School.
“We had 56 kids in a vocabulary bubble at the start of term three and then now they have 1.”
“NAPLAN proficiencies! We had something close to 90% of our kids in grade three writing at or above their expected level. The issue with that is that we only had 9% in ‘exceeding’. So, we had a lot of kids at level. We didn’t have a lot of kids in exceeding”. Josh was happy to report that that 9% of students writing above their level has now increased to a figure closer to 40%.
Make no mistake, this fantastic achievement is a result of teachers at Kingswood. The dedication and committed they have demonstrated is worthy of praise and one we know is taking place across Australia. With the additional time saved, thanks to Writemark, the teachers at Kingswood Primary School have reinvested time back into personalised teaching.
From one leader to another
“It’s a grading system that doesn’t have likes or favourites. It just looks at it for what it is and gives you a very objective mark, whether that’s what you want to see or not. Either way, real thing is what you will do with that data. That’s where the real brain power and real teacher autonomy comes in.” Then adding, “if you think it’s going to be at a detriment to data literacy, well, you’ll have more time to do data literacy”.
We really enjoyed sitting down with Josh and understanding more about the progress of Writemark in his school. With the ambition of the school and all the teaching staff, it’s fair to say that the introduction of artificial intelligence is matching their aims. When asked for a final word, Josh remarked, “You can’t just save how many hours, 40 something hours. You can’t just save that. You can’t pull that away of other things, whereas this can do that for you. It can pull away countless hours of grading and moderating”.
