But a group of Shell Cove Public School teachers are causing a positive education storm online, and it’s their students who are benefitting most.

What’s more, even fellow teachers throughout NSW are checking in to see what Alliera Carroll, Ashlee Pepper and co are doing in the classroom, that is helping their students ‘improve out of sight”.

Mrs Carroll also has 1485 followers on Instagram. Fellow visible learning educator Mrs Pepper, has 2782. The duo both post instructional videos and share other visible learning resources with their online followers. 

Shell Cove Public School principal Simon Webb said schools were very good at keeping things a secret but he was happy to shout out “how proud” he was of his hard-working, dedicated teachers.

“Our school is widely regarded for the hard work that teachers do in visible learning – which is all about opening up the learning and sharing that with the student in terms of setting success criterias and learning goals,” Mr Webb said.

“We have had a focus on writing and by that we have all the students on a continuum of learning and we work out where they are at and then teachers diagnose through formative assessment where the student is and where to go to next.

“Our teachers are incredible at what they do on a day to day basis. So the decision was made to open up our school and share what we were doing with other schools.”

The school hosted some visible learning workshops.

The initial event attracted 100 teachers. The next workshop attracted 200 teachers from schools “big and small”, from all over the state. 

“The feedback from teachers and principals and instructional leaders across the state was that the quality of our teaching is exceptional,” Mr Webb said.

“The work that our teachers are able to do with our students is phenomenal and the way the students are engaged in their learning is really at a high quality.”

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He said the school puts up all its learning on its website and encourages everyone to look at it.

“The traffic that we are getting is just incredible. Within a week we can have over 30,000 hits on our visible learning website on the school page,” Mr Webb said.

“This is just an example of our teachers sharing the wonderful work they are doing...but it is a two-way street where we are trying to learn from other schools as well.”

But the principal was quick to point out that his teachers were getting really impressive results in terms of students’ growth.

“Students still may be above or below our syllabus expectations but what we are seeing in our own teaching is that we are getting clearly over 90-95 per cent growth in the areas that the teachers identify and target,” he said.

“The reason we are getting that is because our teachers are intelligent and very capable at their job.

Read more: NSW principals praise learning progressions as a ‘valuable tool’

“They are able to adjust their teaching to what they are seeing in the classroom as opposed to an external source coming in and saying you should be focusing on this.

“We are encouraging our teachers to make decisions about the needs of students and every student in every classroom is known and cared for.”