Leader of Pedagogy

Welcome back to 2023!

There - as always - is exciting learning happening all around the campus. This year Year 7 has begun our first middle school experience at O’Connor Catholic College. Traditionally, students have moved around the school from class to class, and this can be an overwhelming experience for many of our Year 7 students. In order to support their transition from primary to secondary education and maximise their learning time, each class has a designated homeroom where they will study the majority of their subjects. 

The benefits of this model are:

• Reduced anxiety around finding new rooms
• Reduced number of teachers, which allows for clear expectations of learning spaces
• Opportunities to work in open learning spaces
• Opportunities to develop self-regulation skills in order to complete home and school learning

As some of the Year 7 classes are occupying open learning spaces in the school, this provides an opportunity for our teachers to co-teach. Co-teach is the educating of students by more than one teacher and often has classes combined to allow for a range of skills, learning and resilience to be developed. As a model, this follows much of the primary schools' learning spaces where students have access to more than one teacher at any time who is able to give fast feedback on how to move their learning forward. 

Ms Lauren Donnelly

Acting Leader of Pedagogy