Assistant Principal's Message

Last Friday the teachers had the opportunity to come together to continue their professional learning during the Curriculum Day.  The professional learning was informed by the key improvement strategies as outlined in our Annual Implementation Plan (AIP) - further refine approaches to ongoing formative assessments to inform planning, teaching and responding to learning.

Teachers were led through the following key ideas:

• Familiarisation with the changes to the Mathematics curriculum that will move into implementation from 2025
• Importance of ‘Reading Fluency’ and the effective practices to improve reading fluency
• Understanding how to plan for and implement ‘checking for understanding’ strategies within all lessons.

In the later part of the day, teachers had the opportunity to work in their teams to apply the learning from earlier sessions into their planning for this weeks/terms lessons.

Each Monday afternoon is a dedicated time for teachers to work together in a professional learning team (PLC) to analyse student learning data, continue professional learning and plan for improvement.  The first PLC cycle for 2024 focussed on: students being able to articulate and understand…

• What is bullying and what isn’t it?
• Roles of a bystander and upstander
• That put-downs are not acceptable 
• That asking for help is not dobbing/snitching

Each year level gathered data to establish an entry point of student knowledge, implemented a sequential series of lessons using the ‘Bounce Back’ resource and then evaluated student understanding after the lessons.  Each year level incorporated age appropriate lessons that included:

• Explicit instruction of vocabulary
• Repeated exposures through role play
• Creation of student led definitions
• Re teaching of language and phrases
• Rehearsal of upstander and bystander roles and responsibilities
• Wellbeing check ins

The PLC cycle this term will focus on ‘Checking for understanding’.  Teachers will continue to refine their practice in planning for and gathering student responses during instruction.

Today I was privileged to take Prep C for their Maths lesson.  The focus of the lesson was addition and making addition stories using manipulatives (counters).   Students were able to count all, count on to find the total of the collection as well as create their own number stories using the counters.