Leader of Learning and Teaching

As Term 3 comes to a close I would like to share with you some exciting initiatives that have taken place at Marian this Term through our Professional Learning Teams.

This Term our staff spent a large amount of their professional learning time analysing our College NAPLAN Data.

Below is a snapshot of our outstanding Year 7 Data where our School was well above state proficiency levels in all domains.

I am also pleased to report that in both Year 7 and 9, MCC was above Statistically Similar Schools (SSSG) in all domain areas.

Despite our successes, there were still several areas of improvement identified by our staff. Ultimately it was decided that students needed to improve their reading comprehension and inference skills when understanding a writer's purpose, perspective, tone and attitude. This hidden meaning is often intrinsically connected to textual form and audience.

As such, we are excited to announce our new whole College initiative - Making Meaning the Marian Way. This initiative is led by our new College wise scaffold, the Meaning Map (see below).

The Map has four key areas for students to use when inferring hidden meaning and intentions in a text:

Form - Is the text persuasive, informative, imaginative etc? Is the text an article, a report, a narrative etc?

Purpose - What is the author trying to achieve? What meaning are they trying to send?

Perspective - What does the author think, feel or believe about the topic? What is their attitude or tone?

Audience - What does the author want us to think, feel or believe about the topic?

All of these questions are accompanied by a reflection where students use metacognition to identify an example or what makes them think their answer is correct.

All staff will be using this scaffold for in class reading tasks and students have already been familiarised with the scaffold. I encourage you to have a conversation with your child about the Meaning Map and how it is assisting their learning.

Yours in learning,

Damien Herb