Principal's Report

Each year our staff engage in a range of professional learning opportunities in order to support our understanding of how best to support all students to believe, achieve and succeed at Truganina College. This year, staff will have participated in one curriculum day per term, and one Professional Practice Day. While the topics and focus of each of these meetings is different, they always afford an opportunity for staff to engage in whole school, Professional Learning Community (PLC), and Individual learnings and professional conversations. The time we take on learning represents our commitment to ensuring our staff are the most highly trained, and professional educators that can be put in charge of your children’s education.

This year, staff have learnt about how to engage in instructional alignment conversations in their PLCs so that each teacher guarantees the same learning experience in each classroom. Questions are asked like, “how are we teaching our key vocabulary at the start of every lesson?”; “What is the most important sentence on that page of a text that we should model unpacking to students?”; and “How do you model algebra to students in the first lesson?” These questions ensure that every staff member gets the opportunity to share their expertise at how best to teach.

At a whole school level, we have continued our work at implementing the Department of Education’s VTLM 2.0 and PCMS. VTLM 2.0, outlines an updated theory on ‘how to teach’ and PCMS stands for ‘Positive Classroom Management Strategies’, which helps staff understand how to set and maintain high behaviour expectations in the classroom, to support students to focus on the important learning they need to, while feeling safe and secure in the school. 

The school continues to engage the services of a number of consultants who often deliver professional learning on these curriculum days. This year, there has been a focus on community, culture, and wellbeing. Due to this learning, Truganina College continues to take steps at improving the way we lead, speak and work with each other for the benefit of our primary purpose, education of the next (or in some cases current) generation of leaders.

Curriculum days are privileged time where schools ask the community to give our staff time to get stuck into the hard work of continuous improvement, so we extend gratitude always to the families who support these days by hosting their kids at home for just a few more days each year, so that we can be our best for them. 

Thankyou,

Daniel Piacquadio

Year 8 Assistant Principal