Teaching and Learning

Teen Sleep and Mental Health:

The link between getting enough sleep per night (Generally the recommendations suggest getting a minimum of 8-10 hours per night for Teenagers) and it’s impact on student’s mental health and learning outcomes can be enormous. I have noticed this year on a few occasions boys falling asleep in class, so I fear some students / their families may need more help with improving sleep routines. Please find below a recent article that may be of benefit on this topic.

https://www.blackdoginstitute.org.au/news/teen-sleep-and-mental-health

Does your child need help with their sleep?

One resource I have recommended a few times to students over the years is the sleep Ninja App which is a digital tool for improving sleep in adolescents.

Details can be found at: https://www.blackdoginstitute.org.au/sleep-ninja/

The Year of the Pen - Instructional Rounds

This year's Professional Learning focus has been on writing development across all grades. Nicholas Kennedy has led the executive team exploring a range of strategies to support this development including 'bubble writing', tiered vocabulary and transitional words and phrases.

Supporting our professional learning sessions, as usual, has been Instructional Rounds which allows for cross-faculty explorations of teaching and learning as staff view professional practice in a range of classrooms across the school. Staff continually share how valuable it is to step into the classrooms of their colleagues to identify different ways to implement teaching strategies and add other activities to their 'toolkit'.

In Week 4, our summative Instructional Rounds for 2025 took place and staff observing added their commentary to our ongoing records. Some notable observations that were made in the final round include:

In senior years, writing support included backward mapping to HSC questions, syllabus documents and examinations. Classes analysed samples from past HSC Exam and explored the strengths and weaknesses of these responses, analysing the style of questions and what was required to access marks.

In other classes teachers explained marking criteria and expected language use and sentence structure. This included metalanguage examples and clarification of Tier 3 subject specific metalanguage.

In younger years, compare and contrast TEEL paragraphs were written under timed conditions. Teacher explanations of reading strategies such as skim-reading were included to support the writing of summaries. In some lessons joint construction was also used to support writing development.

In all classes, teachers observed that students were actively engaged in the writing process. This ultimately has been the aim of our focus on writing this year, as we continually strive to develop reflective learners in all teaching and learning activities across our classrooms.