Learning & Teaching

Teacher Excellence Awards

I am pleased to say that we have nominated Kylie Rackham and the Inclusion team for the annual Victorian Department of Education Excellence Awards in the Team Category for Inclusion Practices. In writing the nomination, it was very clear that this was a very worthy application. Here are a couple of the highlights from the lengthy selection criteria.

Through hard work in the last 2 years, we have successfully increased funding for students with disabilities and complex needs and the Inclusion program has grown in scale and impact. Direct funding to students has increased from 1% at the start of 2022 to 3.5% this year and has enabled the program to expand to 22 Inclusive Learning Assistants and an additional 6 Education Support staff hired for a broad range of support roles.

In 2022, Inclusion support was limited to the traditional tier 3 classroom support and now the Tier 2 funding we receive through the recent Disability Inclusion reforms has enabled us to reached over 300 students in the past year, with over eight programs now in place. These programs are designed around student need by Inclusion and Wellbeing specialists.

For example, students struggling with social emotional skills are supported in our Connect Program and their interests and hobbies are used to set up lunchtime ‘clubs’ to engage students and link them with others who share their passions. Behind the scenes, staff are working on their core skills to form and maintain friendships, regulate their interactions with others, support socially appropriate behaviours, improve communication skills and build resilience, confidence, and leadership skills.

I congratulate Kylie Rackham, as the Leading Teacher of Inclusion, for leading this important work.

Instructional Coaching

Over the past 2 years the College Learning Specialists and Leading teachers have been trained as Instructional Coaches to support our teachers to continue to examine and improve their practice. Instructional Coaching is a high impact professional development activity with a very sound evidence base. It involves two colleagues working through a staged improvement cycle, including lots of conversations and classroom observations to explore how teacher instruction impacts the quality of the learning. It is a process every teacher, no matter how experienced, can learn from.

This year, we expanded the coaching program to include several experienced teachers who expressed interest in partnering with one of our new Early Years teachers. We had 11 teachers apply to become coaches to 11 newbies. The program will continue next term and for several of our graduate teachers, the Coaches will become Victorian Institute of Teaching Mentors when the grads engage in their Teaching and Learning inquiry cycle process to become fully registered. This in no small undertaking for the grads or the mentors.

Across the College we now have more than 20 Coaches who are coaching dozens of teachers through short cycles of coaching.

Many thanks to Learning Specialist, Ben Karwan, who has been leading the professional development of our coaches this year, and to Leader of Professional Practices, Daniel Brookes, who coaches many teachers within the College.

Positive Masculinity Conference

Today, I am attending a conference presented by Dr Ray Swan the co-founder for Positive Masculinity. The conference theme is around finding better ways to engage boys in exploring positive masculine identities and educators' role in this work.

The difficult truth is that Australian men, young and old, have poorer outcomes than women in many key areas - lowered educational outcomes, a greater likelihood of perpetrating and becoming the victims of violence, and are significantly more likely to become homeless and incarcerated. We also know that men are killing themselves and killing others at far greater rates than women - everyone is suffering - men are nearly 3 times more likely to end their own lives than women. Alarmingly, more women are dying at the hands of men, as Carrie wrote about last week. We need to lean in, not away from, these challenges through conversations, big and small. We must have honest and authentic conversations with each other to realise a better future for all young people at the College.

The solutions start with understanding the current reality for men/boys because things have shifted for men in recent years:

Whist the world is changing rapidly demographically, technological (etc), research across the world show a trend in men generally becoming more conservative in their views/behaviours, and people generally becoming less connected and more isolated.

Women are outperforming men in many areas of education and work - school and university.
Women are more successful than ever in educational outcomes and earning potential.
Women are quite rightly seeking equal relationships, equal in intellect, power and earning capacity in relationships.
Men are turning online for the answers - intelligent algorithms are nudging their views into the extremities - intimacy understanding is increasingly developed through 'Porn Hub' and answers through unfiltered platforms such as reddit, living through gaming. In a world of disinformation this results in polarised views and behaviours. Interestingly on average boys are spending 44 hours a week on screens. As an example, recent Man Cave research showed that 92% of boys know who Andrew Tate is and 25% agreed that he was a positive male role model.
When the sexes come together, they are ill-prepared and a recipe for disaster. This is playing out when young people try to navigate more complex consent laws. To successfully navigate laws and have positive intimate experiences, they need moment to moment awareness and communication about how a person feels and they need advanced social skill. Expectations are higher and but unfortunately skills fall short.
Men are much less likely to acknowledge personal issues and seek help.
There is often narrowly defined view of masculinity, and this constricts individuality and favours a performative and conformist culture.

The conference narrative is centred around the idea that there are some real positives about masculinity and being a man - male relationships, behaviours, and activities etc. We should celebrate these elements. Our challenge is to broaden the current narrow views/perspectives of masculinity, to respect and value a diversity of values, behaviours, and attitudes. This is our challenge as a society and school. We are committed at the College to achieve better outcomes for young boys, not at the expense of others, but alongside the positive work we are undertaking to improve the lives of our young women and gender diverse young people. More on this work to come next newsletter...

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Natalie Manser

Assistant Principal

mar@wantirnacollege.vic.gov.au