From the Principal 

Principal’s Message - February 2025 

Welcome to the end of Week 4 of Term 1! 

During the first two weeks of school, our teachers have dedicated time to building strong routines and setting clear expectations for behaviour. This has been a crucial period for establishing the structure and discipline needed for success in 2025. We’ve focused on helping students develop consistent habits that will support their growth, as well as building positive relationships that support our students to feel safe. At the same time, our leaders have been supporting teachers to strengthen their classroom practices by offering feedback on what’s working well and where improvements can be made. This approach ensures a solid foundation for the rest of the year.

For families new to Gilgai Plains Primary, exploring our classrooms and observing our teaching methods might be quite different from what they're accustomed to. I believe it's important to explain to our families the reasoning behind what we do and to make it clear that every decision we make is backed by research and is evidenced based.

The arrangement of our classrooms, with students seated in rows facing the front, is intentionally designed to support the most effective learning based on what we know about how children learn best. We need to limit the amount of distractions when students are learning. That means facing the front and having a clear view of the teacher and the teaching resources. It’s about reducing the student’s cognitive load. Cognitive Load Theory is the idea that our brains have a limited amount of space to process information at once. When we're learning something new, we use our working memory to hold and understand that information. But if we try to take in too much at once, our brain gets overwhelmed, making it harder to understand or remember anything. If we can retrieve relevant information we’ve stored in long-term memory, we have more capacity in working memory to take in new information.

At Gilgai Plains, we use knowledge of the human brain to design teaching strategies that will maximise learning. We provide an explicit model of instruction, in which teachers show students what to do and how to do it, rather than having them discover or construct information for themselves. Our teachers know that for a child to learn effectively, we need to manage how much new information we put into our working memory. This means breaking things down into smaller chunks, repeating information, and practicing it over time so that it can move into long-term memory. This helps us avoid overloading our brains and makes learning easier.

We will give our students and teachers a chance to settle into their learning routines and next term, we will hold our Learning @ Gilgai Open Morning, where you will have the opportunity to see first hand, our programs in action. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to talk to your child’s teacher.

I hope to see many of you tonight at our annual Community Picnic. It should be lots of fun.

Kind regards,

Anthea Jamieson

I’m looking forward to seeing many of you tonight at our annual Gilgai Plains Community Picnic. It should be great fun!