St Simon’s Showcasing their Learning 

Last Thursday the 2nd of March, our beautiful school had the pleasure of hosting the Teaching and Learning Network for all the Catholic schools in the Eastern region of Melbourne. It was a great honour to have teachers, leaders and principals from 38 different Catholic schools come together at our school. It was an absolute honour to present St Simon’s learning journey over the few years. Our Grade 6 Environmental and Library leaders did an amazing job greeting and showing our visitors to where our Library was located. 

Over the past four years, we have been working hard to refine our teaching and learning practices in partnership with Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic School and educational expert Dr Lyn Sharrat who is based in Canada. Selected members of the leadership team have participated in various conferences and webinars around 'What matters most in Learning, Teaching and also Leading’. Through participation in The Learning Collaborative Project, we have focused on building teacher capacity to implement both engaging and personalised learning based on consistent use of data, reflective practice and feedback. We have celebrated a number of successes, through the consolidation of consistent whole school expectations, understandings and the implementation of contemporary teaching and learning practices in the curriculum areas of Mathematics and English. 

We have placed greater emphasis on using and making explicit our learning intentions and success criteria in classrooms and across different curriculum areas, specifically in the key learning areas of Mathematics and English. As a result, there has been a positive impact in the learning and teaching of all students. The use of Data Walls has proven to be an effective way to build a collective responsibility for all students in our school and provide invaluable opportunities for professional conversations. 

It was a proud moment, when we opened our classrooms to showcase what we have been doing and for other schools to see first hand. This was the highlight of the day for the many visiting teachers, leaders and principals as they had the opportunity to visit our classrooms and talk to teachers as well as students.

There was an overwhelming amount of encouragement and praise for our teachers and students, as Learning Walks and Talks were conducted in classrooms across the whole school from Prep to Grade 6. 

Monica Rayner 

Deputy Principal

Maths and Teaching & Learning Leader