Leader of Learning and Teaching

Welcome back to 2022!

Our staff and students have enthusiastically recommenced their teaching and learning over the last few weeks. Staff and students have been getting to know each other, their learning styles and abilities and beginning skills building and explicit teaching of content.

Behind the scenes there has also been a multitude of initiatives commencing. The College Growth Action Plan (GAP) Team of Staff have already met and identified potential interventions, extensions and strategies. 

Our Gr8 Thinking Team have begun their planning also to improve teaching and learning at the College focussing on developing staff capacity to develop rich assessment tasks and build critical thinking in students. In addition, the Igniting Writing Team has started creating Professional Learning Sessions for staff to undertake capacity building in writing instruction, while the Numeracy Team will meet next week to commence the planning process for further Numeracy Development at the College.

All of these teams of staff meet in time that is additional to their teaching load, and I thank them again for their work last year and in advance for the brilliant work they will do in 2022.

Continuing on with Professional Learning, the staff Professional Learning Teams embedded on the timetable will also return in 2022. The fortnightly sessions for staff commence next week, with a program set out to give staff time to collaborate, research, build capacity, learn, and embed resources and activities into their teaching programs. 

Our focus this year is for teachers to change one part of their practice and experiment with research based strategies to improve classroom pedagogy.

Next week is a busy week as Year 7 students will also undertake their Best Start Testing Online. The Reading and Numeracy diagnostic testing will take place on Wednesday the 16th February (Period 1) and Thursday the 17th February (Period 1). The remainder of the lessons on these days will remain as normal.

Best Start Online Testing is an important diagnostic tool used by the Inclusive Education team to determine future student learning adjustments, needs and extensions. Please note this is not a test that students need to study for, it is not an assessment, and does not influence the student grade.

On these days students will need to have their laptops fully charged and must bring a set of headphones.

Yours in learning,

Damien Herb