A message from the Principal

As you would be aware, last Friday our school held a student-free Curriculum Day.

These days are always an invaluable opportunity for our teachers and staff to focus on their professional learning and to improve their effectiveness in the classroom. 

Schools are such busy places with hundreds of different activities, questions and decisions to make on a daily basis that trying to give staff time for their own development, focus on the 'big picture' and to improve what we do sometimes feels like trying to build the plane while you're flying it.

Our day was spent (just about) off-site at the new Parks Victoria pavilion on the school oval. This proved a great venue for our teachers to work together to learn about the idea of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) and the way that we can use this model at SKiPPS to better meet the learning needs of our students.

 Our day started with a reflection and celebration of our school with teams of teachers getting creative and making an artwork to represent SKiPPS - its strengths, unique features and areas for improvement. Maintaining this clear vision is a really important part of what has allowed our school to retain such a strong culture and identity over a long period of time and it is vital that all staff understand, share and keep sight of this.

You can see the results of this short task in the photos below and I am so proud that they show both a deep understanding of what makes our school so special and also a high level of creativity and artistic talent!

After this thought-provoking and fun start to the day, we learnt more about Professional Learning Communities.

PLCs are an approach to school improvement where groups of teachers work collaboratively to improve student outcomes through the use of an evidence based inquiry improvement cycle.

A PLC in a school involves collaboration, sharing and ongoing critical interrogation of teaching practices in line with professional standards and the latest research.

Whilst we pride ourselves as a school on the strong collaboration that has long existed amongst our staff members, as professionals we are excited about moving towards a PLC model that will guarantee time each week to engage with reading, research and challenge to ensure that all of our teaching and learning conversations and decisions are always rigorous and based on best practice.

This PLC work is structured into a 5-8 week inquiry cycle that will see teaching teams examine and analyse detailed learning data, pose questions and engage with evidence-based research, make collective decisions that reflect new understandings and gather evidence to measure effectiveness.

This work will soon commence with teams about to embark on a PLC cycle to better understand how their students use the trait of 'sentence fluency' in their writing and how we can best ensure learning growth and progress in this important area.

The Curriculum day was led by Matt Cook, Our Assistant Principal in charge of Curriculum and Instruction and a team of SKiPPS teachers who have recently completed the Education Department's PLC course.

We look forward to sharing our teachers' learning as we work through this cycle and the impact that this has on our students' learning.

Neil Scott

Principal