Teaching & Learning

I would like to take this opportunity to thank our staff, students and families for the positive and productive manner in which they have engaged with remote and flexible learning. Our staff have enjoyed speaking with students and families about their teaching and learning progress during our online Parent/Student/Teacher Conferences this week.

Our Year 12 students have felt very well supported in their final year of secondary school with online lessons for each of their classes. We wish our Year 12 students all the very best for the GAT on Wednesday 7th October. Term 4 will be the final term for many of our Year 12 students and we commend their immense resilience and courage during a very challenging and unprecedented final year. 

The staff at Greater Shepparton Secondary College have been undertaking a great deal of professional learning around our GSSC Instructional Model. Our staff look forward to implementing many of the new teaching strategies we have learnt when our students return to face-to-face teaching in Term 4. 

We hope our students have a terrific break over the school holidays. We know that our senior students will continue to prepare for their upcoming exams, but we have included some fun activities that our Year 7-10 students may like to do over the break.

TERM 3 GSSC LIBRARY UPDATE

Over our second period of remote learning the GSSC Library hasn’t stopped operating.  The McGuire Campus Library staff have been working onsite and supporting students and staff consistently.  As well as the day to day work, they have been completing larger tasks in the library work areas, even at this early stage which will prepare the GSSC Library Team for the move to the new site in 2022. 

Staff offsite have been working equally hard with their normal work – most of which, with the aid of Microsoft Teams, One Drive and other technology, can be done so much more easily now.  

Like everyone at GSSC, while it was not anticipated, we had set ourselves up in the first remote learning period, and that experience has served us well when it crept up again in term 3.  As well as our normal work, we have kept up our weekly virtual morning tea where we catch up with each other for a chat over coffee, while this isn’t compulsory, it’s been very well attended whether people are at work on that particular day or not.

Professional Learning has been a major focus on a weekly basis. The Library team, like all GSSC Staff use Microsoft Teams confidently now due our experience from Remote Learning One.  We have now built on this further with skills development using Microsoft One Drive for collaborating with each other. Other areas of professional learning have been in the following areas:

1. Resourcing the curriculum for Differentiated Learning.
2. Reading Programs in school libraries, including the links between wellbeing and reading & the creation of a wellbeing hub with reading resources in each of the campus libraries.
3. The teaching of information skills as part of the wider school curriculum
4. As well as participation in the staff PD day on 11 September we followed this up, using tasks provided by the Humanities and Science Domain, with `hands on’ location of differentiated resources by the library support staff.
5. On the same day, the teacher-librarians worked on a template for the delivery of information skills across learning areas using the GSSC `We Learn’ template.
6. We are in the process of developing a 27/7 Library website and spent further time on 11 September looking at possibilities for this. Thank you to the expertise of Mooroopna teacher-librarian, Rachel Fidock.
7. Teacher-Librarian, Cathy Bell from Wanganui provided us with great insight into an online resource we will be trialing with GSSC staff next term, Britannica School – a highly recommended resource we hope teachers will find useful to support student learning.
8. In the final week of term three we also learned a great deal from a presentation from Rhonda McKie at Mooroopna campus, on current Copyright procedures and how teaching and learning can be supported by these processes.

I also enjoyed, with GSSC teaching colleagues, participating in the Microsoft Educators 2-day Professional Development on Friday 4 September and Wednesday 9 September.  The two significant `take always’ from that work for the GSSC Library Team  were:

1. The next stage of our development with Microsoft products will be One Note.
2. I contacted a Teacher-Librarian from another state secondary school, and we will now be able to work together in relation to school libraries and their increased utilization of the Microsoft Education suite.

Eileen Cooney

GSSC Library Leader/McGuire 

Teacher-Librarian

Megan Michalaidis

Associate Principal of Teaching & Learning