Glen Education St John's 

Forging a new Teaching Team 

Glen St John's Kindergarten Educators 

Quality Area 1:  Program and practice 

The Glen St Johns kindergarten teaching team has had an eventful start to 2023.  We welcomed new staff members, Nina, Priya and Alinta and have started on a joint learning journey to embrace inclusive and intentional team teaching across the week.  With fresh eyes and enthusiasm, we engaged in pedagogical discussions around changing the physical environment to include practical considerations, intentional spaces, and experiences.

Several educators and members of the Glen Education leadership team spent a morning during the holidays rearranging the room. Creating new spaces to meet children’s individual and group needs.  We added some visual supports to guide the children’s decision-making, adding signs to indicate the number of play partners per experience.  The children’s response to the new space has been terrific to see, as they are engaged in productive and pro-social play. 

As a team, we are focused on communicating across our working days; we share a service plan and any professional development opportunities that come up; for instance, we recently received refresher training on working inclusively with children on the autism spectrum and a training session on diabetes management to support a newly diagnosed child and their family. These actions demonstrate how we work together to cater for the individual developmental needs of children.

- Alinta Davidson, Early Childhood Educator 

Quality Area 2: Children’s health and safety

Ensuring the health, safety, and well-being of every child is a primary goal of every teacher and educator at Glen St Johns Kindergarten. All new staff have undergone extensive induction training to ensure they know Glen SJKs routines, policies, and procedures. To kick start reciprocal relationships, staff familiarise themselves with the children’s enrolment forms, taking note of family structures and medical and formative information to ensure that we can include these elements in our program and our approach to building relationships with the families. All staff have current First Aid and CPR qualifications. The team also completed Child Safe Standards training and Mandatory Reporting training in March 2023. The teaching team hold regular staff meetings to address key operational and pedagogical points.  We also constantly communicate during the week, in person and via email. 

Glen Education introduced Allergy Buddies in 2022. These contain the details of all children with a medical condition, their medical plans and associated medical aids. When an incident occurs at GSJK, it is recorded and reported to WHS at Glen Education. Each term, all educators and children practice an Evacuation (every 3 months), a lockout and a lockdown. This ensures that if there is an emergency, everyone will react automatically and know exactly what to do.  We have recently reflected on how to improve these processes for clarity and consistency.

Health, hygiene, and safe food practices are embedded into our program. A Wellbeing Board was established in 2022 to introduce children to making healthy food choices.  

Risk assessments are completed before all excursions, and parent helpers are invited to assist with excursions to ensure the safety of all educators and children, which is beneficial to children and families.  All educators are well-qualified, passionate, and extremely caring. We have 3 educators in every kindergarten session, ensuring high ratios.

- Liz O’Donnell, Early Childhood Educator 

Quality Area 3:  The physical environment

Although change can be challenging, it also brings opportunities for reflection and growth. Asking pertinent questions about what is working well in our program and what could be improved prompted the teaching team to consider the physical environment and its teaching intentions.  We wondered about the accessibility of resources both indoors and outdoors.  How can we move beyond worrying about cleaning and orderliness to empower children to explore their autonomy? How can we support children to take responsibility, in age-appropriate ways, for the space and equipment that they use during the day?  We considered; if we truly believe that children are capable and strong, how are we constructing and co-constructing knowledge through access to physical resources so children can experience pride in their abilities and the success of a job well done?

And so, we made some changes; resources are accessible to children on shelves in the room, and labels and photographs empower children to take care of their environment autonomously.  Smaller spaces encourage small group interactions.  This encourages productive conversations as well as more ‘stay and play’ behaviour in these areas. The addition of multiple sensory-orientated spaces (play dough, cloud dough, sand tray, plasticine) and numerous expressive arts areas (easel painting, paint pens on terracotta pots, box craft and cellophane leaf creations area) supports emotional regulation while incorporating hands-on learning. While the extended dramatic play area (the ‘home corner’ has a bedroom and dressing room with various dress-up options as well as a kitchen and, next door, a pizza restaurant that includes a reception area, a phone for ordering and a whiteboard for writing down menus, orders and more!) provides opportunities for embedded literacy and numeracy experiences, to name a few!

- Nina Wright, Early Childhood Teacher 

Quality Area 4:  Staffing arrangements 

With staff changes in term one, we had the chance to get creative with our staff arrangements in ways that will support our future team growth while supporting consistent service delivery for the rest of 2023. We welcomed a new Teacher, Nina Wright and two new educators, Alinta Davidson and Priya Suraindran. Priya will be qualifying as an early childhood teacher at the end of 2023 and initially completed her placement at Glen St Johns Kindergarten. Preeti Patel extends her working days across the week, which complements our team-teaching approach beautifully.  Sharing ideas, observations, and planning extensions on the visual programming board in the room has further supported the team-teaching approach. Through these collaborations, we can affirm, challenge, support and learn from one another to improve our practice as well as our service delivery.  

To further provide program consistency, we follow the same routines and rhythms during the day so that there is a sense of familiarity for children who attend throughout the week with various educators.  We aim to develop warm, respectful relationships with children, create safe environments and encourage children’s active engagement in the learning programme. We might be a young team, but we have come together quickly and are excited to work together.

- Priya Suraindran, Early Childhood Educator 

Quality Area 5:  Relationships with children

We provide a warm and welcoming environment that nurtures each child through meaningful relationships and play-based learning programs that enhance and complement the learning journey each child is already on with their family.

We strongly believe that each child is confident and capable and design environments, experiences, and interactions to enable them to succeed, build their social relationships and develop a more robust understanding of the world. Our play-based learning program encourages active, positive developmental outcomes, including independence, critical thinking, and creativity. Our team supports each child’s social and emotional development by engaging in rich discussions and engagement in experiences such as , introducing new vocabulary as part of everyday conversations, as well as singing, playing games with children and reading with the children daily. 

Our innovative, best-practice programming fosters a true sense of happiness and well-being for children. We embrace each child and family's diversity and individuality within our service, which naturally extends into our curriculum and environment. We support every family through each step in their journey by forming ongoing and trusting partnerships. We encourage families to be part of our programme and create a home-based environment for children to feel safe and secure. 

We work collaboratively to build secure, respectful, and reciprocal relationship practices. We greet children with warmth, happiness and welcome children with smiles when we see them in the morning.  We observe each child’s strengths and share that knowledge with the children and their families. We approach children at their level so they can share their feelings and ideas. Our team are always available for children whenever they need us by observing or listening. We provide an inclusive environment where all children can participate and communicate their thoughts and feelings. We support and motivate our children to participate in new challenging tasks and encourage their capacity to learn.

- Tracey Burns, Early Childhood Educator 

Quality Area 6: Collaborative Partnerships with Families and communities

So much is achieved when our families and other community groups work together to build strong partnerships which enrich the children’s lives and the lives of others in the community.  Our families have supported our Nature walks program by coming along as parent volunteers. In recent years, we have started regular visits to the Aveo Aged Care home in George St., also with parent volunteer support. In running this program, the educators, children, and supportive parents bring immeasurable value to the elderly residents and our children.  Partnerships with the broader community have been built with the staff and residents at ‘The George’ Aged Care home and with the members of ‘The Friends of George Street Reserve’ and Citywide staff (Bayside council contractors) when we explore the George Street reserve on our nature walks.

A new initiative in 2023 is our Story Sharing program. We have a sign-up sheet at the front table, and parents are invited to come along at a time that suits them and share a story, a talent or something about their cultural or family background. Examples include when a dad came in and showed the children how to draw superheroes and when a family brought a lamb in from the family farm. As our staff are all female, it’s been very enriching for the children to have some dads involved in the program.

These connections promote kindness, compassion, sustainability, caring for our world, physical and emotional well-being, and the list goes on. What a privilege it is to have these programs in place!

- Janet Stamp, Early Childhood Teacher