Excellence in Teaching and Learning

Stephanie Di Salvo

Assistant Principal

PLC Numeracy Focus

As our wonderful students return to onsite learning, teachers in Professional Learning Communities (PLC), have been collaborating on refining their teacher practice to improve student outcomes in Numeracy. Our PLC Instructional Leaders: Katelyn Leddy (Primary-Sub-School), Cynthia Kearney (Middle Sub-School) and Miranda Ingram (Secondary Sub-School), lead the planning and implementation of the PLCs to guide teachers through the inquiry cycle of professional learning.

Teachers are working collaboratively to identify Numeracy assessments to drive discussions around what students currently know and what skills they need to focus on next. Key questions for this phase of the PLC Inquiry Cycle are:

What does our evidence tell us? What are the common themes within our classes?
Where will we concentrate our energies to make the greatest impact on learning? What sub-strand and content descriptor will we focus on?

As part of their ongoing reflective practice, teachers are invited to refer to The Learning Pit illustration to review and consider:

Where am I at with my understanding of where and how to target my Maths teaching to meet the needs of my student cohort?

Using a range of robust assessments, teachers will then evaluate and diagnose numeracy data to identify the key skills to enable them to feel confident in explicitly teaching within their sequence of planned lessons.

2021 School Staff Opinion Survey

Staff are currently completing the 2021 School Staff Survey. The Victorian Department of Education and Training (DET) has engaged ORIMA Research to collect the survey responses on its behalf.

The Survey is conducted annually and is an opportunity for staff employed in Victorian government schools to provide feedback on factors of the school environment proven by research to have an effect on student outcomes. All staff members, including teaching and non-teaching staff, full and part-time, have the opportunity to participate if they have been working in the school the month prior to the survey.

This survey will be conducted online and should take around 50 minutes for Teaching staff and 25 minutes for Education Support staff. Responses will be submitted by Friday 13 August 2021.

AIP Numeracy Focus

In addition to our school's focus on Reading & Viewing and Student Voice, Agency and Leadership, the School Improvement Teams will begin to explore the final goal of the Annual Implementation Plan (AIP) which relates to Numeracy.

Goal 3 of the AIP targets on improving student learning gained in Numeracy by:

Building a culture of collaboration focused on refining teacher practice to improve student outcomes and to measure the impact on student learning
Developing, implementing and embedding whole school formative and summative assessment practices for Mathematics

School Improvement Team members will maintain the implementation of the Improvement Cycle to support and guide staff in selecting, planning, implementing and recording Number & Algebra learning goals and success criteria within student's Personalised Learning Support Plans.

This will be achieved by:

developing whole-school professional programs to develop teacher knowledge and capacity to use assessments and practices
using Professionals Learning Communities (PLCs) process to support teachers to reflect and receive and provide feedback on the effectiveness of their teaching practice
constructing a Numeracy Curriculum Team to focus on the development of a Number and Algebra Guide, to provide advice on how to apply evidence-based Numeracy teaching and learning practices and assessments to improve student learning outcomes