Teacher Professional Learning Day

Firstly, thank you to each person who had their child at home with them on the pupil free day on Monday. We appreciate the opportunity to participate in Professional Learning that will help us improve our practice, which will ultimately improve your child's experience at our school. 

In our Professional Learning Day we continued to learn about High Impact Teaching Practices. We started our morning working through an online Catalyst Module. This module centered around Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction. The module broke apart the four strands and each of the ten Principles which are (please see below image for more detailed information):

• Reviewing Material
• Daily Review
• Weekly and monthly review
• Questioning
• Ask questions
• Check for understanding
• Sequencing concepts and modelling
• Present new material
• Provide models
• Provide scaffolds for difficult tasks
• Stages of Practice
• Guide student practice
• Obtain a high success rate
• Independent practice

After we had worked through the Catalyst Module and had the opportunity to break each of the principles open through watching examples of each of the principles and having in depth discussion, we created Professional Learning Teams. We broke up into four Professional Learning Teams and worked through further research around Daily Review (one of the High Impact Teaching Practices and Rosenshines Principles). 

As you may be aware some of our teachers started delivering daily reviews in their classrooms, with great success. As part of our Professional Learning Teams, we all decided upon specific daily reviews that we would implement in our classrooms this Term with the support and collaboration of our Professional Learning Teams. We are all very excited about this new structure for collaboration, to implement the High Impact Teaching Practices and to continue to learn and become better, more effective practitioners. 

Rostrum

A big congratulations to Apjok in 6B who represented St John’s in the quarter finals at Rostrum, yesterday evening. Rostrum has been running a Primary Schools Speaking Competition for nearly 50 years for schools in the ACT and surrounding areas of New South Wales. Last Term, each Year Six member presented a speech to their classmates on one of the below topics:

• A better way
• Assistance Animals
• Cars of the future
• Escape from the city
• Glaciers
• Going to Mars
• I took a big risk
• The Year of the Ox

Tabitha-Jane Wormald and Serae Love (Year 6 Teachers) then selected 6 finalists to present their speech to the whole school. Apajok was the student selected to go to the next round and represent St John’s in the quarter finals.

A big thank you to Miss Wormald and Apajok’s family who were there to support her last night.

This is such a big achievement, well done Apajok! We are all very proud of you and your confidence in presenting your speech on ‘I took a big risk’.

Rebekah Brown

Assistant Principal and Inclusion Coordinator