PRINCIPAL SPEAKS
‘Ambassador School’ Principal Speaks:
Our high-impact practices that lead student learning Last year, members of our Auburn North Public School learning community proudly learned our school had been selected as an ambassador school. While we have developed and implemented programs and practices to assist all students develop outstanding literacy and numeracy, technology, and 21st century skills, the main reason we were selected as an ambassador school was because our students achieve outstanding literacy and numeracy outcomes. The Ambassador Schools program is part of the NSW Department of Education’s School Success Model. This program recognises highperforming schools: our school will work with other ambassador schools as well three universities to identify
Mark Harris, Principal, Auburn North Public School, NSW and then share highly effective, high-impact practices that we have operating in our schools. It’s expected that this will help generate a strong evidence base on the factors that drive high-performance in schools. Over many years, we have focused on and allocated most of our resources to the four factors that research and other evidence show have greatest impact on student learning.
Those four factors are the:
and change leadership.
1.
Quality of the school’s leadership.
2.
Quality of the individual teacher.
3.
Level of collective teacher efficacy and its enabling conditions.
4.
Level of parent engagement.
More than 20 school leaders participated in a seven-month leadership development program, all members of the executive team participate in three-day coaching and mentoring workshops each semester with our two education consultants, grade leaders participate in a fortnightly leadership development program that is coordinated by our Deputy Principal, and the executive members meet weekly to further develop their instructional leadership knowledge and skills and to share information about their present projects and programs.
Some of the interrelated programs, practices, and strategies we have successfully developed and implemented in these four areas include:
Distributed leadership To maximise the positive impact of leadership on student learning, we have adopted a K-6 distributed leadership model, composed of seven executive members and seven grade leaders. All leaders participate in high-quality leadership development programs, with a focus on instructional leadership
All assistant principals and instructional leaders are ‘offclass’, but ‘in-classes’. Each leader supervises a grade or stage, and they utilise a range of strategies to work shoulderto-shoulder with their teachers. Strategies include lesson
Images courtesy of Auburn North Public School
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EDUCATION
Term 1, 2022 | school-news.com.au
