and Learning A community of lifelong learners

Mr Richard Spence Director of Teaching and Learning

As part of the regular five year cycle of review, our International Baccalaureate primary years’ programme (PYP) which covers the Junior School curriculum, and the middle years programme (MYP) in our Middle School were recently evaluated by a team of international educators.

The review found that the learning environment and educational leadership in both sub-schools was outstanding, and that the teachers, parents and students interviewed as part of the process shared a commitment to a learning culture that nurtures enquiry, curiosity and places the student at the centre of the process.

As a relatively new member the Scotch family, the IB Evaluation process was hugely valuable in allowing me to discuss and reflect on our achievements over the past 5 years with the many stakeholders that make Scotch College the centre of excellence it is today.

Most notably however, when conducting class visits as part of the evaluation process, I was able to go into many classrooms and observe the outstanding work by classroom teachers that takes place day in day out at Scotch. In every classroom I visited, I saw established processes and procedures, clarity of purpose and intentionality in the range learning activities utilised, and a consistently nurturing and supportive environment in which every boy is known and valued.

It is clear that we are blessed with excellent classroom practitioners across our College, and part of my role as Director of Teaching and Learning is to provide opportunities to further develop our teachers’ skills.

The vital importance of the classroom teacher in promoting student learning is well established by decades of educational research. There is so much input a teacher has on a daily basis, from delivering curriculum content in a manner that caters to diverse learners, to breaking down complex concepts and providing appropriate feedback, and helping develop a wide range of transferrable skills. Moreover, teachers play crucial roles as mentors and role models for the students in their care.

Classroom teaching is highly complex and is never something that you can fully master; we are constantly refining and improving our practice. The challenge is to find time for this ongoing refinement of practice in such a busy place as Scotch College! This year we are prioritising peer observations as a means of promoting professional conversations and self-reflection.

Peer observations involve two or more teachers supporting each other’s professional growth by going into each other’s classrooms to look at a particular piece of practice that the observe would like some feedback on. The conversations before the observation, but especially afterwards, are seen by researchers such as Professor John Hattie as a particularly valuable tool in teacher professional development. Hattie states that what teachers think and believe is just as important as what teachers do, so the conversations where we listen to and learn from our peers are of significant value in our professional development.

As a potential focus for these observations staff have recently been presented with Barak Rosenshine’s ‘Principles of Instruction’. This piece of educational research is now used extensively worldwide as an accessible and intuitive bridge between educational research and the realities of the classroom. Rosenshine used the findings of cognitive science, key elements of educational research, and observations of the practices of master teachers to produce a set of principles that could help guide effective classroom teaching. These principles can be synthesized into four key areas:

• retrieval practice

• effective questioning

• the sequencing of new material into manageable chunks

• modelling (where students move from guided to independent practice).

Teachers could use these elements of pedagogy as the focus of the observation and the start of a conversation about the impact they are having on student learning.

Peer observations are not new at Scotch, but they remain an important way to continue to reflect on our practice and to grow collegial understanding and collective efficacy. We define ourselves at Scotch as a community of lifelong learners, committed to developing each and every member of our staff.

A central pillar of our strategic plan is excellence in teaching and learning. It is clear from the feedback from our International Baccalaureate evaluation that this excellence already exists, and with an embedded process of reflection and professional growth, we can maintain and develop our status as a school of choice for the very best classroom practitioners.