Opportunity for a Music Futures Open Academy arm to the Music Department.

Developing Intentional Environments For Christian Leadership Formation

Steven Hodgson

For nearly 200 years The King’s School has existed to create leaders. Bishop Broughton’s original vision states ‘The education in The King’s School is not for the exclusive benefit of those upon whom it is bestowed, but for that of the entire community.’ The current King’s purpose further develops this idea ‘… The achievement of academic excellence in a caring environment that is founded on Christian belief and behaviour, so that students are equipped to act with wisdom, compassion and justice as faithful stewards of our world.’ The King’s School seeks to develop leaders for the good of others, leaders who look beyond themselves and invest their capacity for the betterment of society and our world. It is a grand ideal. The formation of young men with the capacity to lead with ‘wisdom, compassion and justice’ takes place within the organisational pillars of Academic Excellence, Character Development and Christian Community. Leadership development is an implicit aspect of these and is deeply embedded within much of what students participate in at King’s. Recently, much work has been done in explicitly articulating the structures and opportunities that exist for leadership formation within co-curricular programs. There is little doubt that opportunities for leadership formation are abundant and rich and indeed are developing young men with many of the skills and initiative required of a leader today.

However, given that King’s exists not for the ‘benefit’ of those who are fortunate enough to receive an education within its school, but for the benefit of the ‘entire community’ our evaluation of leadership formation should be measured, not solely by the skills and initiative of young men to lead, but by the character of their leadership and their internalised vision of contributing to the common good. Arguably, King’s vision is not one that is developed in the marketplace of consumerism and capitalism, but from the worldview of the Christian Community. The vision of leadership in a Christian community is one that is leadership ‘for others’ as exemplified through the sacrificial life of Jesus Christ. The question to be asked, therefore, are graduates of King’s embodying this ideal or are they reflecting something different? Is our environment conducive to this end?

In exploring this question of Christian Leadership formation, a few challenges emerged that became the catalyst for the project moving forward:

- How do we help develop a vision (worldview) for a ‘better world’ in those graduating from King’s? - What environment fosters the intent in young leaders to choose pathways that ensure they use their skills and abilities for the good of others in their field of vocation?

- What skills do young leaders need in order to act on their convictions, vision and desire to make a difference for the good of others?

This initiative seeks to intentionally shape environments that foster the unique vision and character of leadership that a Christian Community holds. The intent moving forward is to work alongside already established programs so that the King’s unique vision of leadership might be fostered more effectively. Three areas of focus will be developed:

1. A clearly articulated vision of the product of leadership formation at King’s that is communicated consistently across our environments.

2. Development of an effective tool for measurement of key characteristics of Christian Leadership that allows for both positive feedback and personal evaluation as students grow.

3. Working alongside key stakeholders, we will identify opportunities to deepen students’ exposure to needs within the community and the broader world that challenges their worldview, fosters a desire for a better future, and provides opportunities to lead as agents for change in significant projects.

Owning Your Zone

Alison Lawson

The King’s School is a Christian community that seeks to make an outstanding impact for the good of society through its students, and by the quality of its teaching and leadership in education. Teaching and Learning form the engine room of the School, for without them the School ceases to exist. Academic excellence is essential for the School’s ongoing success, but is not, in itself, sufficient to guarantee that success.

Social and emotional learning is the process through which students acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, set and achieve positive goals, and make responsible decisions.

As a Kindergarten teacher and Red Colour Housemaster at The King’s School, Tudor House, I observe students from PreKindergarten to Year 6 struggling with self-regulation and emotional control. There are many factors contributing to change and uncertainty. For example, extended periods of missed schooling, climate change, the rise of extremism and pervasive use of technology, just to name a few. Sadly, interference with everyday life and learning for students, families, teachers and peers are common realities. The King’s School, Tudor House is an International Baccalaureate School following the PYP programme. The PYP program, together with the successful implementation of the Zones of Regulation (ZOR) program will be the vehicle for teachers and parents to support students in demonstrating agency as active and engaged learners.

Explicit teaching of the ZOR program will engage the entire Tudor House community in a common language and compassionate framework to firstly improve self-regulation and emotional control and wellbeing. Extending further beyond is a second and powerful goal of improving academic excellence and selfefficacy.

In addition, through the School’s Values, students will be equipped to demonstrate Compassion, Humility, Respect, Honesty, Integrity, Responsibility, Excellence and Gratitude through:

• identifying their own feelings and levels of alertness.

• choosing effective regulation tools.

• problem solving positive solutions.

• understanding how their behaviours influence others’ thoughts and feelings.

This initiative benefits the entire Tudor House community. Emotions play a key role in school environments and have a significant impact on academic excellence and performance. As such, the correct regulation and handling of emotions is essential for the personal and academic wellbeing of students.

An Evidence-Based View To Thrive At King’s

Sandi Netto

The world in which our students learn is rapidly changing. Now, more than ever, nurturing our students’ wellbeing is paramount to ensure each individual achieves their full potential, wherever their passions lie. To achieve individual success, The King’s School offers every student a unique pathway in learning, developing their cognitive, emotional, social, physical, and spiritual qualities ready to emerge as Global Thought Leaders.

The wellbeing emphasis at King’s ensures that students have positive health, engagement, achievement, a sense of purpose, and a superior ability to manage stress. Wellbeing is a powerful force linked to students’ activities and programs within the School’s distinctives of Academic Excellence, Character Development and Christian Community.

A wellbeing dashboard will capture individual performance across all programs and activities. Consistent data collection, analysis, and review will provide specific insight into learning, engagement, and achievements across the School. The data display will reward personal success through the implementation of individual learning and behavioural support interventions.

The dashboard will empower systems to further support individuals, cohorts, and approaches within the School. Traceable data sets will clarify multiple trends which further identify and support wholeschool initiatives, positively contributing to students’ wellbeing. Individual skill deficits will be highlighted, informing the design and implementation of strategies and adjustments to meet individual learning needs. Students who are thriving will also be highlighted with evidencebased reasons for this success. This will provide a base to further improve School programs and apply strategies to other students. In the future, the King’s Wellbeing Dashboard will be available to the student and stakeholders, to actively engage with goal setting and track personal growth.

• Initially the dashboard will be teacher driven and managed.

• Ultimately moving towards a dashboard that is student driven.

• Students will be taught skills and strategies to take ownership and accountability of their own dashboards.

• Students will be empowered to reflect and self-regulate.

• Data will provide social and emotional real-time tracking.

• Clear data visualisations will highlight wellbeing trends.

• Data will provide evidence-based insights across the student cohort.

• Targeted resources will support meaningful interventions.

The result will be Kingsmen who thrive and positively contribute to society.

Academic Support And Tutoring For An Extended School Day - Study Hub

Jason Nowland

King’s offers a wide range of Study Support programs for a diverse range of students. However, much of this is targeted at particular students and “the middle” often miss out. Study Hub will fulfill and support many tutoring and study workshop functions with the Senior School and address the perception that the CLL Tutors are primarily focused on Stage 6 students, and Stage 4 and 5 students “fit in” where they can. Teachers from key subject areas such as English, Mathematics, Science and the HSIE Subjects will be rostered on to Study Hub as part of their co-curricular allowance. Furthermore, the Study Hub will be located in the Centre for Thought Leadership (TL) classrooms to formalise the perception of the program as a mainstream activity within the School. In support of the School’s Strategic Plan, Study Hub will be a key component of the extended school day by providing broadbased academic support of Stage 4 and 5 students outside regular school hours.

Study Hub will operate during two time periods. Monday to Thursday, 3:45 to 5.30pm will be free and will end in time for buses and boarders’ dinner time. Following dinner, a paid period of study will operate until approximately 7.30pm. The after-dinner program will provide closer tutoring of students, and for day boys, will include access to showers after sport and dinner. The initial focus of the program will be on supporting Stage 4 and 5 students to assist in the development of stronger study skills in younger students, in preparation for Stage 6. Opening the initiative to Stage 6 could be feasible after initial start-up, depending on rates of staff “buy-in” and student interest and participation. McCrindle survey data reveals significant opportunity for the School to provide improved tutoring and study support to day students and their families, while continuing boarder support. 37% of 2022 McCrindle Survey respondents to whether their child receives external academic tutoring answered yes.

In consolidation of the current tutoring and study support provided by the School, the ESS supported Homework Club would remain in place for higher needs students. Furthermore, faculty study clubs such as English – WriteNow will continue in their current form, as these structured group programs provide support before school, during break or lunchtime. Other, more targeted tutoring and study support programs such as the Language Enrichment Program (LEP) for international students, should also remain in place.

Study Hub supports the development of academic excellence in coordination with the extended school day. The program will provide a substantial opportunity to develop the academic ability, performance and support of students at King’s.

Parent Wellbeing Seminars

Jhunlee Pamintuan

Parents are the first and primary educators of their children. A study by Clinton and Hattie (2013) confirmed the idea that students benefit most when there is harmony between the two major learning environments of home and school. Therefore, both parents and teachers should try to work together to grow the qualities they wish the students to acquire. One of the key strengths of the The King’s School community is the parent’s active involvement in areas such as boarding, homecoming weekend, volunteers in the Saturday sports canteens, and fundraising events. The Parent Wellbeing Seminars stand as a means of giving back to the parent community by upskilling them in key areas of their child’s development.

The vision for the Parent Wellbeing Seminars is to create a holistic Stage 4-6 program that mirrors the wellbeing program the boys experience at school. A strategic area that could pilot these seminars is the Boys to Men Program. Through this program, the School would offer a series of seminars to educate parents on wellbeing issues such as mental health, drugs and alcohol, and the appropriate use of technology. This would enable parents to continue the conversation around personal development with their sons beyond the Boys to Men program. If the School could begin to upskill parents, then a consistent message around wellbeing could be achieved. The Parent Wellbeing Seminars will be piloted as a part of Boys to Men in 2022, with two seminars taking place. The first seminar, ‘Brave Parenting’ by David Kobler will be a 75-minute webinar event that will unpack masculinity, the impact of pornography, sexting and image-based abuse, and sexual decision making. The second seminar ‘Independent Drug Education Australia’ by Tom Reynolds, teaches parents everything they need to know about drug abuse, with a key focus on providing proactive response skills and strategies that they can use to have informed conversations with their child about alcohol and other drug related situations.

It’s Just Not Cricket

Warwick Percival

While the School is committed to the development of good character and values consistent with a caring Christian community seen through its mission statement, its core business is teaching and learning. As such, the HSC can be seen as the summit of a student’s time at school. This fact is highlighted by multiple ‘league’ tables published in newspapers and other publications that rank students and schools. There is no denying that here at King’s, the marks in the HSC PDHPE Course have not been where they should be for some time. Internal data reveals that over the past 10 years, the faculty is averaging a yearly cohort size of 42 students obtaining 5 Band 6s at a conversation rate of 12%.

It’s just not cricket – recent feedback from student surveys suggests that there is a well verbalised negative stigma surrounding the HSC PDHPE Course and one that is chasing away high performing students from enrolling in it. This is something that does not sit well with the PDHPE Department and is something we are determined to change.

With this in mind, I have utilised the National School Improvement Tool and Continuous Improvement Framework, a data-driven improvement cycle that I am using for improving, optimising and stabilising the Department. Through the information gained from these tools, I am leading a change initiative of the culture and academic rigour of the whole subject, largely aimed at retaining as many of the top academics of each year group into the elective Stage 5 Physical Activity and Sport Studies Course and subsequently, into the Stage 6 PDHPE Course. This is intended to increase the calibre of students in the course and thus, the results obtained by them and the faculty. Aligned to this program, we have in 2022 started to drip feed many writing strategies and other aspects of our senior classes into the junior years, particularly, the A and B streams of Years 9 and 10 to ensure students are exposed to the content and can gain an experience of how very different the senior courses are to what they are used to or have heard about from other students. For our Stage 6 students, we have developed a more regular assessment schedule of weekly examination-style questions. Specific techniques for answering multiple choice and short to extended response questions have been rolled out to align with what is occurring in their English classrooms. These are then completed with a largely peer-marked process to further develop a deeper understanding of the application of syllabus content against examination-style questions.

Similarly, we have established new relationships with ‘highflying’ faculties within the School and, importantly, external schools who regularly obtain multiple state rankings. These relationships have culminated in a range of workshops with senior teachers, the external marking of our Half-Yearly Examination from staff at Amity College and Our Lady of Mercy College, to name a few. A highlight of these partnerships has been the highly coveted weekly Zoom sessions for our top 30 students that have been taking place since Term 2 with 2021’s 1st in the State for PDHPE.

At the end of the day, we are here for the boys and although we are making serious headway into the betterment of the PDHPE offering for them, we know there is still some way to go. All members of the faculty are onboard to ensure that each student can thrive in the pursuit of achieving their personal best in our classrooms, not just on the sporting field.

Tracking Students

Steven Solomonides

In The King’s School Strategic Plan 2022-2024, there is mention of the Academic Excellence priority to “develop the technological capability to enable academic data to better inform teaching and learning.”

My project aims to help address this goal using external data (NAPLAN) along with internal data across the school to track students. To handle the external data, this year saw the creation of a NAPLAN “dashboard” created in Microsoft Excel that allowed the English and Mathematics Departments to see student results (by Band) for each student, the breakdown of NAPLAN by subdomain, and more importantly, the ability to filter questions by the percentage of students that saw a question and the percentage that got it correct based on a domain. This was also presented to the respective Heads of Departments to ensure that they understood how to use the file effectively to better inform teaching and learning.

Regarding the internal data, TKS was using the SM Marks platform to record and input student marks for each assessment task. However, with no link or sharing between KLAs, these existed as a “silo”, with no meaningful way to compare students between learning areas. This also highlighted the issue that, while there were formal procedures documented, many mark books were significantly different between KLAs. As such, this meant that there was no clear way to ensure that all mark books were homogenous between each other.

In conversations with the Deputy Head of Academics (Senior School), a new procedure for mark book creation was made then was enacted for the Heads of Departments, and this formed the basis in which links and trends could be made across all faculties, for all students, across the school. This link is in the form of a z-score, which was created for all students for each faculty. A z-score is a numerical measurement that describes a student’s result, to that of the average of a given cohort, measured in standard deviations. This then gives a way to rank students’ academic ability across a particular year group and potentially over their school career.

All this data was then placed onto a Power BI platform so that data visualisations can be made, and trends easily identified. This will also potentially flow onto a year coordinator and house master dashboard where students can be viewed with greater granularity (rather than just their proficiency score) and provide deeper insights into their academic performance across all stakeholders.

The Benefits

1. The NAPLAN “dashboard” allows Heads of Departments to identify and target areas of improvement based on their chosen inputs. This allows targeted interventions with significant time-lead to ensure that highlighted areas of improvement can be worked towards.

2. Students can now be tracked holistically for a decline in their overall performance. Since reductions in academic performance is usually a precursor for pastoral needs, this means earlier interventions for students who may have previously “slipped under the radar” or who have pastoral care needs that have not been identified.

3. Heads of Departments were engaged in the process of the creation of the dashboard, to facilitate exactly the information they want and need. The big idea was to save time for each faculty area to create opportunities for discussions around best practices and intervention strategies.

4. In the future, consultation with Heads of Departments will happen to create bespoke alerts that aim to remove the processing, analysis, and technical components of the information that they need. This aims to remove the burden of time that would have been placed on them within this new space. The rationale was that this would then allow the Heads of Departments to place emphasis on intervention strategies for students identified, rather than finding the students in the first place. This helps inform teaching and learning that would have a potential greater upswing in student growth, which was the primary driver of this initiative.

Manga Mania

Melanie Webster

This initiative aims to expand and develop The King’s School Senior Library’s Manga collection in order to support positive reading habits within the School.

With the spotlight often on falling literacy levels and studies showing that frequent reading for enjoyment can improve vocabulary and fluency, the draft ACARA English curriculum has placed focus on reading for pleasure. By making reading fun, students are more likely to read regularly and with enthusiasm. From this standpoint, it is vital that teacher librarians are on top of current reading trends and provide access to books and stories that will appeal to students based on their taste, age and abilities.

With this being a component of good library practice, the rise in popularity of Manga and Manhwa amongst our students informed the decision-making process. These Asian styles of comic storytelling have been around for years, but recently their popularity has exploded. The shift to digital platforms and userfriendly interfaces, has seen teenagers readily embrace the format. They love reading it, which makes Manga ideal to focus on to encourage reading for enjoyment.

Growing the Manga collection to accommodate this burgeoning interest, does, however, come with some challenges. Firstly, there is a need to identify suitable titles in-line with our current collection development policy. By determining “gaps” in the collection we can aim to better resource our library and increase student engagement by providing them access to the type of stories they want to read. Consultation will be required with professional organisations, affiliated groups, and the students themselves, to determine what purchases and promotions are relevant and engaging. The aim is to provide a vibrant and contemporary selection for all our students. Secondly, it is imperative to explain and justify the targeted focus on one sublocation of the library collection and clarify why the changes are being made. By collaborating with my peers, other teacher librarians in my PLN and identifying trends, the library is positioned to align with international developments and contemporary trends. It will also improve accessibility for students seeking to find the stories they enjoy.

By expanding our Manga resources, and then advertising and promoting these changes to our students, they will be able to explore a popular writing style. This will encourage them to evolve into regular and happy readers. With constant complaints of falling literacy rates , if we can appeal to the boys and get them engaged in and enjoying their reading, they are better positioned to improve literacy performance across all subject areas.

www.kings.edu.au | P: +612 9683 8555 | E: tks@kings.edu.au | A: PO Box 1 Parramatta 2124, NSW Australia Cricos No: 02326F | The Council of The King’s School, ABN: 24 481 364 152 | Incorporated by The King’s School Council Act 1893