Whole site commitment

Gaynor Steele
Principal Noarlunga Downs Primary School
Noarlunga Cluster

Finding 6.3: Professional learning
Be both a mentor and a learner, as the act of giving and receiving feedback establishes safe, respectful relationships conducive to critical engagement and change.

Ensuring whole of site commitment to curriculum change through scaffolded observation and feedback.

As the Principal at Noarlunga Downs P-7 School the Make It Count project has hugely influenced my practice as a curriculum leader. My goal is always to ensure excellence in teaching and learning in my school. My vision for this project was to see enthusiastic engagement in mathematics by all students in the school, and especially our Indigenous students.

This degree of engagement would lead to improved mathematics outcomes across the school. We had many things already in place. Our teachers understood the importance of positive relationships with their learners and we had set an expectation with all of “Aiming High and Achieving Together.”

As a leadership team we grappled with ensuring that all our teachers were fully participating in the project and embracing the new, scaffolded pedagogy in mathematics that we were trialling and researching. All teachers had participated in the training but some practice had moved very little.

We also had new teachers coming into the school since the start of the project and we needed to bring them on board quickly so that their students did not miss out. We could see the students of the teachers that were engaging were demonstrating vastly improved engagement in lesson, enjoyment and success in their maths. We wanted to support those who were engaging even more.

I felt that if we did nothing to move the resistors we were in fact colluding with them. We could not allow less than the best for students who were already disadvantaged. We were determined to move the resistors for the sake of their students...

Want to know more?

• See two other signficant episodes from Gaynor:
  • Peer to peer
  • How can it not be the best of pedagogy
• Have a look at her inspiring story Whole of site commitment written with Cluster Coordinator Marie Wright.