MEMBERS of staff from St Patrick’s Lithgow, St Joseph’s Portland and La Salle Academy Lithgow have come together as a Years K to 12 Professional Learning Community.
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As at a previous staff development day, there was a commitment made to coming together as a team of teaching professionals with the aim of improving the quality of teaching and learning in the three local schools.
Staff in the three schools are committed to striving to improve their results collectively, rather than as separate entities.
The three schools have a choice of either resting on their laurels or continually striving to improve.
The aims of the day included:
• Strategies for improving student learning outcomes.
• Enhancing collaborative professional learning between the three schools.
• Increased teacher self-efficacy.
• Development of a process where, working collaboratively, the three schools will further improve the students NAPLAN results from Years 5 to 9.
• Presentations of the Motivated Minds Project.
To enhance these aims La Salle, in partnership with the Catholic Education Office and Charles Sturt University, embarked upon a project called Motivated Minds.
The La Salle staff based their research on improving feedback options to students as a means to further engage students in the learning process.
La Salle Academy acted as a lighthouse site for the project.
This research and professional development project is based on psychological theories of motivation.
The project focussed in particular on students’ implicit theories about intelligence, their ‘mindset’, and their attitudes and behaviours related to effort and ability.
The products to come from the project include a set of faculty-based teaching and learning strategies that develop student motivation, confidence and effort; the development of a package of teaching and learning materials which can be used for teacher professional development across the Bathurst Diocese.
These products will be evidence-based, fully evaluated, and provide sustainable models of teacher professional learning for the Diocese.
The success of the project has been quite astounding and the feedback received was very affirming.
The three principals look forward to working more closely together to explore further ways of improving student learning in the Greater Lithgow community.
