27/10/2023
A key component of St Patrick’s College, Strathfield’s Professional Learning Framework, is the belief in providing professional learning that is purposeful, planned and aimed at improving learning and wellbeing outcomes for students. The College is committed to professional learning that validates and extends the capacity of staff and is linked to the individual, team, and faculty/College learning priorities. This was evidenced during the recent Professional Learning and Curriculum Planning Day.
Teaching staff across the College gathered to participate in an ADHD training workshop, presented by Clinical Psychologist and Old Boy, Alex Latouche (’04). Alex is the CEO and founder of Thinkfree Psychology Services, who provide teacher training and both clinic-based and at-home psychology services in the wider-Sydney region. His workshop was dynamic and purposeful in its intent to inform, update and amplify the significance of real-time teacher inventions. As custodians and stewards of syllabus delivery, classroom teachers are privileged to observe student learning routines and provide impactful accommodations, metaphorically building ramps to engagement and learning success.
Following the ADHD workshop, staff met in department and faculty groups. Within these collaborative groups, staff were charged with identifying and actioning programming and assessment needs. Departments took the opportunity to engage in activities such as reviewing, editing, and updating scopes and sequences, designing diagnostic and benchmark formative assessments, and identifying opportunities of challenge, explanation, modelling, practice, feedback, and questioning, and backward mapping assessments tasks. New English, Mathematics, Language and Computing syllabi have required these departments to develop teaching and learning programs and assessments ready for implementation in 2024.
