Cultivating a Thinking Classroom

Across the last two weeks St Catherine’s staff have begin collaborating and planning for the academic year ahead to continue to cultivate a thinking classroom for all our students.

Our focus for our opening session for 2023 was on ‘Strategies and Routines to create a Thinking Classroom.’ As part of our ongoing commitment to developing our expertise through teaching for thinking and sharing practice, our Senior School teachers had the pleasure of hearing from colleagues across the subject areas who presented their findings from their reflective portfolio projects in 2022. Each presentation showcased the specific way a teacher (or Faculty Team) had actioned St Catherine’s School’s Teaching and Learning Framework within their own context.

The following snapshot of their findings evidences how our approach to developing a common language of learning across faculties can drive improvement in student learning.  

Ms Clare Haysom – Using Observational Evidence to Frame Reflective Practice

Cultivating a thinking classroom

Science Teacher, Miss Clare Haysom

Science teacher, Ms Clare Haysom’s presentation on ‘Using observational evidence to frame reflective practice’ demonstrated how to select a course for action based on the observational data of student learning that a teacher collects. Her focus on Year 9 Science unpacked the process from identifying a point of learning need in students, to designing an action plan to improve student cognitive and metacognitive skills in the area of scientific graphing.  

 

Cultivating a thinking classroom

Mrs Lisa Gionfriddo, English Teacher

Mrs Lisa Gionfriddo – Streamlining the Feedback Process 

English teacher, Mrs Lisa Gionfriddo presented on ‘Streamlining the Feedback Process to Help With Deliberate Practice.’  Like Clare, Lisa’s action plan was based on observational data on student ability to apply feedback in senior English. Lisa then demonstrated her innovative method of combining feed forward advice in digital format, supported by explicit in-class instruction on constructing powerful sentences. This was a timely presentation given our goal to incorporate more explicit teaching of literacy across subjects this year.  

Miss Tamara Andrews – R U Wise

Cultivating a thinking classroom

Maths Teacher, Miss Tamara Andrews

Finally, Tamara Andrews spoke on behalf of the Year 8 Mathematics Faculty (including Mrs Cherie Johnstone and Mrs Kirrilly Shroeder) about their collaborative efforts to develop the use of a consistent thinking routine (‘R U Wise’) across the Year 8 cohort to assist students with unpacking worded problems in Mathematics. This project has been several years in the making in the Mathematics Department, with its success evident in the ever increasing confidence of our junior Mathematics students.  

Overall, listening to the expertise of our colleagues was an inspiring way to begin the term.

We look forward to continuing to refine our approach to teaching for thinking throughout the year, and sharing more pictures of practice with our School community.  

Miss Kristy Forrest, Head of Professional Practice and Mrs Ceri Lloyd, Deputy Principal - Teaching and Learning

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