It gives me great pleasure to write my first article as Director of Teaching and Learning. I look forward to working in partnership with our teachers, parents, and most importantly students, to continue to deliver and develop outstanding academic care and innovative programs for every student at St Catherine’s School.

St Catherine’s is a unique school, founded on core Values that drive our School’s Towards 2025 Strategic Plan. We align these Values with innovative programs that develop 21st Century skills and dispositions in all students.

We do this extremely well, as our recent academic learning models have forged ahead with the development of our Senior Years Learning Model, Independent Learning Tutorials, and this year, our Learning Framework, focusing on academic care and wellness.

St Catherine’s is known for its personalised academic care, providing every student with the strongest foundation possible to reach their individual aspirations in learning and in life. A testament to this was our outstanding VCE results in 2021.

To ensure every student continues to be engaged, resilient, intellectually curious, and independent in their studies, St Catherine’s must continue to develop creative and rigorous academic programs.

Our Senior Years Learning Model for Years 10 to 12 was developed to empower students in their learning and equip and prepare them for life after school. Post-COVID, educational reform, and disrupting the traditional view of learning is a necessary step for schools to stay relevant.

As part of our Senior Years learning Model, we introduced the Independent Learning Tutorials in 2021. Years 10 and 11 students step into a hybrid learning model with face-to-face classes and online delivery of Masterclass lectures and tutorials.

The students have relished the opportunity for a self-paced and independent learning model. As we move into 2022 this model will continue to be developed and refined.

To develop 21st-century skills in our students, we recognise St Catherine’s must offer innovative strategies and programs that align learning and wellness, mapping connectedness of a ‘whole education for character, competency, and wellness’. (OECD, 2021)

This vision led St Catherine’s to once again review our academic programs and develop our Teaching and Learning Framework that seeks to provide every student with the strongest foundation possible to reach their aspirations. A key focus is our view that teaching and learning, and the development of wellbeing, are complementary processes. In short, students learn best when their wellbeing is optimised.

The Framework aligns with our School Values, our Teaching for Thinking culture, and our vision of learning and wellbeing integrated within a framework for improving student outcomes. Within the Framework, we have prioritised eight learner competencies, differentiated for each Year level. In Year 7, we model, in Years 8 and 9, we scaffold and in Years 10, 11, and 12, we coach.

A key academic priority for 2022 is that teachers model, scaffold, and coach students, focusing on the learner competencies in order to build independence, boldness, resilience, and creative capacity. Teachers will purposefully plan to teach for knowledge, thinking, and dispositions. I am excited that our Learning Framework will be linked to both wellbeing and learning in academic care.

I look forward with great optimism as I work with our teachers to continue to foster our teaching and learning programs, to innovate, and to care, as we do this so well.