This year, five teachers from St Catherine’s School are participating in the Teaching Excellence Program (TEP), a year-long professional learning program for highly skilled practitioners facilitated by the Victorian Academy for Teaching and Leadership.  

The Program required an application process and interview in September of 2022, whereby teachers needed to demonstrate their proficiency in their discipline to be accepted. We were thrilled that so many teachers from our School were invited to participate.  

The Program’s focus is on developing our pedagogical content knowledge and teaching practice through inquiry and collaboration, enabling us to teach more effectively within our contexts. After commencing the year with an orientation session at the Melbourne Convention Centre together, we were then allocated into two groups: one based on our discipline, and the second a TELC, or a Teaching Excellence Learning Community, where we are grouped with teachers across disciplines and sectors.  

Five teachers from St Catherine’s School were accepted into the Teaching Excellence Program

In Terms 1 and 2, we worked with colleagues and Master Teachers in these two groups on moving through the practitioner inquiry process, culminating in the completion of an individual inquiry project in Semester 1. This will expand into a collaborative project in Semester 2. 

Mini-Inquiry Projects 

The methodology of the Program is context-based action research, which closely aligns with the approach we already take to professional learning at St Catherine’s School. For the last three years, we have utilised this method alongside Teaching for Thinking as the main driver for developing our collective expertise. It is pleasing to see our in-house frameworks are aligned with best practice.  

The inquiry process first involves the teacher identifying a problem of practice, followed by an action-plan, professional reading, implementation, and evaluation of data.  

Below is a brief summary of each teacher’s inquiry: 

Monsieur Andrew Gold: Year 4 French  

Andrew focused on improving the autonomous oral fluency of French students through a focus on student agency. He created an action plan which sequenced gradual release of responsibility from teacher-led explicit vocabulary instruction and choral fluency, to student-led fluency.  

Mrs Lisa Gionfriddo: Year 11 English  

Lisa focused on increasing student ownership over the writing process in English. Using a new unit in the Unit 1 English Study Design which focuses on student voice, Lisa designed and implemented a process of collaborative peer feedback to assist students with developing the skills necessary to evaluate their own work and drive their own improvement.  

Miss Kirrilly Wootton: Year 5 Mathematics  

Kirrilly’s inquiry revolved around building resilience in Mathematics, particularly for students who are fearful of failure. Kirrilly’s action plan involved employing questioning techniques and drawing on elements of growth mindset theory to assist students of all different levels to evaluate their strategic approach to problem solving in Mathematics.  

Mr Stephen Brown: VCE Physics 

Stephen focused on improving the accuracy of student comprehension of Physics problems through a focus on the explicit teaching of literacy skills. His action plan and data collection concentrated on student annotation and reading comprehension as a precursor to successfully answering of questions. 

Miss Kristy Forrest: Year 9 Humanities (Philosophy)  

For my inquiry I chose to focus on how to improve student self-efficacy through oracy. This allowed me to scale out the work begun by our Year 9 Humanities Faculty in 2022 using the Harkness Method in our Critical Conversations Geography and History Program for my Year 9 Elective ‘Introduction to Philosophy and Critical Thinking.’  

Drawing on research on the competence/confidence loop, I was able to confirm our previous team findings that the explicit teaching of academic background knowledge improves student oracy, which then increases their confidence.  

We have all enjoyed the opportunity provided by the TEP to meet and collaborate with teachers from across sectors in Victoria and to improve our teaching practices.  

We look forward to sharing more regarding our collaborative work in Semester 2.