Our Lady of Mercy Catholic School
Summary
Our Lady of Mercy Deloraine School is in rural Tasmania and at the time of filming had 135 students, with this number made up of multi-age classes from Foundation to Year 6, and 13 teaching staff. The focus of this school is the provision of education that guides the students’ spiritual, academic, social, emotional and physical development through a balanced curriculum. Our Lady of Mercy began its Australian Curriculum journey looking at the culture, ethos and values in the school. From there, the staff decided that they needed to create a whole-school collaborative culture, moderation of student work within and across schools, and participate in ongoing professional development focusing on improving student outcomes.
The principal had a strong vision for the school and worked to clearly identify the ethos, culture and values of the school. Collaboration was the focus for professional learning to develop the skills to implement the Australian Curriculum. The staff researched and created a model of collaboration to fit their school. Teachers were involved in professional development to assist them when analysing student data and the Australian Curriculum. When planning using the Australian Curriculum, the teachers start with the achievement standards to identify essential learnings; from these they develop learning intentions and success criteria for their students. The school works with another rural school to plan their teaching units and then moderate their students work at the end of the topic. The school has based its intervention program on Finland’s model of immediate interventions for the short or long term. The next stage for this school is developing formative assessments to inform teacher planning. The school has seen some significant improvement in student achievement
Our Lady of Mercy Deloraine is a small rural Catholic school situated in the Meander Valley in Tasmania. The school has a preschool as a part of the school community. The students have specialist lessons in Japanese, speech and drama, physical education and music. The assistant principal’s role is to work with each teacher to program from the Australian Curriculum. The school works collaboratively and has moved from talking about ‘me and my students’ to ‘our students’; this has freed teachers to have professional and honest conversations about the achievements of their students. The school has developed a thorough scope and sequence plan that has enabled teachers to work on teaching strategies to improve learning outcomes for their students.
Our Lady of Mercy
Deloraine TAS 7304 Australia
School type
Non-government
School sector
Primary
School location
Provincial
School size
< 130 students
Copyright
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