Day 2 St Rita's - Vanessa Crouch

How do you see the school’s educational and faith vision and mission informing and shaping daily practice?

The ST RITA mission

It is very evident from observations in all classrooms that the ST RITA vision and mission is an integral part of the daily life of the classrooms and the school. This week the focus is How can I be the best I can be? During the HPE prep class lesson the teacher - Dan Kenyon  discussed question of week with the preps and they discussed how this applies to HPE. The responses of the little ones were very clear and specific. It is obvious they regularly have these discussions in HPE.

How are they using data to inform decision making?

In one of the year four classes the teacher has issued lanyards with red, green and yellow paddles to check for student understanding. This is a form of formative assessment and helps the teacher determine which students she needs to support in the lesson.

Formative assessment tool

The year 7 class which was learning about St Augustine had very clear learning intentions which were regularly referred to and checked off as sections of the lesson were completed. This made things very easy for the students to focus on what they needed to do. 

Give your readers an idea of the application range of ICT/digital devices in the learning spaces.

YEAR 7

• Powtoon used to create a document about St Augustine. Powtoon is available to us through our Google Drive - there is an EDU version.

• Padlet used for precamp post its and ideas about what students are looking forward to.

• 1:1 in class not take home.

• In one class all tasks in morning session related to ICT.

YEAR 4

• These students are part of the 1:1 program. 
• The students used Answer Garden and Tagexdo to share ideas and create a word cloud in response to a task for science. Answer Garden and Tagexdo are linked making it easy to export the answers to a word cloud. 

When considering your own class teaching/organisation, what might be three approaches you have observed that could be adopted?

Furniture in the Yr 4 classrooms, very flexible.

• In the classes visited today there were no teacher desks. The Year 7s had a separate office space but the Year 4 teachers either had a small space or nothing at all. This decision was taken by some teachers to allow greater space in the classrooms. The Year 4 classes in particular were quite small spaces.

Why are the learning environments engaging? What is going on to ensure each student progresses?

• today I noticed that the classes all seem to have maths text books. Does everyone use maths texts? Why have they chosen this approach when it seems like all other curriculum areas are planned in a opposite way.