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Transcript: Yarra Junction Primary School
File Name:
Yarra Junction Primary School
Duration:
6:34 minutes
Page 1 of 4
PROGRAM START:
0:00-0:08 seconds
VIDEO:
Text: Yarra Junction Primary School
Digital Story
May 2010
AUDIO:
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0:09-6:25 seconds
VIDEO:
Chris Thomas, Principal, Yarra Junction Primary School
AUDIO:
This is Yarra Junction Primary School we’re in the eastern part of metro
Melbourne right on the outskirts. We’re an Anglo-Saxon community. We
are a disadvantaged community; our SFO is at .7; about 60% of our
families are on EMA and it’s a school that over the years has had a circle
of poverty attached to it. In the beginning our school went through a
diagnostic review, a number of years ago, which was probably a
watershed time and a light bulb time. We were, we thought we were,
doing really well. Our data had gone up but I think it was very much
Transcript: Yarra Junction Primary School
Page 2 of 4
cohort driven, it wasn’t an embedded practice for our school. When we
were told we were going to get a diagnostic review it was probably one of
the worst moments of probably my career and a lot of senior people in
the school. We went away and unpacked and started to do research and
looked at what really is going to improve this school and these children.
We then looked at, and we had looked at data, but we probably hadn’t
looked in depth at the data until this time. So we unpacked the data right
down to its lowest form and we started to find some problems with
practice with our data. The first thing we looked at was; we unpacked our
NAPLAN for four years, for our AIM / NAPLAN and we still do this today.
We unpacked to find out what was the common things that our kids
continually were getting wrong and it was an alarming thing when we
unpacked it for three years and we found that the same question put in
different various forms our kids were continually getting wrong. So
straight away we thought, hang on, our teachers can’t teach this area so
we then went back and started to run PD explicitly on teaching that area.
The literacy and numeracy coordinator / coaches here all at the time
spent on teaching. From planners that come in from the teachers, they
then look at how much of that time did the teacher say they were going
to use explicitly. Our coaches here must spend two hours in every
teacher’s grade per week and then the teachers are given 45 minutes
reflection with the numeracy coach and the literacy coach on top of their
normal 2 ½ hours time release. About 5 years ago we decided to get
everyone’s planners in and we looked at them, and we put them all on
the floor as a leadership group and we thought let’s have a look at the
planners and see what we have. We we’re amazed, we had some people
that wrote one sentence, we had some people that wrote half a book for a
week but one thing that came out from all the planners they were all task
driven ‘the kids will do this task’, ‘the kids will complete this maths plus
activity’, ‘the kids will do this maths program’. What there wasn’t in there
was ‘the kids will learn’, ‘this skill will be taught’ and there was nothing
for this teacher to say at the end of this class, ‘how will I know that this
activity has been taught?’, ‘have the skills been taught?’ and ‘how do I
assess it, and from that assessment do I need to go back?’, ‘do I need to
revise it?’, ‘do I need to change it?’ We have targets that are team
targets. We have of course our annual implementation plan. Each team
has a target. Why they have a target (we have junior, middle and senior)
is that cohorts in their groups need specific things, specific skills they
need to improve and it might be at the moment our grade threes are
struggling in the area of writing so that middle school team has a target
Transcript: Yarra Junction Primary School
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directly related to those kids and their writing. We still have an overall
target for writing in our school but for those students it’s specific and
targeted to them. So what are the teachers going to do, what skills are
we going to help them to provide and what assistance are we going to
provide the students as well. We have team leaders but they are skilled in
understanding data and understanding student learning and
understanding what best practice looks like in our school and any of my
team leaders know exactly the data of our school but so do my teachers
as well. So everyone knows the direction of the school and everything
here and the final thing I’d say is whole school there are no island states,
everything we do is whole school. Every implementation is whole school,
everyone does the same thing because everyone’s got to be on the same
path of student learning and that’s probably been one of the biggest
things that we’ve done. As a principal at Yarra Junction Primary the single
most important function that I perform would be to oversee student
learning and if I go back a number of years ago I probably were doing
management roles and not leading so the change in that is that I lead the
school improvement so I have a finger to know exactly what is going on.
But I impart that knowledge back to team leaders who we’ve skilled up
but I’ve also put that back on to my coaches etc but at no stage do I not
know the data of my school, the data of my kids or where our school is
going. I also go into grades, far, far far too long I didn’t go into grades
enough for the positive things to say to a teacher ‘yea I really liked that,
that was fun and enjoyable’ but it give me a pulse of my school, it says to
me is the coaching working because I can go in there and see it and if I
start a lesson and see that the teacher is teaching a skill and I know the
learning that’s going to happen I can talk to the kids and say ‘What are
you learning’ and they come back to me and say ‘I’m learning this’ and I
would ask ‘ how are you successful’ the students can tell me and I can
even do that in a prep grade and the kids will tell me what they’re
learning. We became what I would call a welfare school. Because we’re
low socio-economic you can spend all day you can spend every minute on
welfare but we turned that around in the kids, the parents and I know a
lot of principals struggle with that because they will spend every day with
the issues that happen and not on student learning so that’s probably the
biggest change that we started to do. When we were put in this
diagnostic, yeah we started to think hang on we’re doing 14 welfare
programs but we’re doing two pedagogical programs, this is not making
sense. Everyone here understands that we want to get the kids to the
state benchmark and above. Just because we’re low socio-economic it’s
Transcript: Yarra Junction Primary School
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not an excuse for us to use for our kids not to attain the state targets and
we must remember as a community that for our kids to get out of poverty
or to get out of their environment, education is their only way, so they
have to be at the state benchmark, they have to be above when they go
to high school. So we make sure that’s a whole school philosophy and it’s
driven by everyone here.
6:26 – 6:34
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