Bradley Mitchell – Principal, Oran Park High School

My name's Brad Mitchell. I'm the very proud foundation principal of Oran Park High School. Oran Park was founded in the year 2020. So we are just coming up for our fifth anniversary. So it's a wonderful, comprehensive, large high school in, a huge growth area of southwestern Sydney.

We are part of a very large growth corridor, so it's a very new and evolving and an exciting area. The students have come to our school and the families have come to this area from all over Sydney, from all over New South Wales, all over Australia, all over the world in fact. We have students arriving all the time. Our numbers go up very rapidly and those students come from a huge variety of different contexts. We've established ourself as a school, as the heart of the community because traditionally there's nothing for them to fall back on as a community. They don't have long established relationships in the area.

The plan for public education has been a game changer, I guess, a great document. One of the elements of that plan is about delivering outstanding leadership, teaching and learning. And obviously that's the core of, of everything that we do, and so we've been able to take that. It relates very closely to our school plan and especially our strategic direction, number 2, and building that leadership capacity, but building the knowledge and skills of our teachers has been at the core of what we've tried to do so that they can better support the students in their care.

Constance Gartside – Deputy Principal, Oran Park High School

We are very fortunate this year that we have a full complement of staff. It seemed like a perfect time to review what we were previously doing with our professional learning and to adopt a more collaborative communal approach to staff learning.

At the crux of what we do here as a school is collaboration. We recognise that that is key to staff being able to, I guess, connect with our own professional learning and share their own voices when it comes to how they develop as teachers and how we approach our improvement as a school with students at the base of all of our conversations.

Laurie-Anne Hudson – Head Teacher, Teaching and Learning, Oran Park High School

The context of our school, being a fairly new school with, you know, upwards of 25, 30 new teachers starting each year for the first few years of our school meant that we had a range of staff coming in at different career points. And with different experiences and backgrounds from their previous schools. So ensuring that we were creating a really strong staff culture amongst the staff was essential to us.

I was tasked as the head teacher of teaching and learning to create a sustainable professional learning model at the school that included looking at ways that we could work together collaboratively, not just siloed in our faculties, but ensuring that we're working with a whole range of different teaching and non-teaching staff.

We make sure that all of our PL is aligned directly with our strategic direction goals and our school priorities. So we make sure that we look at our student data from various sources like NAPLAN, Best Start, National Minimum Standards, and check that what we're running at the school is something that's going to directly improve student learning outcomes or will directly enhance the experience of a student in our classrooms.

Effectively collaborating with your colleagues has a really strong follow-on effect to ensuring that every learner feels supported in the classroom, and it's the building of that relational trust and doing the job together that makes teaching so rewarding.

[End of transcript]

Laurie-Anne Hudson – Head Teacher, Teaching and Learning, Oran Park High School

We looked at our school priorities in our strategic directions around providing a quality learning environment and building a positive school culture, and we wanted to embed some explicit teaching practices and focus on our formative assessment within our classrooms. We wanted to make sure that we could provide some professional learning to staff across the school around those areas of checking for understanding and formative assessment to make sure that when we are teaching students, we know exactly where they're at with their learning and we're not making assumptions about where we think they may or may not be.

From that point, we worked collaboratively with the curriculum team to develop a suite of workshops and professional learning programs that we could implement jointly at the school. We wanted to gather some baseline data from our executive team and our staff to check which areas may be of best use to us when we are looking at upskilling teachers in the explicit teaching strategies.

The first part of this process involved meeting with the executive team at the school and running a survey to determine which areas were of most need of the 8 strategies within the explicit teaching framework. From reflecting on that framework as an executive team, we determined that the areas for checking for understanding and effective feedback would be most useful for us to focus on as a school.

The form that that took was through developing some faculty-based and also some whole school PL sessions. The faculty-based sessions were run within faculty meetings. Staff were able to collaborate with their colleagues from their KLA areas to work together and gain a little bit more baseline data around effective feedback and formative assessment and checking for understanding.

Through that we then met back up the following week within our PLCs to work a little bit more in the space of checking for understanding. So, the team developed some interactive activities that we could run as a whole school in our performance space where we had teachers up and practicing in front of their colleagues. We all took on the turn of being a classroom teacher and a student. So, we had a lot of fun in that space to practice different checking for understanding strategies. After that, we then spent some time implementing those strategies in our classrooms. We developed some extra posters to go around the school to try and encourage some better use of questioning rather than asking, you know, specific or, or closed end questions in class.

We wanted to improve those kind of checking for understanding discussions. A little time later, we then ran a follow up session in our faculties again. So, we've sort of tried to follow the learn, do, reflect cycle to do some time on that learning space, the implementation space and then some time then to reflect on our achievements on a faculty level and a whole school level.

As we've been implementing the strategies around effective feedback and checking for understanding in our classes, we've seen some greater engagement from our kids in, responding to learning as it's occurring within the classes. It's allowed the executive team to put strategies into practice and develop the capacity within their teams to further improve student learning outcomes.

[End of transcript]

Bradley Mitchell – Principal, Oran Park High School

Collaboration is the basis of everything that we do here at Oran Park.

Going back to our track values and, and, and to T for teamwork. Teamwork to us is all about collaborating. And it also harks back to something that I stress with our staff constantly, which is the importance of positive relationships.

So, if you get those positive relationships right you build a culture of collaboration and teamwork, then I believe that we can achieve anything together.

Quite naturally in a large high school, you can get silos of people doing great things all around the school but having that opportunity and cross faculty groups to be able to share that is fantastic.

And also, the importance of the leadership team of the school, so the senior executive and executive staff, you know, taking the lead on that high impact professional learning.

Nothing's going to happen, and nothing effective is going to happen unless there's that sort of support from the top. I think that's been the key to what we've been doing as well.

Constance Gartside – Deputy Principal, Oran Park High School

Collaboration is an important element to what we do here as a school, but part of that is also recognising that any PL needs to have a continuous aspect to it, so it needs to be sustainable.

Teachers need to be able to take what they've talked about in PLCs, what they've discussed, and use those strategies within their own classrooms so that students are more engaged, and that learning is heightened.

After the initial discussions with the teaching and learning team, the curriculum team came out to speak with our exec, and they presented some of their ideas around what could be presented to staff at staff meetings and then used in PLCs for discussion.

So, feedback from the executive team was that the clarity around the project was really strong and useful, and that then I guess, helps with the buy-in in terms of how those PLCs then function.

Laurie-Anne Hudson – Head Teacher, Teaching and Learning, Oran Park High School

The strategies that we've developed and practiced within the school has enabled us to support our students.

But also support our staff and our emerging leaders, as well as our existing leaders within the school to build that capacity for leadership and improve aspects of collaboration, both within the faculty and across the school as well.

Amanda Harding – Teacher, Oran Park High School

I have really enjoyed that I can talk and collaborate with people from different KLAs, and it's really nice to sort of see what they're doing in their classroom compared to what I'm doing in my classroom. And I like to get ideas from like, what a math teacher is doing, what is a PE teacher doing?

So, I like that we're in this tight little group and everyone's really, really friendly at sharing their ideas. I feel like I'm, I'm learning to be better every day by implementing even these little, small changes within the classroom.

Constance Gartside

Working with the curriculum team has been really valuable because it's not often that you get an external look at what's happening within your school.

You're often quite close to the action of things and feeling, you know, subjective, you know the staff, you know the context really well, and that sometimes can create a bit of a barrier to your ability to be able to look and review and see how something is working.

So, the curriculum team has been really useful in providing that eye into our school that has that objectivity that we probably needed when reassessing and reviewing what we were doing.

Bradley Mitchell

Working through that high impact professional learning cycle has been a great learning curve for some of our staff, but certainly a positive for our school.

Laurie-Anne Hudson

Effective collaboration in a school is so essential to feeling supported as a staff member and being able to support your colleagues as well. And that all follows through to ensuring that our students feel supported as well.

[End of transcript]

The department would like to acknowledge and thank staff at Oran Park High School for their participation in these videos.