Kirsty is attending the annual Leaders Retreat in Bowral this week. All Principals, along with staff from Catholic Education will meet to discuss future directions in education as a Catholic system, while also spending time in prayer and reflection.

Staff have undertaken a variety of Professional Learning courses over the past few weeks.

Miss Soulsby has renewed her First Aid Certificate and attended an Autism Workshop. This week Janet Cartwright, a Leader in Challenging Learning, worked with Miss Braun and Miss Soulsby to clarify their role as Data Analysts in the school. Mrs Beavan and Mrs Murray attended Instructional Leadership days where the focus was on developing Action Learning Plans for the school in both Numeracy and Literacy. Mrs Parker has attended an Aboriginal Contact Day, while Mrs Anderson will be attending a Learning Support Network Day to gain training in administering CELF 5, a screening assessment for Language Development and Mrs Dean will be attending a Numeracy Day lead by our Mathematics coaches .

As a Challenging Learning school, all staff are provided a range of Professional Reading texts to read and discuss at staff meetings. We are currently reading ‘Challenging Learning Through Feedback

Some interesting facts we have gathered from our readings:

* Feedback is information we receive that helps shape our next response. It can be formal or informal.

* Research suggests that Feedback doubles the rate of learning

* Feedback should help the students do the following:

1. Understand the goal or learning intention
2. Know where they are in relation to the goal (how much progress have I made?)
3. Realise what they need to do next (to bridge the gap between their current position and their goal)

* Feedback should relate to clear, specific and appropriately challenging goals.

Staff will continue to explore the effective use of feedback in the classrooms as the research suggests that “we learn faster, and much more effectively, when we have a clear sense of how well we are doing, and what we might need to do in order to improve’. (Dai Hounsell 2003, p.67)

Have a great week,