My ongoing mantra to everyone here has been to set ‘High Expectations’ in everything we do. High expectations of our own performance and of those we influence, whether we are student, teacher or parent. Underpinning this focus are our core values of Personal Best, Integrity, Respect and Responsibility. It is so important that they continue to be evident in how we all work together throughout the year.

As a school community focused on achieving the best possible outcomes for all of our students we need to continually reflect and seek improvement in everything we do. A reminder of the Goals and Key Improvement Strategies in our Strategic Plan (2017-2020):

Goals:

• Student Achievement – to improve the VCE all study score to above the state and to maximise student learning growth for all students 7-12 across all learning areas
• Student Engagement – to develop confident and engaged students who have an authentic voice in planning their own learning pathway in and beyond school
• Student Wellbeing – to empower confident, healthy and resilient students

A number of key improvement strategies have been planned over the life of the Strategic Plan aimed at achieving these goals and the specific targets set.

These include:

1. Develop precision in teacher practice using agreed lesson structures and challenging learning tasks that reflect high expectations for student learning and strengthen feedback and coaching for staff
2. Develop and embed rigorous, reliable and well differentiated assessment practices to support quality learning outcomes for all students
3. Develop and implement processes and practices to strengthen transition into, through and beyond the school
4. Plan learning sequences and activities that strengthen authentic student voice and self-directed learning
5. Build student resilience and identify and respond to the needs of specific groups or individual students through a documented and implemented wellbeing approach

In terms of the Curiosity and Powerful learning initiative and our implementation plan, we will continue to focus on the theory of actions introduced over the past two years in: High Expectations and Authentic Relationships and Learning Objectives, Success Criteria, Narrative and Pace (2016); and Teaching Protocols (our Instructional Model) and Development of Challenging Learning Tasks (2017); while introducing two additional theories this year, Higher Order questioning and Connecting Feedback to Data. These are linked into our first two key improvement strategies above.