School Spotlight - St Mary of the Cross, Epping

And when we started talking about this and the kids were saying to me, oh, my gosh, that would help my learning or when are we going to get the walls and the doors, I had to put my own beliefs or prejudices aside and say, okay, and that... also had to happen with the curriculum.

And I think that puts you in a bit of a unique position in the sense that the school's been through this transition as a movement towards science of learning, cognitive load theory, explicit instruction.

But I hear you were one of the individuals that needed some convincing and that's a very kind of real story and it's very, very prevalent across the state and across the world.

So what was that like for you having to be one of those that needed

convincing? um well as I said I really had to come back to what what do I believe in as an educator and what do I see as being my my moral imperative here as the principal so certainly um when we opened the school we were a huge driver for um inquiry-based learning play-based learning um you know and I have a background my part of my master's is in literacy early literacy intervention so um to be told that perhaps what I had been doing, and no one was necessarily saying it was wrong, but there was a feeling of it was wrong.

And there's a certain podcast that I know a lot of teachers have listened to and I was furious.

It was like it was saying everything we'd been doing was so wrong and I had to think, you know, and I knew I hadn't been causing harm to the children in my care and, you know, as a prep teacher.

But in... 2023 we reached our 10-year anniversary as a school and we set up our theme as being learning from the past to shape the future and you know we were coming out of COVID and things had changed and what we had to come down to is what is the data telling us and the data was telling us our students weren't making the academic progress we wanted them to and you know You can't keep doing what you've always done and expect to get a different result.

So it was the right timing with the release then of Vision for Instruction in 2024.

And, you know, we were thinking about putting the walls up.

So our theme for 2024 was reimagining.

And it sort of gave us a freedom to then try different things.

And I had to put my... beliefs and maybe a little bit of my grief.

And I had to keep coming back to what do I believe at the core? And what I believe at the core is what is best for the kids.

And I came to this school because I wanted to be on the forefront of, you know, at the time contemporary learning.

So I had to ask myself, well, why am I blocking this change in education when that's always been something I wanted to embrace? And now I wouldn't look back.

And so much of that change happens so quickly as well, as you say.

You're only 13 years old as a school, but have already been through those transition periods.

Now, I don't want to quote you wrongly here, but a little birdie told me that a famous phrase of yours is, it's building a plane while flying.

So what was that experience

like? Yeah, so I heard that actually from one of the Max Literacy webinars.

And yeah, building the plane as you're flying it.

And That doesn't mean we're about to crash and burn.

What I loved about that was I felt it summed up our approach, which was we knew the direction.

We knew where we wanted to go.