A busy time at Radford

By Mrs Louise Wallace-Richards, Assistant Principal Teaching and Learning

The Secondary School staff and students have been engaged in a variety of activities beyond the classroom over the past few weeks. Most notably for students was RadPAC and also Languages and Book Week. Thanks to all the Language teachers led by the Head of Department Ms Michele Sharp and to the Library team led by their Head of Department Ms Susan Davenport for the activities they organised to engage students in language learning, focusing on culture and the joy of reading respectively. A number of Secondary staff engaged in dressing up on Friday for the individual and team Book Week competition. Though the Library team won for their representation of witches from Roald Dahl’s novel of the same name and other literature, the Secondary Executive and Admin team put up a fair challenge with our Mr Men and Little Miss efforts.

Other student activities over this past week, with a sporting focus, have included a Year 7 vs Year 8 futsal competition led by the Year 7 Head of Year Mrs Jane Lilley, and Snowsports and ASC basketball comps. The highlight for the week though, was the performance by Year 9 and 10 students of a play version of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice directed by our Head of Performing Arts Ms Sally Stenning. The costumes, sets, including a chandelier, made it easy for the audience to transport back to early nineteenth century England. The performers delighted us with their rendition of the play, bringing Austen’s wit to the forefront and also entertaining us with singing, dancing and piano solos. This week we have the treat of seeing Year 7 and 8 students bring to life Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. It promises to be a night of reflection for Scrooge and entertainment for attendees.

On Friday of last week, eight Year 10 Radford students and fourteen Year 9-12 students from other Canberra high schools and colleges had the opportunity to attend a Creative Writing Workshop run by author Will Kostakis, organised by Acting Assistant Principal, Mr Jason Golding and sponsored and run by ACTATE (ACT Association for the Teaching of English). The students benefited from Will’s expertise in writing effective and engaging creative responses.

Teachers have also been undertaking a variety of learning experiences from Moderation Day last week where all senior teachers came together in their respective disciplines to confirm the assessment approaches of other Colleges, to our iTea this week, focusing on how we can use digital platforms such as Teams Assignments to assist student in organising their planning and drafting for tasks.

Our Leadership and Teacher Learning Communities have been undertaking refreshers focusing on conducting research projects and in particular, literature reviews. Ms Davenport has led all Secondary School teachers through the steps to achieve more accurate searches in their teaching and learning area of focus and how to effectively use our data bases. Leadership Learning Communities reported to the Academic Executive last week about their progress with their teaching and learning focus and their plans for moving forward in the next semester. Their focus areas are Writing, Deep Learning to Facilitate Critical and Creative Thinking, and Space and Pedagogy. Our Deep Learning project with AISNSW is progressing well with Year 7 history, geography and English units embedding the explicit teaching and assessment of critical or creative thinking skills ready to be rolled out towards the end of this term or early next term. More on this project in a future article. Stay tuned!

Finally, with Dr Shyam Barr, who has led our school on self regulated learning (SRL), I have been sharing with the wider education community in Australia, through the Education Summit in Melbourne in June this year and last week at the Evidence in Teaching conference in Sydney, about our work with SRL.

Teachers and leaders in other schools have shown at these events that they are keen to know about our journey, asking me many questions about the implementation of SRL at Radford. Radford figures prominently in Dr Shyam Barr's new book educate to self-regulate, 2024, published by Amba Press.