Learning and Teaching

Professional learning communities (PLCs) are an approach to school improvement where groups of teachers work collaboratively at the school level to improve student outcomes.​
Professional learning community (PLC) schools start from a simple idea: students learn more when their teachers work together.

Building a PLC is a proven way for schools to increase student learning by creating a culture that is:

• focussed on continuous improvement by linking the learning needs of students with the professional learning and practice of teachers
• committed to professionalism
• fuelled by collaborative expertise

PLT’s at SFCC

At St Francis, we have meetings scheduled within the school day on the official timetable across the fortnight for our Professional Learning Teams to plan, collaborate and learn from each other. These meetings are highly valuable and exist in a variety of different ways, such as Stage meetings, KLA meetings and Leadership meetings.

Our PLC approach:

1. Enables teachers to harness the value of working together to improve student learning outcomes.
2. Focuses on three big Ideas: Focus on Learning, Collaborative Culture, Results Oriented Thinking.
3. Encourages teachers to research and experiment with instructional creativity.
4. PLC approach is data driven and not based on opinions. Collaborative learning is driven by an analysis of student data.
5. College timetables need to support collaboration, planning and effective intervention.
6. Consider questions presented in AITSL “The Essential Guide to Professional Learning: Collaboration”.
7. Effective collaboration is frequent and ongoing and, when most successful, an integral part of daily procedures.
8. Schools that effectively collaborate create a base of pedagogical knowledge that is distributed among teachers within a school as opposed to being held by individual teachers. The aim is to improve ALL teachers so that ALL students improve.
9. Collective focus on student learning fueled by the belief that all students can learn and that all staff members can teach to high standards given the right assistance and have a mutual obligation to ensure students learn.
10. Collaboration needs to move beyond dialogue about students to produce materials that actually improve instruction, curriculum, and assessment for students.
11. Four structural conditions required to support:
    1. Time to meet during the school day.
    2. Teachers organised into collaborative teams that work interdependently on common goals.
    3. Open communication within and across teams.
    4. Teacher autonomy guided by a shared sense of purpose, priorities and norms.

So how are we doing? - Academic Performance

NAPLAN is implemented for students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9. The results provide valuable information about student achievement in Literacy and Numeracy. Analysis of the results is used at a school level to support the enhancement of literacy and numeracy outcomes for all students and as a critical part of the Learning and Teaching Cycle.

NAPLAN results, along with other Literacy and Numeracy assessments, provided baseline data for the College to set learning improvement goals and future directions. Overall, the results were overwhelmingly positive with a large number of students, in all areas, performing above the State and National averages.