Sparking professional dialogue at St Andrews Christian College

The school

St Andrews Christian College is a Prep to Year 12 independent school in Wantirna South, in Melbourne’s east. Its professional learning is led by Michael Swanborough, Deputy Principal – Learning and Teaching.

The challenge

Before DistillED+, the college was already running a differentiated professional development programme for its staff. The challenge wasn’t the programme itself but what it took to sustain it: producing the resources needed to support it was becoming increasingly difficult.

The solution

DistillED+ now supplies those resources. A good example came at a Learning Leaders’ Meeting, where Michael used the DistillED+ materials on Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction: Provide Models to review how modelling was being approached across a range of faculty areas.

The result

The resources gave staff a structure for sharing the approaches they had found most useful with their own classes. For some, it raised awareness of approaches they hadn’t considered, and many said they would trial them in their classes.

The session also changed the conversation. Afterwards, there was a lot of sharing of ideas among the Learning Leaders, with staff asking each other how they had applied an approach in their classes and what benefits or challenges they had seen.

“

The level of professional dialogue was more than I had seen in other sessions.

Michael Swanborough

“I would certainly recommend a DistillED+ licence as it gives you access to a range of high quality, evidence informed resources. The materials are well presented, easy for staff to follow and very practical. Teachers can easily apply the concepts covered in their own classes.”

Michael Swanborough