Teaching & Learning

Teaching and Learning at St Patrick’s, Bega

Our approach to Teaching and Learning focuses on curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment, what we teach, how we teach, and how we know that students have learnt what we have taught. It is informed by the Science of Learning and the Science of Reading. Our teachers participate in extensive professional learning to ensure that they are well equipped with the knowledge they need to best implement these principles in the classroom.

Science of Learning

The Science of Learning summarizes existing cognitive-science research on how students learn and connects it to practical implications for teaching and learning. The Science of Learning was developed by member deans of Deans for Impact in collaboration with Dan Willingham, a cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia and Paul Bruno, a former middle-school science teacher.

You can read more about the Science of Learning here

Science of Reading

The science of reading is a vast, interdisciplinary body of scientifically based research about reading, how students learn to read and implications for teaching a child to read. This research has been conducted over the last five decades across the world. The Science of Reading emphasizes the importance of phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. It is based on the understanding that reading is a complex cognitive process that involves the integration of multiple skills and abilities.

You can learn more about the Science of Reading here

Benefits for our students

What does all this mean for your child? Our approach to Teaching and Learning and the professional learning occurring for all our teachers, is ensuring that we have:

• High expectations for all students – raising the bar and supporting students to reach it.
• Equal opportunity classrooms – ensuring all students are actively involved in each lesson.
• Focus on “learning” - maximizing learning time.
• Impactful teaching practice – focusing on teaching practice that will have the most impact to student learning.
• Increased knowledge building – building student knowledge through lessons and tasks that are knowledge rich and engaging.
• Increased engagement – by ensuring all students are active, lessons are well-paced and teachers are checking for understanding throughout the lesson.
• Improved retrieval of learnt content – revisiting content taught to ensure this content moves from working memory to long term memory.

What to know more?

Learn more at catalyst.cg.catholic.edu.au