Greetings Colleagues,

I trust you have all had a relaxing break now that all States and Territories have had their Term 1 School Holidays. Hopefully there has been the opportunity for some down time amidst all the work that continues during the breaks.

With new staff inductions and Leadership Team Meetings happening it is a time of excitement and anticipation as we welcome back our students. The employment environment remains extremely competitive with many advertisements for positions posted online. With these challenges that we all face it is even more important to keep our networks strong and support each other. One way of doing this is attending quality professional learning. We hope to see you all at our Biennial Conference in Perth, Western Australia from July 14-16 at the Crown. It is shaping to be a real opportunity to celebrate our distinguished and long serving leaders as well as learn from a group of esteemed educators. For all communications, please refer to our CaSPA Website or communicate with your State/Territory Director or local Association.

We continue to be approached by key players in the education and political sectors as a voice for Catholic schools. There have been numerous media opportunities related to the ACU Principal Health and Wellbeing Survey Report and the National School Reform Agreement. The Federal Minister for Education, the Honourable Jason Clare, has invited CaSPA to attend a roundtable with the national peak Principal organisations in May. Here he will provide an update on the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement, lead a discussion on Principal and school leader wellbeing and listen to ideas related to ongoing school and system reform.

The CaSPA Board have met with Notre Dame University regarding possible faith formation partnerships and since the April meeting, both Presidents from CaSPA and ACPPA have had a follow up meeting. At the Board Meeting in April, I reported on the Catholic Education Stakeholder Meeting and we have had ongoing communication with AITSL regarding a National Framework for Teacher Registration in Australia as well as a National Teacher Workforce Action Plan - use of Teacher Assistants. We also had our regular meeting with ACARA with business focussed on the early release of NAPLAN in 2024.

Recently we met with representatives from the Australian Medical Association (AMA) regarding vaping in schools with a view to launching a joint cross-sectoral approach with all the peak Principal and parent educational bodies.

Our focus on advocacy will continue to be a priority as we continue to make an impact on positive educational change.

Have a wonderful Term 2.

Dr Stephen Kennaugh
CaSPA President

Due soon!

Attention Principals

The CaSPA Board is keen to remind you that 2024 Principal Awards and funding opportunities for Social Action and Professional Learning are due soon.

All Awards will be presented at the CaSPA Conference in Perth this year. Hence all nominations will be due on 24 May 2024.

Please find all the Word versions you can use or distribute to your colleagues.

The new forms are on the CaSPA Website: https://caspa.schoolzineplus.com/awards-criteria

Profiles of all the CaSPA Board are available on the CaSPA Website: https://caspa.schoolzineplus.com/current-and-past-board-members

• CaSPA Directors have enrolled in the Australian Institute of Company Directors (ACID) course.
• CaSPA received an invitation to attend the APPA Conference in New Zealand. CaSPA appreciated the invitation and will be sending a representative.
• CaSPA has distributed the ACU Australian Principal Occupational Health, Safety and Wellbeing Survey Report to the States and Territories. CaSPA will be meeting with the ACU Researchers in June to discuss the findings further.
• CaSPA and Athas Concepts are currently finalising the Data Project for 2024.
• CaSPA continues to investigate ways that it can continue to collaborate with ACPPA to support Catholic Principals. Catholic Primary Principals have been invited to attend the 2024 CaSPA Conference.

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‘Inherent risks’: academics push back against NSW ed dept's explicit instruction drive

By EducationHQ News Team
Published April 23, 2024

A string of academics have come out in force to warn against a push by the NSW Department of Education for explicit teaching across all schools.

One goes as far to say explicit teaching is “laden with inherent risks” and should not be adopted at the expense of inquiry learning approaches. 

The long-running explicit teaching vs inquiry learning debate has once again reared its head, following an announcement from the NSW education department that all teachers will undergo a day’s professional development focused on explicit instruction next week – a move signalling a desire to cement evidence-based instruction across the state. 

But concerned academics have responded to the news, telling MCERA the department’s focus on explict teaching ought to face pushback because it undermines teachers’ expertise and threatens to hinder students’ 21st century skill development. 

Dr Lynde Tan from Western Sydney University tells the organisation that explicit teaching is a “buzzword” that has gained traction in the media and is being presented as the solution to improving academic outcomes.

Tan says research shows the teaching approach carries a range of risks and thus “requires precautions”.

Namely, that students’ “over-reliance on the teacher as the knowledge provider” inhibits self-directed learning, while the inherent “rigidity” in the pedagogical approach prioritises the recall of facts and rote learning over critical thinking, she suggests. 

“The highly structured scope and sequence restrict teacher and student creativity,” Tan adds.

But UNSW Sydney's Emeritus Professor John Sweller has previously warned the widespread bid to teach critical and creative thinking in schools is a misguided endeavour.

The influential cognitive psychologist maintains it’s only domain-specific knowledge stored in long-term memory, plus our innate ability, that allows these capabilities to flourish.

“At the end of the day, if you can think critically (or creatively) about something, it’s because you have a lot of knowledge about it,” he tells EducationHQ.

Sweller argues the drive to teach critical and creative thinking skills has taken hold in education simply because it sounds like a great idea. 

The main job of teachers, he says, should be to build up students’ domain-specific knowledge across multiple areas.

“If you want somebody to be creative, give them knowledge, give them information. And that’s really what teachers ought to be doing – most teachers do that anyway…”

Sweller notes that sometimes teachers are “led astray” by inquiry learning.

“[It] just goes against everything we know about how humans learn and think and solve problems. 

“There’s a lot of knowledge of cognitive science and it’s been ignored and it’s foolish,” he asserts. 

At its core, explicit instruction is a systematic method of teaching that is hinged on three components: breaking down learning into small steps, checking for student understanding and ensuring all students actively participate.

Other academics, such as Dr Lorraine Hammond from Edith Cowan University, flag that explicit instruction is frequently misunderstood.

“[They] are often characterised as being traditional, didactic and boringly reminiscent of Charles Dickens’ Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times,” she tells EducationHQ.

"The reality is, this is not the case. As Mark Twain noted, ‘A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots’. 

“The pace of instruction is fast, students have multiple opportunities to practice and teachers do not teach this way all day.”

 Explict instruction is the quickest route towards knowledge mastery, the expert adds. 

“The information processing model illustrates how vulnerable novice learners are to experiencing cognitive overload; that sensation when we know our brains are struggling to juggle information and we run out of space in working memory.  

“Learning something new is hard, but by repetition and practice we can get to the point of mastery quickly,” Hammond says.

In response to the reignited explicit teaching vs inquiry discussion, Victorian school leader and author Dr Greg Ashman outlined his schools’ position in a Substack post. 

“People have funny ideas about explicit teaching…” he wrote.

“To us, it is a whole system that gradually moves from teacher to student. 

“Concepts are fully explained and procedures are fully modelled before students are asked to make use of these concepts and procedures. 

“However, there is a lot of checking for understanding and guided practice – our lessons are highly interactive with students often answering a question every couple of minutes on their mini whiteboards  and the end result is students working independently on complex problems or producing complex products such as essays or works of art.”

But Deakin University’s Associate Professor Jill Brown says an excessive focus on explicit instruction would have side effects and could result in students not meeting curriculum expectations.  

“A pushback is critical – explicit teaching is not a magic bullet, nor should it be the single pedagogy in any classroom,” Brown argues. 

In the maths classroom, Brown puts forward the example of learning to multiply numbers, which she says requires students to explore many strategies to determine which method is the most efficient. 

“Teachers can model these methods explicitly, but learning ultimately takes place when students explore them for themselves.” 

The people ‘doing mathematics’ should be the learners, not the teachers, Brown says. 

The academic also claims that explicit instruction will not allow students to meet the expectations of the general capabilities, cross-curriculum priorities, nor of specific disciplines, and especially in mathematics.

“Equally, the proficiencies and processes that underpin the maths curriculum cannot be learned via explicit instruction,” she says.

“Finally, I would suggest the main reason most people dislike and abandon further learning in mathematics is that it is typically taught heavily through explicit instruction, despite the curriculum aims,” she concludes. 

Associate Professor Jorge Knijinik from Western Sydney University slammed the ‘back to basics’ debate, which he says is all about enforcing one ‘superior’ method over another. 

“This mantra narrows the conversation around teaching methods; it undermines teachers’ professional expertise and society’s view of education in schools overall,” Knijinik says. 

NSW school leader Rebecca Birch weighed in on the commentary from universities via X: 

Meanwhile, some school systems around the country have already made the switch to the science of learning, with explicit teaching now forming the bedrock of teachers’ practice. 

Others, such as Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic Schools (MACS), have unveiled plans to implement an explicit instruction model across all their teaching and learning programs in the coming years. 

A recent study by think tank The Centre for Independent Studies found there was a ‘science of learning lottery’ at play in Australia, with too many teachers happening upon the science of learning by chance, only to face contradictory advice from education departments and a lack of system-wide support.

(Source: EducationHQ)

ACER news 18 April 2024

Professor Geoff Masters AO says high-performing school systems go to ‘quite considerable lengths’ to ensure every student makes ongoing progress in their learning.

Speaking in the third and final episode of his Teacher podcast series on world-class learning systems, the Chief Executive of ACER says system leaders and policymakers need to think about ‘how we introduce more flexibility into our learning arrangements so that we can better target the needs of individual learners’.

The podcast explores Professor Masters’ latest book, Building a world class learning system: insights from some top performing school systems. The book is the result of a multi-year study of 5 jurisdictions that have long performed well on the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) – British Columbia, Estonia, Finland, Hong Kong and South Korea.

‘Across these 5 school systems, what I see is that they take seriously the question of catching students who are starting to struggle and trying to get them back on track as quickly as they can,’ Professor Masters says.

‘If you don't have something in place to catch students and to try to get them back on track; if you have a system that just sorts students out over time, as each curriculum becomes harder and harder for them, increasingly out of their reach, then you've designed a system that almost guarantees a percentage of students are going to fail.’

Professor Masters says Finland holds multidisciplinary meetings to talk about individual students and has specially trained teachers that work with student who need additional support. He notes that around 30% of all students in Finland might work with one of these special teachers at some point in their schooling.

‘Estonia doesn't have the resources to do what Finland does in terms of specially trained teachers, but what they do is to withdraw students and teach them in small groups, about 8 students for example,’ Professor Masters says.

Professor Masters believes transformational change to existing learning systems is required to ensure all learners achieve high standards. This includes loosening institutional constraints of when and where learning occurs.

In the Teacher podcast, he says the high-performing systems he has studied have a ‘supporting ecosystem’ that comes in behind the work of schools.

‘Teachers require support of various kinds. Often, dealing with the variability in a particular classroom is beyond the capacity of one teacher. It often requires teachers to collaborate in that, or other kinds of support for teachers,’ he says.

One of the ways this is occurring is Hong Kong’s ‘lifelong and life-wide learning’ approach that draws on a range of community organisations and associations to provide career-related and community service activities. Similarly, Estonia reinforces the intended outcomes of its curriculum through programs at museums, nature centres and other organisations, while Korea provides out-of-school learning clinics to address student needs.

‘And then there are really radical things that people are attempting as well,’ Professor Masters says.

‘If you look at places like Wales and Scotland and – to some extent – New Zealand, they are radically rethinking how they organise learning at school. So, they're trying to find ways of breaking out of the rigid, time-based, assembly line model. How can we move to ways of structuring, organising learning so that we can better identify where students are up to and better meet their needs?’

(Source: ACER Newsletter)

2024 CaSPA Conference - Registrations Open

Registration link: Catholic Secondary Principals Association 2024 Conference (eventsair.com)

This year’s conference will be hosted by CSPA WA in Western Australia and provide an opportunity to reconnect, reimagine and dream the future of Catholic Education together as we meet in Boorloo, Perth, our capital city. 

We acknowledge the Whadjuk people, the Traditional Custodians of this Land in Perth Western Australia, where we will hold the conference - people who have loved and cared for this Land for thousands of years.  It is the perfect location for this gathering and conversations around the future.

The journey to shaping the future of Catholic Education is ongoing. Grounded in our faith, the conference will provide further opportunities to examine innovation, imagination, and collaboration. Together, we will delve into visionary ideas and innovative strategies that will shape the future of Catholic Education, ensuring it remains an educational platform of hope and strength for generations to come.

The two-day program will include three keynote speakers, student panels, sessional presentations and workshops. Themes will range from innovation and adaption, inclusivity and diversity, faith integration and community engagement. You will have a choice of school visits where you will be hosted by the Principal and have a chance to see Catholic Education at work in Western Australia.

Being engaged in thought-provoking discussions, sharing the experience, expertise and perspectives within this collegial environment and the beautiful surrounds of Perth, is sure to be a rich learning experience.

Let us continue to dream boldly, envisioning a future where Catholic Education continues to instill true Gospel values in the hearts and minds of our students.

We invite you to Boorloo, to dream the Future of Catholic Education, in this journey of connection and discovery.

John Bormolini

Chairperson
National Conference Organising Committee