APA News

Dear Families

As I move about the school it is exciting to see classes working hard to finish learning and undertake assessments.  At St Saviour’s our learning dispositions lay the platform for students to be active and engaged learners, who take responsibility for their progress.  I was in a classroom this week where students were completing a writing task and were using very clear scaffolds to self-reflect on their effort, as well as utilising prompts to improve their work.  I’ve also spent time in music lessons as students diligently practice drumming patterns and ukelele chords, continuing to ‘give it a go’ as they fail and start again.  This evidence of ‘striving’ in learning can be found across the whole school and as the term moves closer towards the end of the year, I encourage all students to finish strong!

Last week I was privileged to be able to attend training that aligns with our goal of improving student wellbeing.  The model is called Collaborative Proactive Solutions and is a way of reframing how we perceive concerning behaviours and a framework to assist in problem solving.  As the name suggests, the goal of the framework is to bring all key people to the table to collaboratively develop solutions to difficulties that students are facing in the school environment.  Key to the approach is the importance of hearing student voice in these solutions, as opposed to strictly ‘adult imposed’ solutions, acknowledging the impact this can have on likely success. One key underlying belief of the model is that ‘kids do well if they can.’  This mantra certainly helps to shift to a more compassionate lens when viewing concerning behaviour and triggers a response to problem solve. We look forward to aligning components of this approach into our practices at SSPS.

I hope you can stay cool over the weekend!

Mrs Katie Hauser