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High Notes, Vol 24 No 11, April 28 2023

From the Principal

Welcome to Term 2

I trust that students and teachers had a relaxing break after term one and have come back refreshed and ready for the most demanding term of the year. All years will be assessed and reported on during this term.

Our staff had a busy day at their Staff Development Day on Monday, raising their awareness of Aboriginal culture, traditions and stories and integrating teaching units to enhance student understanding into programs in Stage 4. We heard from Deputy Premier and Minister for Education, Prue Car, who stated repeatedly her intention to value and support teachers and SAS staff better than her predecessor. To that end, some months of negotiations with unions on pay and conditions are ahead. The Student Behaviour Strategy due for implementation in Term 2 has been postponed. Acting Secretary for Education, Murat Dizdar, added his assurances that additions to teacher workloads generated from the centre would be dialled down this year.

Both leaders were upbeat about addressing the issue of teacher shortages through recruitment and retention of teaching staff by offering permanent employment to a growing proportion of our workforce that has been casualised by temporary engagements. Let us hope that acceptable outcomes are forthcoming to improve the morale of teachers which has been impacted severely by additional workloads caused by the pandemic and compounded by frequent additional expectations for accountability and reporting over the last several years.

We had another whole staff session on sentence conscious pedagogy, led by Cassandra Pride and Madeleine Rigby, to refresh our understanding of our literacy foci for 2023. Several teachers shared their experiences of using kernel sentences to promote complex sentence building as well as the ‘because, but, so sequence’, to probe student understanding of topics and concepts by engaging them in critical thinking and considered expression of their responses to stimulus statements. If we achieve immersion of students across faculties using these techniques, we should see improvements in the clarity and coherence of student written responses this year.

Clearance Forms

George Barris and Jamie Kay presented to staff the new digitised Clearance Forms acquitting procedures, using a bespoke application created by Old Boy Eric Holmstrom. The online process should reduce teacher time in processing due to the absence of paper forms, allow SAS staff to tick off and speed up the processing of co-payments and textbook returns, and offer visibility to students and parents about their outstanding commitments.

Anzac Day Service

I was proud of the representation of our school at the dawn service held at the Anzac Memorial in Moore Park on Anzac Day. Well over 100 people attended the service. Representatives from the ̽»¨ÊÓƵ Cadet Unit made up the catafalque party and were very disciplined in holding their stations during the hour-long service. Many wreaths were laid by representatives of stakeholder organisations in the Moore Park area, including Victoria Barracks, the Waratahs, Easts Rugby League, the Entertainment Quarter and Centennial Parklands. Our cadets laid a wreath in honour of the ̽»¨ÊÓƵ Cadet Unit. Thank you to Meredith Thomas for once again organising our cadets to represent the school and serve the community at an important function; and thank you to the cadets who gave up their time to commemorate our important national day.

Assessment and Reporting Update

Year 8 assessments commence in Week 2 from Monday May 1 to Friday May 5. Reports will be finalised for students with completed Clearance Forms to discuss with the Principal from May 22.

Sentence Conscious Pedagogy: Expanding Sentences with Coordinating Conjunctions.

A conjunction is a word that joins one word, phrase or sentence to another word, phrase or sentence. The most common coordinating conjunctions are - and, but, or, nor, yet, whereas. Correlative conjunctions – either…or; neither…nor. Example:- Mike performed very well in mathematics but he didn’t score above the class average in English. Either you have mislaid your textbook or you are being misleading about where your book is. Neither cricket nor swimming is a winter sport at High. Minh likes athletics whereas Henry prefers basketball. Take away the conjunctions and you have two sentences that stand alone.
Dr K A Jaggar
Principal