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Learning Overview

At St Mary’s, we are a community of learners inspired by Christ’s love.

Our goal is to support students striving for personal excellence in a safe, engaging environment that promotes individual responsibility and respect for self and others. Our mission is to empower our students to discover their gifts and realise the difference they can make in the world.

Our learning environment encourages collaboration, and critical and ethical thinking skills, ensuring students graduate from the college as productive and positive contributors to their community.

At St Mary’s, we are committed to building the capacity of staff as leaders in learning. A continued focus on the analysis of data and the development of students’ numeracy and literacy skills, especially non-fiction writing, is paramount to our current School Improvement Plan.

We are committed to building a culture that promotes learning and honours our moral imperative to be generative, Christ-centred place, calling all community members to the fullness of their being as people and learners.

Our common work is about deepening our shared professional capital, both individually and collectively, in highly specific ways to serve our core goals:

  1. promoting our Catholic identity
  2. promoting the care and wellbeing of people
  3. enhancing student engagement, growth and achievement in learning
  4. reducing the variation in the quality of classroom teaching
  5. building the capacity of staff as “leaders in learning”.

This achieved through:

  1. building relational trust (“the key enabler of innovation” – Fullan, Indelible Leadership, 2017)
  2. engaging in coherence-making – deepening our shared understanding about the nature and purpose of our common work in the minds and actions of staff individually and especially collectively
  3. employing the “coherence framework” (Fullan) as a vehicle for collective action
  4. building our professional capital by focusing on deepening our social capital (collaborative expertise/social efficacy)
  5. promoting deep learning using “visible learning, visible teaching” (John Hattie) as our authoritative pedagogy
  6. following a “pedagogical game plan” – our shared vision for learning and teaching.