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Narrator  00:00:05 Today we're celebrating Marist Sisters College, hailed as one of Australia's 5-Star Innovative Schools of 2024 joining us is Melissa Carson, who will reveal the dynamic mindset driving this innovation. 

Kylie Speer  00:00:21 Hello and welcome to the educator TV. I'm Kylie Speer, and joining me today is Melissa Carson, Leader of Professional Identity and Learning at Marist Sisters College. Marist Sisters College has been named as one of the winners of The Educator 5-Star Innovative Schools for 2024. Welcome to you, Melissa, congratulations, and thank you so much for joining us today. 

Melissa Carson  00:00:44 Thank you. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. 

Kylie Speer  00:00:48 Well, firstly, Melissa, as the college has been honored as one of the most innovative schools in Australia, how would you generally characterize the internal mindset with regards to innovation? 

Melissa Carson  00:01:02 Well, I think particularly here at Marist Sisters College Woolwich, we are very willing to be engaged in innovation. I think the staff here have a lot of trust, you know, in the leadership, and that they know that any innovation that we are working on is something that has been considered, is research based, and will ultimately have an impact on our students, a successful impact on our students who are our primary concern. And something else, I think, that you know connects to that mindset is they know that they will have a voice in the innovation.  

Kylie Speer  00:01:45 The college has its own compass for life. Could you tell us what this brings to the day to day operations for students and staff? 

Melissa Carson  00:01:54 So the compass for life is a lived experience. It is the basis of three of basketball frameworks, one for wellbeing and learning, one for faith formation and the other for professional learning. So it's something that guides all of our actions. It is based on, you know, supporting us in working towards sisterly relationships, the way we share our gifts and talents, supporting us through empowerment of ourselves and one another, and also demands of us courage, which can be difficult to demonstrate at times, but it is the focus of our goal setting that we are constantly working towards. 

Kylie Speer  00:02:38 Each staff member at the college is engaged in coaching and mentoring, and you've recently launched the early career teachers program. How has this gone so far, and what benefit has it brought to your teachers? 

Melissa Carson  00:02:52 Okay, so we've been piloting the early career teacher program since 2023 and during that time, we've had 26 early career teachers work through the program. This year, we've developed a second phase of the program, as the first phase takes people through basic orientation to the school, their orientation to teacher, identity, their life as a professional teacher, we support them with wellbeing. And many early career teachers are still completing their university degrees when they start teaching, so that can be something that's a real challenge. And we also then focus on professional practice, so guiding them through their nessa accreditation, then the second phase of that program really focuses in on what an early career teacher needs at that next point, which is pedagogical content knowledge. So we pair them up with a middle leader mentor who is able to take them through that really more subject and content based knowledge that potentially myself as an early career coach might not have. You know, I'm not a maths teacher or a science teacher, so it's better placed being somebody who is in terms of the more broader coaching and mentoring. Well, that is, you know, a focus of the school is moving forward on this, developing a culture of coaching. And you know, we use that at the moment in our professional growth in action process where every staff member works through that process during the year, and they have dialog with their coach or mentor, depending on where they are in the continuum, and they are working towards a particular problem that they're focusing on, and they're using data. They're trying to kind of work on the inquiry model, so the coaching is there to support teachers and also be part of that. Dialectic process. 

Kylie Speer  00:05:02 Melissa, you use data points including PAT, AAS, NAPLAN, formative, evaluative tracking tools and transition tracking tools. How challenging is it to collect this data accurately, and how is it leveraged to raise standards? 

Melissa Carson  00:05:18 It's an interesting thing here I've been working on like, how we capture all of the data and use it effectively, probably since 2013 that, you know, the last few schools that I've worked at, and I've been working with these different software providers and organizations from all different school systems, as we're all faced with the same conundrum, but city Catholic schools have come up with a really great dashboard where they have worked with leaders and teachers in schools to access that data and keep it in real time. Many of the other platforms in the past have required people to be putting in data constantly and updating that by uploads, where this works in real time, where a teacher can look at a data visualization and very quickly ascertain the progress of any particular student in their class. And we work with our tutor teachers and Class Subject teachers so that they understand how that can impact on their relationships with their students and mentoring them, but also, you know, their classroom performance, their daily practice. So we are leveraging it on a day to day basis by supporting our teachers with their own understanding. You know, it's gone. Are the days, I think, where leaders are the people that that analyze all the data and feed that to people. It really needs to come from the ground, so that people have an appreciation for it and can also work with the data so that it informs the day to day practice. So it's been a challenge, and it's still a continuing challenge to be able to use the data or access the data correctly, but I think we've definitely gone a long way with the visualization through the data dashboard from syna Catholic schools and also the octopus tentacles program that we're using in the background of our learning platform, also to collect formative data. 

Kylie Speer  00:07:23 Education Consultant Janine Stratford, at coaching focus provides training to both your middle leaders and college leadership team. What is it about janine's guidance that attracted you to work with her? 

Melissa Carson  00:07:35 So I think I started working with Janine for about 2018 where she had individually reached out to me to work with her on the leading edge conference that she was running a few years ago at that time, and from the moment I first started to work with her, I could see that she definitely had a passion for supporting women in Leadership, which is a real focus here at the college. But I think my first and foremost, she understands teachers, and she understands how schools work, and not all coaching programs or organizations do that. You know, they, they make education fit into their model, where she she makes or tailors her model to working with teachers. She's also, you know, she challenges the leadership team to make us, you know, a better a better group. And she, you know, continues to hold us accountable to the goals that we set through the coaching questions and the structures that that she asks us to work with. You know she is there to support at any time, and has been really pivotal empowering our staff to feel like they have the capacity to do this. And I would consider her a great role model for any leader.  

Kylie Speer  00:09:00 Yeah, and finally, Melissa The college also follows transformative practices underpinned by the learning disposition wheel Anderson and Jefferson, as well as an explicit instructional model based on rose and shine and implemented through the tempo e model. How do you optimize the use of the temple E model? 

Melissa Carson  00:09:24 So our temple E model application is through our professional learning community groups. So we have eight groups that meet a few times each term, and we're working on problems that feed into our annual improvement plan. So these are student based problems, where we're starting with data and trying to, you know, solve a conundrum that ultimately will improve our student outcomes. So some of the things that our groups are working on this year include our development. Of a school Reconciliation Action Plan. We've got groups that are focusing on our cumulative learning growth, individual learning, conversations with students, improving engagement in goal, setting, improvement, improving attendance. And so the temple E model allows every staff member to go through that process of having a problem, looking at the data, going through research, creating a test, trying to put in a strategy and implement it and testing it. Re evaluating. So last year, we had a symposium where we presented our findings, and we're now using some of the processes and products that came out of that issue. We will launch a journal that is a collection of all of our work as research articles, but you know, finished products in terms of our student mentoring process, updates, the Reconciliation Action Plan. We have tangible things that will come out, but we will also have this great collection of research material that we can all use and fall back on when we're looking at problems.  

Kylie Speer  00:11:13 Well, congratulations and thank you once again for your time today. Melissa, it's been so wonderful chatting with you 

Melissa Carson  00:11:19 Thanks. I really appreciated it. 

Kylie Speer  00:11:23 And thank you, of course, to our viewers for watching the latest episode of The Educator TV. We look forward to seeing you again.