At St Monica’s, our staff are committed to professional learning opportunities, developing teacher skills and student growth. We focus on the needs of each individual and measure student progress on a regular basis. 

The teaching team shares best practice to build teacher capacity in each other and are committed to providing their students with a wide variety of engaging learning experiences that stimulates their curiosity and enables them to reach their full potential. 

This year, our Year Six teaching team have been using the national numeracy learning progressions to inform their teaching of Mathematics and implemented the ‘Convince Me’ strategy. 

“This strategy helped all learners take ownership of a problem. When I asked my students a question like "What is 1/3 + 1/2?" they needed to be able to justify their answer. They were able to use higher order thinking skills to explain their answers and collaborated with each other to convince sceptics,” Numeracy Coordinator, Liz Foster, said. 

The teachers are focused on helping our students to become life-long learners who can think independently. The students apply the ‘Convince Me’ strategy to convince themselves, their peers, and their teachers that they understand a concept. Students demonstrate their knowledge and understanding through visual, symbolic and language representations before progressing to the next concept. 

“I liked using the convince me strategy because it allowed me to explore different ways to explain my thinking like the visual way, I personally never used this way to explain things but this pushed me out of my comfort zone and I liked that,” Year 6 student, AJ S, said.

The teachers are able to cater for individual student needs, measure student growth, and track their students on the learning continuum. The teachers provide targeted feedback to their students to correct any misconceptions a child has relating to the mathematical concept taught. This provides informative data to plan future directions for teaching and learning experiences.