Educators and Education support staff at St Anthony’s

Educators and Education support staff at St Anthony’s - we don’t just teach curriculum, we teach children

At St Anthony’s, all educators and educational support staff ensure high quality learning and teaching. The work we do here is exemplary, highly structured, student driven and data driven and it certainly needs to be in order to meet the many demands of teaching in this current climate.  Our educators are actively involved, highly educated, many with Post Graduate studies and Masters Degrees who work from the best available evidence of how children learn in the 21st Century. Our teachers continue to learn in order to provide the most up to date curriculum which meets National curriculum standards. All educators and education support staff diligently ensure that our students have access to a rigorous, locally relevant  and engaging learning program. Working alongside the AITSL Professional Standards for Teachers and Standards for Principals https://www.aitsl.edu.au/teach/standards, we (the educators) are all learners striving to continue to keep up to date with a fast changing society and educational climate. Sometimes the highly specialised work that we do is undervalued. The world economic forum suggests that:

“To thrive in the 21st century, students need more than traditional academic learning. They must be adept at collaboration, communication and problem-solving, which are some of the skills developed through social and emotional learning (SEL). Coupled with mastery of traditional skills, social and emotional proficiency will equip students to succeed in the swiftly evolving digital economy.”  

World Economic Forum® 2016

St Anthony’s educators and educational support staff are learners themselves, who continually research, reflect and discuss the needs of modern learners. Learning which is inquiry in nature, relevant to real life and the future, and which is accelerated by technology. Learners can learn anywhere, anytime and with anyone and so St Anthony’s learning practices reflect this. Our learning structures provide us with the affordance of agility and flexibility, with high digital leveraging and differentiation to meet the needs of the learners.

Pope Francis calls for teachers to: “not teach just content, but the values and customs of life.”

We as a society need to improve educational opportunities for all children, and improve the methods we use in the classrooms. Endless test prep, mind-numbing drills and rote memorization don’t equal a real education and this is the way many of us were educated when we were young or indeed in other countries. Today students need to be encouraged to solve problems on their own, to think critically about the information presented to them, and to collaborate with and learn from others around them.

Our students deserve engaging learning experiences that truly prepare them for the world and improve their chances of success, no matter the background from which they hail:  

The most important thing is not what we're teaching, it's how we're teaching. The Australian school system is evolving. Steering further from the 18th century “industrial model of education”, this 21st century approach responds to the needs of a changing curriculum in which technology and collaboration are at the fore.