[Gentle music]
Danielle Henderson, Assistant Principal, Seville Primary School:
So the course that I'm doing is the Graduate Certificate of Education Learning Difficulties, primarily because I had a lot of teachers coming to me that had students displaying learning difficulties, and they were asking for advice on what is best practice, what can I do with these kids?
[On-screen text: Graduate Certificate in Education (Learning Difficulties) University of Melbourne / Enhance your inclusive practice]
Chris Dossor, Principal, Seville Primary School:
She's always been passionate about making sure that students are captured at the point of need. And I think she's been able to bring a lot more of that evidence-based practice into the conversation, rather than going, we'll throw something at an issue and see what sticks.
Danielle Henderson:
When I was looking at the dyslexia component, I really started to explore what is the misunderstanding here, and then what do I need to work on specifically to enable this student to achieve success?
Chris Dossor:
We're having a conversation and you can see the light bulb moment go off for her and go, oh my gosh, we were just looking at this in class. Let's see what we can do to put that into action.
Danielle Henderson:
I think learning cognitive load theory really helped me to understand how students can very easily become overwhelmed by the amount of information or input that's coming into their brain.
Chris Dossor:
I feel like she's found a voice. We can have, you know, concrete discussions and throw ideas back and forth with founded knowledge.
Danielle Henderson:
We have really emphasised that wellbeing is as important, if not more important, than the curriculum.
Chris Dossor:
And at the moment, we're running through a process where we're auditing our classrooms. It will make a huge impact for our students. It will allow them to access material and their teaching and learning at a more focused point of need.
Danielle Henderson:
And then looking at the implementation of structured synthetic phonics helped me to really go into the teachers armed with this research behind why it was important for us to implement that at Seville Primary School.
Chris Dossor:
Which has worked really well in our favour when discussing change management, because it's a scary process. When people know somebody's got the research, somebody's got the knowledge to be able to support us in class with the students, it's worked wonders.
Danielle Henderson:
Everything we were doing directly connected to what was happening in the school.
Chris Dossor:
And that's led into a fantastic school plan for the next four years. But that has also very much detailed the key indicators of success for our AIP as well.
Danielle Henderson:
When I've realised what I can actually get out of study and what impact my study has had on our students has been huge.
Chris Dossor:
It's an exciting place to be and we can challenge what we've done. We can challenge to where we're going, which is really, really exciting.
[On-screen text: Disability Inclusion Education for All / The Education State / Victoria State Government / Department of Education / Victoria State Government – Authorised by the Victorian Government, Melbourne]
[End transcript]
Updated