From the Director of Teaching & Learning
Learning partnerships @ SPS
The beginning of the school year brings with it a palpable sense of excitement, perhaps some trepidation and all the promise of a ‘new start’. The renewal we find in ‘beginning again’ each year drives us to bigger, better and brighter things. We go through the ritual of channelling what we have learned from the previous year and applying it to the goals we set ourselves for the year ahead. There is undoubtedly something magical in the nascent beginnings of a new school year. And that is especially true for me this year as I join the SPS community in my role as Director of Teaching and Learning. It is a role I am already cherishing as it combines two of my very favourite things – I love teaching and more importantly, I love learning. It is a joy that has been inculcated in me by the people who have walked alongside me throughout my education – my teachers. From the very first artworks I created, praised by my Kindergarten teacher with all the uplifting warmth and fervent enthusiasm that is a hallmark of our wonderful early years educators to my Year 12 English teacher whose ardent and detailed deconstruction of Bruce Dawe’s poem, Homecoming, is still, to this day, a lesson etched in my memory for the way he coaxed Dawe’s brutal, yet beautiful imagery from the page and set it free in my own imagination, these are the people who have inspired the work that I do as an educator, and I know all of our SPS teachers could recount similar anecdotes.
The people who modelled learning for us are the people who guide our teaching now.
Indeed, all of the great teachers I have encountered or admired, have been learners, first, foremost and always. Over the years, those teachers have moved from in the classroom to philosophers, artists, scientists and more whose work I’ve read, researched and enjoyed. I recall their words now as I think on the vital importance of our role as educators – to teach, but also to inspire in our students a capacity and a desire to learn for themselves. Michelangelo, the great Renaissance artist, said, at 78 years of age, “I am still learning.” Such simple words, but from a septuagenarian, there is a profoundness in his recognition that with all his knowledge, experience and wisdom built from a life well lived, there is still room for humility, for learning something from the world and from one another. I turn to other great minds and find similar sentiments. Helen Keller, whose life is a remarkable testament to the determination to learn, says this of her first foray into college: “Before me I saw a new world opening in beauty and light, and I felt within me the capacity to know all things.” In Keller’s desire to learn she found the confidence to know that she could. Albert Einstein, that unparalleled paragon of physics, acknowledged the power of simply wanting to learn as well. He opined, “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” Curiosity builds a fire that can never be extinguished and that is our hope as educators here at SPS – that we kindle the flames of learning for all the young people with whom we work.
I look forward to learning alongside the SPS community in 2025.
Senior Leadership Reflections
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