Literacy

"Thomas More College is committed to making a difference to the literacy standards of our students to support their learning across all subject areas. Our teachers use pedagogy that supports all learners and regularly update their skills to keep abreast of National Curriculum Standards with regard to literacy."

Literacy is defined as the ability to understand, analyse, critically respond to and produce spoken, written, visual and multimedia communications in different socio-cultural and situational contexts. Literacy development is a vital aspect of learning across the curriculum and needs to be taught in all Learning Areas. As they learn about language and texts, students also develop functional and critical literacy skills.

Thomas More College supports literacy by:

  1. Collating and analysing data from PATR, ESL, NAPLAN, SACE and any other test results made available to inform areas of literacy need and plan and implement appropriate professional development (from various sources) which supports a whole school literacy approach.
  2. Facilitate Professional Development for staff, and then support staff to implement literacy strategies by:       
  • Building Online and Resource Centre held resources.
  • Helping staff locate, modify and introduce resources and strategies for their learning areas.
  • Training teachers in the use of the Teaching and Learning Cycle by providing model structures and processes for completing tasks, then working with teachers, to define lesson sequences which improve the level of work by students by focusing on paragraph structure and sentence structure.
  • Modelling and assisting, through team teaching, the methodologies which support the learning of sophisticated and technical words in a specific topic/learning area, which may include definitions and spelling.
  • Designing tasks with an anchor word (Explain, Analyse, Recount, Argue, Discuss etc.)
  • Providing assessment criteria for written SACE acknowledged genres, macro genres, reading and viewing.
  • Providing assessment for learning rubrics.
  • Providing templates and basic structures for the tasks teachers ask students to produce (writing, speaking, viewing reading, listening)
  • Helping staff plan units of work which use literacy resources and strategies and where necessary support teachers by team-teaching lessons, and/or units to provide support, experience and confidence to teach and address literacy.
  • Continue the skilling of English staff and other teachers in the work which emanated from the Communities Making a Difference (CMaD) project.

We believe education is at the heart of a life well lived. It is a philosophy we instil in our students and one which underpins our College maxim.