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Vision and commitment

Our Vision at ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ»ÆƬ is to establish and maintain a positive community of engaged learners striving for the achievement of excellence. This Vision is communicated across various publications - via our website, school diary and many handbooks. A school’s vision helps to set the direction for the students, staff, parents and wider community to clearly articulate what our core purpose is.

Across various staff meetings in 2018, Ms Gilligan and I asked our K-10 Teaching Staff to re-visit the College Vision and to identify how we as a staff are working to enable this vision to be alive in at our College.

From this we determined that as a staff we are doing many great things to help students achieve the vision and from this established a set of guidelines to help us with our work and preparation in 2019.

To achieve this vision, we as a teaching staff are committed to:

• Working and collaborating with parents;
• Creating safe, structured and positive learning environments;
• Providing, nurturing and building positive relationships;
• Continuing to be lifelong learners by collaborating with peers, participating in professional development and providing clear learning intentions;
• Modelling positive behaviours that reflect our expectations;
• Having high expectations of students along with quality differentiation;
• Having clear boundaries and fair and consistent consequences;
• Being passionate about what we are teaching to demonstrate real world connections;
• Using data to plan and deliver curriculum based on best practice and individual student need; and
• Empowering students to be responsible and reflective learners.

Our next task was to establish a list of actions to help our students to work towards achieving this vision.

We have now incorporated a fortnightly Year Level Assembly in our 5-10 Year groups during EMPOWER lessons as a way of communicating these expectations to students, and providing them with the tools and skills to help them to reach this vision.

We believe that to achieve this vision, our STUDENTS need to:

• Be independent, self-motivated, resilient, creative problem solvers who are open to accepting feedback and coaching and are prepared to learn from their failures and take risks in their learning;
• Attend all classes in a punctual, self-disciplined and well composed manner and always try their best;
• Be respectful for the rights of others to learn in a safe and pleasant environment;
• Strive to understand the purpose and intention of what they are learning from an academic, spiritual, ethical and personal growth perspective; and
• Value their education whilst being kind, compassionate to others, and following and modelling Salesian values.

So far I have had the opportunity to speak to our Year 7 and 10 students about these expectations and helped them to unpack what they mean further. I also spoke of the importance of using each Expectations Report at the end of the term as a way of gauging how they are progressing towards achieving this vision. I will work with other year groups in due course as we believe that constant reminder of what our core purpose is when coming to school is crucial to success.

I have been very impressed with all students K-10 and their excellent engagement and work ethic so far this year. I have no doubt that each student at Dominic will strive to achieve his or her personal best as the year unfolds.

Mr Stephen Casni - Principal