 At Mitchell and State High School, the strengths and benefits of having a master teacher have been that the person has been key to driving the explicit improvement agenda. They're able to develop a culture of professional learning amongst teaching teams based on a very strong research background, having an extra person in the school to work side by side with teachers, particularly in their classrooms, around planning with a narrow focus on literacy and numeracy has enabled student learning, particularly at Mitchell and State High School, to improve dramatically even in the nine months of the role out of master teachers in Queensland schools. The master teacher role is a really exciting role because it's never existed in a school before, so it's something that's really different. It's about shaping the system and it's about building capability and capacity in the teachers. So it's about researching the pedagogical practices in my case, in the area of teaching writing, that are said to be high yield, applying them in our context, working with the teachers to get results from that and data from that to see whether they really were high yield in our area and in our context. Well the strengths and benefits as of the master teacher role are almost too many to list. Having Christy come into our leadership team, we have been able to achieve things that simply would never be possible without her in that role. So for us it's absolutely pivotal and has been a game changer for what we're doing at Cannonvale State School. What I like about the initiative is that the master teacher role can have a laser-like focus on an aspect of school improvement. The benefit around this is that I think it's the first time as a principal in a school I've had an opportunity to have a person who has no distractions, indulgence over one aspect of school improvement and not have to be distracted or concerned or worried about any other aspect of what's happening in the school. There are many things about this role that excite me. I think it's a great opportunity to really work closely with your teachers in a small group, but some of the main things that come to mind about excitement within the role would be the fact that you're able to focus on one area and work on that really well, drill down deeply and look at current research as to how you can address a problem, what sort of things you can implement in your school. But the biggest buzz out of this job is seeing the looks on the teachers' faces when they're actually a part of the project and seeing the results that they get as a part of putting in place some really good practice. The light goes on for them and that's really exciting. He's also able to provide that role of critical friend feedback coaching for teachers so that we can improve teacher capacity as well as the outcomes that students achieve and it's been really wonderful for him to be able to work with Naplan data, work towards better QCS results and basically we've seen an increase straight away for our school based on the work that he's done with teachers and students. The master teacher role, there's a lot of exciting elements about it and I think the biggest one is the fact that you get the chance to actually help your colleagues. When you first step away from the classroom, it's a little bit difficult to get used to not helping children, but when you have that cognitive shift and you start realizing that you actually get to help the people that help the children, that's pretty cool too and that's really exciting. I see a role within the system is that we can actually lay claim to being a system that responds to data and responds to research, but by the end of it, our children will be more successful, but our teachers will be far more capable and far greater leaders within our education system. I'm really excited because it's a new role. It's been evolving and with the evidence hub being able to take that to the next step, I guess. So I'm hoping that we can see some really effective results. My results, I'm hoping will give us 100% of our perhaps students reading at or above benchmark and we are on that journey. So I'm really excited. So watch this space for another two years, it can unveil. We've had the opportunity to share and collaborate across schools and different sites, which is really interesting to see the way that different people are working through an innovative learning process across Queensland. Being part of a state school system that invests in its teachers and their education is incredibly rewarding and ultimately being a master teacher is awesome.