 For us, deep learning is, it's about being very student-centred. It's about teachers facilitating the learning rather than controlling the learning. It's about making the learning very personalised. It needs to be collaborative. It needs to be creative and it needs to be purposeful. When I was appointed here in 2008 as the Foundation Principal, it gave me a great opportunity to visit schools in other dioceses, particularly in Sydney and Victoria, do a lot of research. YouTube became my friend looking at what was happening in countries overseas as far as education systems, particularly in Finland and the other Scandinavian countries. And from there, I guess, I thought this is a great opportunity to do something different. We very much went from an inquiry approach to learning. So it was based on, I guess, how we thought that children would learn best and we thought children learn best by talking with each other. We identified at the end of 2008 with our teaching team what we saw as the principles of teaching and learning that would underpin how our learners could be successful. And I think that inquiry approach definitely is something that underpins that. And as I said, when we talk about the design thinking process, that really has given us a much better structure to what we were doing in the initial couple of years when we started in 2009. So you'll find when you visit our learning areas that the whole cohort is in a learning area together and the teacher's team teach. And the children, because they're not in separate classrooms and they work together as a year level, they learn to resolve lots of conflict. They learn to work collaboratively with all sorts of different personalities and children with different interests and yet eliminates that competition. The learning space we designed as being very flexible as again some of the research that I had done was moving away from every student having their own desk and their own chair. Our children need to be able to move around. So our learning spaces were very much designed to be very flexible. Things on wheels so they can be easily moved around. Different types of furnishings. I know when we first opened here in Channel 7 did a little commentary on it and the reporter-journalist spoke about here at Starro the Sea where all the classrooms look like lounge rooms. And at the time I thought, this is a bit of an odd thing to say and then I started to think, well no, that was actually quite a compliment because it gave very much the impression that they are learning in a relaxed, happy environment. So we've found that even we've diminished I suppose the costs in budget by being able to have one smart board to the learning area. We have mobile devices in every one of the learning areas. We've started this year a BYOD program in our year 5.6 area which is proving to be very successful. So all those sorts of things, technology is a very neutral part of our learning environment as well. But I think the fact that it's very flexible, that things can be moved around enables that creativity in the children to really shine. What I have noticed about the children when they're working together in groups or with partners is that they're very focused. They're very engaged. They really are keen to share ideas that they're really enjoying what they're doing. We see a lot of talk. We really see their oral language developing extremely well. We see them engaged. They're keen to share ideas to listen to each other's opinions to share different perspectives and come up with a really good demonstration of what they're learning is. I think sometimes as teachers in the past we underestimate what our children are capable of. What their knowledge is, their eagerness to want to explore, to find out more about how the world works. We work on their strengths and they acknowledge what their strengths are. So during the course of the year they get lots of opportunities to meet with me and I give them feedback and they gain feedback from each other. We've also embarked on regularly learning walks and talks. So giving feedback to the teaching teams by meeting with students and talking to the students about a focus. We've had this term a focus on goal setting. So looking at how teachers work with children to set goals to progress their learning. We've also had a session on learning intentions and success criteria. So the teachers actually having to work with each other to plan what the learning intention is going to be for each of the sessions during the course of the day and course of the week. And then articulating that with the children so they're very, very clear too. And that's very visual as well what the learning intentions are for that activity or for that session and then what the success criteria will be. So it's very transparent. So the students know themselves what the intention of the learning is going to be and then how they will know that they have been successful in that learning. We do it from prep so they're very comfortable with it. We have had a number of visitors here over the past few years and that's one of the things that they do notice when they go into the learning areas themselves and start to have conversations with the children is how articulate that they are, how they can articulate what they're learning, how they're learning and they can articulate what they need to do to be able to progress even further in their learning. Working with the parents is always a challenge, particularly something where it's different to what they're used to from their own schooling and particularly from the schools around the area. So that has been a challenge for me. We have undertaken some parent education, need to do more parent education. They think, I think that sometimes that the learning areas, the children can do what they want, that it's a bit disorganised but it needs to be even more organised in a traditional classroom when you have, you know, 40 or 45 children in a learning space with two teachers and our support staff. The children do have a lot of autonomy, particularly in the direction they want to take their learning after the teachers have given them the content that they require. They tend to come up with different questions. We talk about what's Googleable and what's not Googleable. So the Googleable things are the things that children would be able to find out about the topic or the area of study that they're learning about. And then the non-Googleable are the things that you just can't find out about from Google. So they're looking at the higher order thinking again. So the children come up with some really, really interesting questions and I think that's where they really appreciate the autonomy that they are given to be able to take their learning on a pathway which is of great interest to them and that's where I think I see the engagement from the students that they are really motivated because they are directing some of that learning themselves and they're taking it down a path of interest to them rather than just being told what it is that they will be learning about. Reaching out to the community I think we do very well when it comes to the project-based learning that the students undertake as far as the local newspapers, the parish community, local community groups when we, as I said, it's project-based learning so we tend to try and find some way of directing their learning so that it can be communicated and celebrated in the wider community. So from that point of view I think we get a great connection with the wider community. I think there still needs to be work done around educating people in the community that what we do here is does work, is effective because I think there's probably still is a little bit in this community which is quite traditional, quite conservative, that what we are doing here is a little bit too innovative. A delight for me is to see and hear the passion that teachers have. I mean I guess as I said earlier I've worked in education now for nearly 40 years and to hear teachers over the years that the problem is with the students or the problem is with curriculum change or educational reform or we're doing this because we're told to by the system that the teachers here are passionate about what they do they enjoy working with each other and you can see that in a daily basis that they see a lot of benefit in the way that we work with the children because they can see how motivated the children become and how engaged they become in their learning and when we first started talking about discovery learning here about five, six years ago even from the parent's perspective it would be like the children the absenteeism rate was way down because parents were saying to us children wanted to come to school because they didn't want to miss out on discovery so it was exciting to hear that the children were going home and talking about it and using that language which is what we were using here amongst the staff so that common language that shared purpose of what we do is really something I think that we do celebrate and we need to celebrate even more