Intervention

Differentiated and targeted teaching is a valued high impact teaching strategy that helps teachers ensure that learning is appropriately challenging and a successful experience for students of all abilities.

At St Patrick’s, school leaders and teachers use data to inform teaching practices and to apply differentiated teaching approaches to students across a number of areas of the curriculum. This approach to classroom learning enables teachers to identify the abilities of individual learners and provide additional instruction to learners who may benefit from support in smaller, more targeted settings.

Student achievement is closely monitored to help both teachers and students understand how their development is progressing, and to celebrate success in their learning. Teachers can use this data – as St Patrick’s have – to make decisions about student’s instructional needs and whether they may need to move between intervention tiers.

In the English learning area, St Patrick’s uses the Macquarie Literacy Program. There are three tiers to this program; InitiaLit (which is used in Pre-Primary as the class text) and two remedial tiers; MiniLit and MacqLit. Both of these latter intervention programs are evidence based and best practice aimed at assisting struggling readers in their reading development.  The programs rely on a systematic approach to teaching phonics and allow students to blend and segment sounds to decode words. 

In the Mathematics learning area, quality teaching strategies involve using concrete materials and manipulatives, digital technologies and interactive applications. At times, students receive more intense learning in smaller groups with the assistance of the teacher or an Education Assistant to provide additional practise and application to assist them to develop their knowledge and skills.

Additionally, we provide support to students who benefit from open-ended, challenging self-directed learning tasks. In our upper primary classes, our students participate in a variety of enrichment projects. Such self-directed tasks include Night of the Notables and Creative Edge Challenge. In 2020, a group of 7 Enrichment students placed in the top 7 of WA in the Creative Edge Challenge (also known as OptiMinds).