St Edward's Primary School teachers to complete learning projects through $20,000 researchers grant

All teachers in the school are taking on an action research project of their own to help them teach their students better.

It's through a grant from the Australian College of Researchers. This will fund University of Southern Cross tutors on visits to the school to help with the projects, and they'll study what these projects cover and how they help students.

For example, year 4 teacher Belinda Quail's project is looking at how best to help students who are very bright in maths, to keep them engaged in classroom discussions.

"They are finished [with their work] very quickly and do get quite bored and ... I really want to continue their love of maths and I feel like I'm not doing that very well at the moment," Ms Quail said.

"I have always taught that top end group so it's always something I've been trying to work on and then when this came about I was like 'right this is what my project is going to be' so I knew from term 1 that's what I was going to do so it wasn't a really hard choice for me."

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The year-long project will then finish with a learning symposium at the end of the year, where the findings of the study and the projects themselves will be released.

School principal Dr Jake Madden said with 21 classroom teachers working on their own project, the study was going to "improve teacher delivery which will manifest itself in students improving in their area".

"We're enabling and supporting each individual teacher to focus on their need or interest which then takes place in the classroom," Dr Madden said.

"This grant will provide an opportunity to understand more about the nuances of how teachers undertake their professional learning.

"In doing so, we will facilitate the enhancement of learning and teaching practices within the modern learning spaces at St Edward's."

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