How St Patrick’s College is Transforming Student Engagement

Schools are continually going through a process of reviewing and evaluating their practices, and are constantly on the lookout for new ways to engage with their students, whether that be through one-to-one strategies or systems to support a whole-school approach. With International Youth Day fresh in our minds from earlier this month, we wanted to catch up with a school that has been taking strides in this area.  

We spoke to some key staff members at St Patrick’s College Shorncliffe about the strategies they have put in place to support their students and how their school community has responded to these efforts. Here’s what Elizabeth Gaber, Dean of Administration and Business Intelligence, and David Crewe, Program Leader: Student Data and Performance, had to say.  

What systems/ strategies have you put in place to assist student learning? 

Six years ago, St Patrick’s College formally began their journey towards a more data-focused school culture. 

While their approach to assisting student learning was multi-pronged and consisted of a range of strategies, they explained that two specific methods had the community celebrating growth:  

1. Formalising the academic mentoring and goal-setting processes.  
2. Implementing an award that recognises outstanding improvements in learning. 

On their academic mentoring approach, St Patrick’s shared; 

“Our Year 5 to 10 students meet once a semester to reflect on their results compared with their previous targets and set goals for the semester ahead. Our Year 11 and 12 students meet one-on-one with their academic mentor for the above at the commencement of each unit.” 

They also expressed the benefit of Learning Analytics software to support staff.  

“TrackOne has been crucial to fine-tuning our methods and processes, but more importantly, developing our productive partnership with parents. Our parents are included as part of the process; they can easily access their son’s results and goals for the semester/unit ahead.” 

How has your student community responded? 

“The success of our program is partly a consequence of years of explicitly teaching and training our students about neuroplasticity, metacognition, and the value of mastery versus performance goals. This ongoing conversation has aided in developing students’ resilience and ability to approach their learning with a growth mindset.” 

Over time, this has allowed St Patrick’s to build a culture of striving for improvement amongst its students.  

“We had to be careful to educate the community that academic excellence and academic growth are not mutually exclusive. In other words, there is not one group of students who achieve gold, silver and bronze academic medals and then a completely separate group of students who ‘improve’. There is often overlap.  

This went a long way to building the credibility of the Outstanding Achievement in Learning Gains awards. Now, students will proudly accept their award and often will put as one of their goals to receive one of these awards.” 

Have you seen any changes in academic performance or student engagement, and how do you track this? 

Having implemented many practices and processes to improve academic performance, not just the ones mentioned above, St Patrick’s needed a way to track the success of their efforts, and normalise the use of this data. 

The school uses the TrackOne Learning Analytics Suite to track performance both within subjects, and in standardised testing results such as NAPLAN and ACER. In response to how they monitor student engagement, St Patrick’s shared; 

“In addition to academic performance, we have been able to track student engagement with their goal setting. When we first started, although we would encourage students to set achievable yet aspirational goals, being mindful of the timeframe to achieve the goal; they didn’t always action that appropriately. 

Over time, we have noticed students be more realistic. For example, in earlier years, it was not uncommon for students to be setting all ‘A’s for goals when their most recent report had a profile of ‘C’s. We now see students aiming to go up only one or two rungs of the ladder for the next reporting period.” 

Achievable goal setting is crucial to the ongoing participation of students. If students are consistently setting goals too high and not achieving them, they may become discouraged to participate genuinely in the future. Recognising this impact and actively encouraging students to set achievable goals allowed St Patrick’s to turn it around and create a great goal-setting culture among students.  

“We also spend a lot of time teaching our students that success doesn’t come from setting the goal; success comes from implementing strategies to achieve that goal. Over the past six years, we have seen significant growth in the quality of the strategies set.” 
 

What has the effect been on teaching and learning staff? 

St Patrick’s emphasised the positive impact that data analysis software had on their staff when implementing their strategies.  

“It has moved us away from data mining to being able to quickly access the information we need and therefore spend more time analysing it AND turning the analysis into actions in the classroom to improve student outcomes.  

Software like TrackOne helps us improve student engagement through the accessibility of meaningful data; by removing the barriers, teachers can get to adapting their pedagogies more effectively, and it’s easier to identify at-risk students and establish support strategies.” 
 

Do you have any advice for other schools looking to improve their student engagement and support strategies? 

When reflecting on the journey their school community has been on to get to where they are now, St Patrick’s emphasised the importance of communication. 

“Take the time to be clear with your community where you want to take them over the next five years and then taking the time to build this culture with all stakeholders; teacher, student and parent buy-in has been critical.” 

For more information about getting your school onboard for a data rich culture from the get go, check out our blog: Establishing a Vision for a Data-Rich Culture.

We’d like to extend our sincerest thanks to Elizabeth Gaber and David Crewe at St Patrick’s College Shorncliffe for sharing their school’s journey toward developing an amazing culture of data-informed practice, academic mentoring and goal setting.