Story of Impact: Macleod College, VIC

Snapshot

Macleod College is a P–12 school in the Northern suburbs of Melbourne, Victoria. Our school is very proud to have established a supportive and positive school climate for students’ and staff’s personal, social, emotional, and academic growth. Our college values of Achieve, Respect, and Connect underpin everything we do in our school community.

Challenge

We chose to start BSEM to support our staff with practical strategies that enable the highest quality of teaching and learning, with a particular focus on classroom-based practices. We had been working on using a consistent approach with our students through our values, behavioural expectations, and positive reward systems. We use the frameworks of SWPBS (School-wide Positive Behaviour Support) and Respectful Relationships. We decided to implement BSEM to bring these whole-of-school frameworks together into one cohesive and consistent approach that all students and staff could benefit from.

Solutions

Our first two sessions were in 2023, which covered the domains of Body and Relationship. Our staff loved the first training day and gave feedback about how amazing our presenter was at engaging us for the full day. After the first day the school wanted to capitalise on our staff’s enthusiasm and unpack the day of training. We held a professional learning (PL) session that allowed our staff to work together to discuss their key take-aways from the training day and we spent time in year level teams planning for how we could use the strategies.

We emphasised the following key points:

• BSEM strategies are not a ‘new shiny thing’ – they are founded on the evidence around what works to support student wellbeing and academic learning. BSEM is extending and building on our existing good practices.
• BSEM is a good fit for our values as a school. Our staff reported that they felt enthusiastic about using the strategies because they reflect the school’s choice to emphasise a positive, safe, and supportive teaching and learning environment.
• Getting the best out of BSEM is about working as a whole school to align our practice around BSEM strategies, building consistent, predictable routines across our learning environment.
• We will use data to review behaviours (compass/pulse data) so we can track positive changes and spot any areas that require further attention.
• Our students tell us over and over they want to connect with their educators. Relationship is what matters most to them, so working in ways that create, sustain, and build upon strong staff-student relationships is key to success. BSEM gives us the practical strategies to put student-staff relationships at the forefront of our practice.

Outcomes

Our staff have been steadily bringing BSEM strategies into their classrooms. On completion of a second successful day of training for BSEM’s Relationship Domain, we held another PL session to unpack our take-aways. The enthusiasm for BSEM was still evident. In this session, we formed small groups to develop an online BSEM Teacher Practice Toolkit, full of resources to assist teachers in the classroom. The toolkit, which we will build on over time, has resources suited to all our students from Prep to Year 12. It has been amazing to see how often our staff have found the toolkit useful.

When starting or implementing practices in schools we know it is important that staff have input into planning and implementing without this being overwhelming, so we have slowly implemented chosen priority strategies at the pace of staff needs. We have visual posters (see below) around our school on values and behavioural expectations. In every classroom we have a Brain Break resource with a vast selection of Brain Breaks that either teachers or students can choose.

When our leadership team run PL sessions with our staff on Wednesday afternoons, we use BSEM examples to engage and connect. At 3.30pm on a Wednesday, staff can be tired and low energy. At the meeting’s mid-point, we reflect on a win for the day, and use a positive primer or a fun Brain Break to boost staff morale, focus, and readiness to participate in the school PL. This has also helped our staff appreciate the value of the strategies, further encouraging their use in the classroom on a daily basis.

In 2024, we’re focused on embedding the strategies in our Macleod College Teaching Model. We will track our student data so that we can see any changes to student behaviour, and we will continue to develop our BSEM Teacher Toolkit of resources. We have started to think about how we can link these strategies into our students’ Individual Education Plans with a focus on Ready to Learn strategies.

We are excited to engage in the next two days of BSEM training and the continuation of our own professional learning sessions to unpack the information and discuss how to embed it into our school routines, policies, and procedures.

At the start of all our PL sessions we use the following message,

“SWPBS, BSEM and Respectful Relationships all contribute to building the values and culture of a school community, so they can work together to create safe, respectful and positive school environments that all young people can thrive within.”

Written by Assistant Principal Michelle Wallis