Duration: 3:05
Transcript
Digby Mercer, Principal: Como Secondary College is a Western Australian Government school and we cater for students from Years 7 to 12. The school population come from every part of the globe. I believe every student can learn. I believe that it's the teacher’s responsibility to help the student overcome the obstacles that they're facing in their learning.
Mileva Tubbs, Head of Learning Support Program: At the college, we have a number of staff who work in the Intensive Learning Team program, and each has a really crucial role to play in the intervention, ranging from the principal championing the intervention at the school, as well as our deputy principal who is in charge of our timetabling. I also oversee our staff that run the program, and our teachers deliver programs in both English and maths to our students.
Digby Mercer: We do reading specific programs, and they're scheduled when the students would normally be doing their English classes. The mathematics is when the students would normally be scheduled to do the maths classes. The spelling – the students will be coming out from a humanities class or from a science class. So it's 4 hours per week for our students in reading, in spelling, in maths. Now, some students might do all 3. Some students might just be doing maths. Some students might just be doing the reading. Some students might just be doing the spelling. But it's at the level of need of the student.
Jacqueline Kolman, Intervention Teacher: The level of progress that some of these kids actually achieve is incredible considering they started so low. I had one student that started with me in Year 7. She started at a really low level in numeracy. By the end of Year 8 – so 2 years of intervention – she scored 6 times better in her progress.
Zachary Healey, Intervention Teacher: Conscious in the back of our minds, while we've got a curriculum to teach, we've also got to teach the kids things like how you actually learn in class, what are the kinds of behaviours that we need to observe that lets us know that they're ready for learning in the classroom? That when we are transitioning a student, yes, they might have the knowledge, they might have the understanding of what we're teaching them, but we need to also observe and be able to be confident that they’ve got the skills to be able to learn in different sorts of contexts and in different sorts of ways as well.
Mileva Tubbs: I find it extremely rewarding as a head of learning area, working with our staff and seeing the progress that our students are making. In some instances that success has been incredible. It improves their attendance, they're coming to school more because they feel that sense of accomplishment. And sometimes our students have gone on to university. So it gives us a lot of gratification when we see that happen for our students. And that's why we're here.
Keywords: multi-tiered system of supports