Learning and Teaching

Students, and their learning is our core business. At St Raphael’s our staff are design curriculum and learning focused on ensuring student clarity and rigour through: 

• Learning Intentions - Articulating the learning to be undertaken and achieved and ensuring students know what they are learning and are not confused with the task or context.
• Success Criteria - The students either co-construct or are given, the key indicators to achieve the learning intention, to assist them on their journey and enable them to understand where they are in their learning and how they will know they have achieved success. 

In conjunction with this, learning at St Raphael’s is based on an inquiry model whereby student learning is geared towards a surface, deep and transfer model. It is fundamental for students that they have surface learning and skills, which provides the foundation on which to build, as students are then asked to think more deeply. 

Deep learning is where students consolidate their understanding and apply and extend some surface learning knowledge, to support deep conceptual understanding. 

Transfer learning is where students take their consolidated knowledge and skills and apply what they know to new scenarios and different contexts. It is also a time where students are able to think metacognitively, reflecting on their own learning and understanding. 

Research has demonstrated that the effect size of inquiry learning strategies equals more than one year growth for every student. So we imagine, and are excitied by what we as a school are able to achieve across every classroom, every day. 

The result is in what we see in our classrooms: rigorously challenged students whom are engaged in their learning, and well on their way to becoming independent and interdependent learners.