Step into a conversation with the four teaching principals of the Thunderbolt Alliance as they join Michelle Tregoning to unpack what it really means to engage with syllabuses. Jenna, Dani, Sarah and Tim share honest reflections from their leadership journeys, drawing on their experiences as Assistant Principals Curriculum and Instruction. Listen as they explore how these experiences translate into stronger engagement and practical insights with real-world stories that listeners can connect with.

Michelle

The following podcast is brought to you by the school and system leadership team in the Curriculum Directorate of the NSW Department of Education.

The podcast focuses on teaching principal and subject experts sharing their experiences to support all. These individual experiences are only one of many ways schools can work towards curriculum implementation.

Welcome back to our podcast, small school, big impact bite-sized strategies for leading curriculum. And our focus today is a session on engaging with the new syllabus. I'm going to introduce you to not just one, not just two, but four amazing teaching principals who are working around in the Armidale network.

Before then, I would like to acknowledge that I am coming from the lands of the  Gundungurra people today, and I'd like to pay respect to elders past and present as ongoing teachers of knowledge songlines and stories. Part of our work in the Department of Education is to strive to ensure every Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander learner in New South Wales achieves their potential through education.

So today we are exploring how we can engage with a new syllabus, and to do that, I have wrangled, not just one willing person, but four willing people.

Dani

My name is Dani Clyde Smith, and I'm principal at Rocky River Public School.

Rocky River Public School is a TP 2. We have about 38 students at the moment, and we're located 4k out of Uralla in a beautiful rural setting. And our class makeups, we have a K-2 class and a 3-6 class, and we work really closely with groups. Stage two and stage three, we break up for English and maths and other targeted programs.

Jenna: I'm Jenna from Kellys Plains and we're 10 minutes out of Armidale in a rural location as well.

We've got two classrooms, K-2 and a 3-6 and we've currently got 28 students and a learning support teacher who works closely with targeted intervention, small group tuition students as well. We've got a high cohort of students who are neurodivergent with two SLSOs currently in supporting those students to help us get them through the curriculum as well.

Sarah: I'm Sarah Harper. I'm relieving principal at Kingstown Public School, and we are a very small school. We have 10 students currently, and we're about 70 kilometres from Armidale. Kingstown is actually part of the Namoi network, but because of how close we are to the other alliance schools, we've actually worked with them for quite a long time now.

We also have a K-2 and a 3-6 for our literacy and numeracy, and then most of our students come together, so it's a multi-age setting for the CHPS, KLAs.

Tim

I'm Tim Tarrant, I'm the principal at Kentucky Public School. We have 26 kids. We have a K-2 and a 3-6 room. We are in a rural setting about 10 minutes south of Uralla and we are very fortunate to be a part of this amazing Thunderbolts Alliance group.

Michelle

Excellent. Well, thank you and welcome to the Teaching Principals podcast, and I not only love the name of your alliance. It sounds very cool to me. I feel like it could be in Marvel, maybe it's the next episode in what happens there, but I think there's a couple of really unique features of the Thunderbolt Alliance, apart from how great it sounds that are probably equally as interesting and much more meaningful in terms of learning outcomes for the students in our communities that we care for. And I thought I might ask you to talk a little bit about one of the unique features of you all and your network, and that is that you've all previously to being principals, been assistant principals, curriculum and instruction across one school or multiple schools in your areas or in other places in New South Wales. And to me that would seem like that would bring huge benefits into the role of teaching principal. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about what you see as some of the benefits of having been AP C&Is and now leading schools as teaching principals.

Jenna

It was the professional learning opportunities that we got given when we first went into the role as a AP C&I and being an AP C&I four small schools, I guess. And it was one day a week, which was a challenge, but we made it work and they gave us the leadership skills to be able to manage ourselves in those spaces and delivering high quality curriculum in literacy and numeracy, and providing that targeted support to those students or teachers in that space. So that's helped me, I guess, in my journey now being a principal to help my colleagues. And the students I work with in such a little space, and knowing that sometimes you feel isolated, but in an alliance, we've got each other and we've got each other's back, and we've got that commonality and common language already that we can use and thrive off each other.

Sarah

I think a big part of the AP C&I position is that planning to take on something within a school and how that's going to look and where you start and all of that process that comes before you even introduce something new. And then obviously the modeling that then happens from you as the person that becomes that almost expert and practicing what you preach is so much what we do then in that principal role and all of that was established through instructional leadership and through AP C&I.

Tim

And we saw the value of being the lead learner, taking that into a principalship and always wanting to improve every day. And I suppose knowing that when we wanted to implement things in our previous schools, we had to have a bit of a roadmap. We needed to know where we were gonna end, and then backward map, what were gonna be the obstacles, what were gonna be our successes, and then learning to work with a diverse group of people. So if we're across schools or in a bigger school, we had all that diversity of people that are beginning teachers, experienced teachers, teachers that are, you know, stage 3 all the way down. So that helped immensely in our roles.

Dani

Yeah, I definitely think we have a strength as a collective, the four of us, in terms of we are instructional leaders. As a teaching principal, you are, as Tim said, the lead learner in your school setting, and you are modeling that high quality teaching practice. We needed to be able to demonstrate that we know what we are doing. So coming from the AP C&I roles, we understand the syllabus and we know how to break it down. And the curriculum reform has been quite overwhelming for, especially in small schools where we are balancing many things at the same time. It's quite a complex setting, so having that confidence that we can navigate the syllabus, we understand how to map the syllabus, we know how to put that into practice, we can make sustained changes throughout our schools, is really powerful.

Michelle

Thank you, and I think for me, one of the things that I'm learning through this podcast is actually just how special the role of the teaching principal is in terms of what it affords you to be a lead learner. Do you know that one of the other teaching principals that we spoke to recently talked about this idea of that you can be standing with your staff leading a session on here are the changes coming up in the CHPS syllabus. And then you walk straight into your classroom and respond to those changes in pedagogy or content knowledge, and that it's not an additional ask for you as teaching principals in your schools to go find a classroom, to get yourselves on class, that you are already embedded and entrenched in the work of the school and the work of the teaching, and what an incredible opportunity that creates for you as lead learners in the school.

I wonder whether I could ask you to share a little bit about how you are now working with and thinking about the CHPS syllabuses, and what are the steps that you're taking, or how are you working with those syllabuses across your community to help your teachers engage with those.

Jenna

At Kelly's, we just took a deep dive straight in all four at the beginning of the year and over those staff development days, we unpacked them all. I had them all printed out outcomes content and laid it all across a classroom floor and see what we could actually fit together, what themes we could fit together, going across K to 6. And you know, some days all K to 6 are together and how we can still keep curriculum moving without putting some blockers in place or kids missing out. And so we unpacked it all as a staff and then looked at, or what could we do first? What could we do next? And taking a slow dive into one particular area at a time. And we did that through walk learning. And so each of our CHPS areas are identified in a learning space through K to 6, where the kids can actually go and investigate, problem solve, and unpack some of the content in there prior to us teaching explicitly in an afternoon session. And then we took on some PL as well, which was a deep dive into the CHPS syllabus, and it was here in Armidale which gave us a little bit more information around why we've changed, how they've changed it, what are the impacts going to be, or how to deliver it within school. As an alliance come together to share that with everybody so that we are lessening the workload on each other. And this term teacher and I decided that we really like dig tech, and why don't we put that into our kitchen garden program? So we've taken that on and really immersed ourselves into that syllabus and that space. We've put in trail cams so the kids can actually witness and observe the impacts that animals are having on our plants that we're going to eat. So we're harvesting some of our plants and the insects or the bugs, and we thought that the rabbits were actually eating some of our herbs. Well, no, it's the magpies. So what are we gonna do for these animals and birds? But so they're actually immersed in that sort of thing and we've taken on something that we are passionate about and we've got that skillset in that. And I think that's something that you could probably take a curriculum area that you've got a whole staff on board with and dive deep into that, that you're familiar with before, dabbling into the others maybe. Yeah.

Michelle

And that process, Jenna, you know, you can take a girl outta mathematics, but you can't take the math lover out of the girl. You know, so that that process where you were talking about of, you know, laying out the syllabuses and then looking for similarities and differences is a really neat reasoning activity right where you're, then finding these common threads that become the most common sense place to begin. Sometimes I think when new syllabus come out, and particularly when there's so many of them, it can feel really overwhelming of where to start. But finding those common threads can provide a sensible place to start and maybe even sometimes a more confident place to start. I'm gonna ask you guys to finish with what the podcast is calling an Ignition idea, which is what's one thing you think that teaching principals could use to light up their school tomorrow? Jenna might go first.

Jenna

I guess looking at CHPS and what we've gone through, don't expect it to be perfect the first time and stay open to the fact that I can go and change this, I can tweak this to engage my students. I can interpret it how I need to deliver it to the students who I have in front of me. And reach out to your small school colleagues or another school close by 'cause they're willing to help. There's people willing to share and help. It's not gonna be perfect straight away, but be open to tweaking, changing, exploring.

Tim

I think mine would be staying the course, because there's always things that pop up. We had issues throughout the year that we had to navigate, but we all stood behind this initiative and we, we pushed it with our staff. We are now seeing the benefit of it, and we are just about to have our planning date for next year, and we are gonna build on the success. So yeah, staying the course is mine.

Michelle

I have just always found teaching such an incredibly interesting thing to try to get working for kids in classrooms, and that when you see that learning like what a source of joy and nourishment that is in the work, and in fact how much fun you can have along the way. I hope you guys have had some fun with us today. For our listeners, we managed to wrangle Jenna a little while ago, and it was just three minutes or so before we started recording that we brought in Dani and Sarah and Tim since they all just happened to be together we thought how nice to hear from the whole of the community of practice.

Thanks everybody for sharing your experiences. We look forward to listening to others share their experiences next time. Have a lovely rest of your day.