Newsletter Term 3, Week 2 2020

Dear members of the SJC Community,

I would like to offer a very warm welcome back to Term 3 to our students and staff. I trust that all in our community had an enjoyable break and are again looking forward to a fulfilling, challenging and enjoyable term. I would particularly like to express my best wishes to our Year 12 students as they commence their final term of secondary education. As I said on assembly last Monday, "Welcome to your final first day of term!"

As mentioned, last Monday saw the first whole school assembly we have experienced since mid-March. I would like to thank our College Captains, Amy Mazzarella and Tom Michael, for the way they addressed the students and staff present. They articulated the challenges and frustrations that have been experienced by all students, particularly our Year 12 students, perfectly but maintained a sense of positivity by expressing the possible learnings and benefits that have arisen from our shared experience.

I spoke to the students about the need to seek from the experience what has been learned and gained, and focussed on two traits; resilience and gratitude. During the lockdown, students were mainly accountable to themselves and needed to exhibit skills that will stand them in good stead as they move through life. Challenges will forever be a part of their lives, as all adults can attest, and challenges cannot be overcome without resilience. The ability to cope with, and conquer, the hurdles that are placed before us is imperative and our students, along with staff and families, were required to do so during the blended learning environment. 

Gratitude was the other trait I discussed on assembly and given what is going in Victoria and parts of Sydney, I pointed out that there was much to be grateful for. In taking a leaf out of our Bishop's playbook, I expressed the need to be grateful in one's life if true happiness is to be found. Our Hanley House motto is "Others before self", something that Fr Hanley epitomised during his time as Parish Priest of Tweed Heads and something our Bishop, and College, strongly advocates for. We need to be grateful that the virus has not impacted greatly on the health of members of our community and for the fact that our time working away from school was minimised. 

I ask you to reiterate with your child the importance of being a resilient and grateful young person. 

Term 3 COVID-19 Restrictions

I ask that you take some time to review this document that outlines the current restrictions being placed on Catholic Schools in NSW. Please understand that all decisions are made with the most current health advice in mind. 

Some of the main points include:

• If you have been in Victoria you need to be in self-isolation for 14 days. Students are not to attend school.
• Good hygiene and social distancing between adults are the best personal actions to prevent the possible transmission of COVID-19.  Therefore, at school, students are asked to socially distance from staff where possible
• In classrooms, hand sanitiser is used by all students and at various points in the playground. Students and staff are encouraged to wash their hands regularly, use hand sanitiser and follow appropriate coughing etiquette - as per the signage around the school
• Cold & flu symptoms: If a staff or students display any cold or flu symptoms, even mild symptoms, they must stay at home. People are encouraged to undergo a COVID19 test to expedite their return to school.
• School excursions and school camps remain on hold and will be reconsidered in early Term 3.  A ‘local field trip’ can proceed, as approved by the Principal 
• Parents and visitors are to avoid extended visits on school premises unless under extraordinary circumstances as deemed appropriate by the school principal.

All Year 9 and 12 parents received a letter on Friday outlining the current status of camps and graduation. In short, our Year 9 camp has been moved to Week 9 in Term 4 and our Year 12 Graduation events could look very different this year. Please understand we are doing all we can to ensure all our SJC students' experiences are the best they can be under current restrictions. 

With regards to places of worship, from Friday 24 July, NSW Health mandates that the number of people in a public place of worship must not exceed 100 people, subject to the 4 square metre square rule. The maximum applies to the whole of the venue.

People attending religious services will be required to provide their name and contact details so that they can be used for contact tracing. Please read further in this newsletter for instructions from our local parishes.

Reflections Days Year 7-10

It has been great to see our Year 7 - 10 students participating in reflection days across four days of last week. Spending time together as a cohort is always of great benefit and learning how to be a better human is a great gift. If you have not discussed the reflection day with your child, please do so. 

Schools Improvement Surveys (DOLSIS)

A number of families were sent text messages last Friday informing they had been randomly selected to take part in this year's school improvement survey. Firstly, I thank in advance all the families who take the time to provide valuable feedback to the College. Secondly, all students will receive an envelope on Monday that will contain information regarding the survey. There is a two-week window to complete this. Finally, you have the choice to complete the survey online or via a hard copy. When it is completed, please ensure your child returns the hard copy to the office or if completed online, informs the office staff that is the case. All students who return (or inform of) a completed survey will receive a bribe reward.

Kind regards

Mr Scott Thomson
Principal

Student Engagement and Application Report (SEAAR)

Congratulations to the following students on their extraordinary achievement in the latest SEAA Report. These students achieved a perfect grade average of 5.0:

Cycle Four (Term 2, Cycle 2):

Mr Peter Lyon
Assistant Principal

Term 3, Week 1

Welcome back to Term 3! What a busy start to the term it has been.

This week has been a very special week at the College with Year 7-10 students participating in their year level reflection days. We began these on Tuesday with Project Hatch presenter, Dave, who spent a day each with Year 8 and Year 10 students. Thursday and Friday saw Chris Doyle return to the school to inspire our students in Year 7 and Year 9 to value and care for one another and ‘want the best’ for everyone in their year level. 

The days were filled with self-reflection, music, songs and laughter. I would like to thank Ms Sara Reynolds for her efforts organising these days over the week; all the teachers who kindly attended the days; and our wonderful students for their engagement and active participation. We look forward to further discussing these events with students and embracing their messages throughout the remainder of the year.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the Year 7 Catholic Studies teachers were fortunate to participate in Professional Learning days with international Project Based Learning expert Michael McDowell, who zoomed in from America. The professional learning sessions form part of the CSO RENEW work in Religious Education that will see SJC students participate in Catholic Studies learning that is relevant and rigorous. Through this learning, students will develop the skills and dispositions to be assessment capable and understanding of the relevance of the Catholic Tradition within the world they live. 

I would like to thank Miss Gooley, Mrs Fenn, Mrs Pratt, Mr Visser, Mr Everingham and Mr Trimboli for participating in these days. We look forward to sharing this learning with our parents through the next two terms as students develop projects. 

Mr Ryan Campbell
Assistant Principal - Mission

Weekend Mass Times

All Mass and Reconciliations will be held at St Joseph’s Tweed Heads
Saturday Vigil:  5:00pm and 6:30pm
Sunday:  7:00am, 8:30am and 10am

Weekday Mass Times

Monday to Friday 9:10am
Saturday: 9:00am

Reconciliation

Saturday:  4:00-4:35pm
and 1st Friday:  9:40-10:00am

Please contact the parish office for any Baptism enquiries.

Fr Michael Brady
Parish Priest

St Joseph’s Parish put on extra Mass times in its schedule to accommodate more parishioners in taking part in the celebration of the Catholic Mass. As of Friday 24 July, NSW Health advised that this must not exceed 100 people, subject to the 4 square metre square rule.

On arrival attendees have to sign in providing their name and phone number, hands are then sanitised AFTER signing in and BEFORE entering. Ushers will show people where to sit, and the church is marked out for physical distancing.

Weekday Mass Times

Sts Mary & Ambrose Church, Pottsville
Tuesday      9:15 am

St Anthony’s Church, Kingscliff
Wednesday 8:00 am
Thursday    9:00 am (during school term, and 8:00 am in school holidays)
Friday        8:00 am

Reconciliation Times

Kingscliff – Saturday 5:00 pm – 5:30 pm

Weekend Mass Times
(Note: Weekend Masses must be pre-arranged. Please call the Parish office to register your interest or to book)*

St Anthony’s Church, Kingscliff
Saturday 6:00 pm
Sunday   9:00 am

Sts Mary & Ambrose Church, Pottsville
Sunday   7:30 am

Fr Paul McDonald
Parish Priest

• Hygiene directions (including regular cleaning and disinfecting the church) must be observed including maintaining physical distancing, taking care when coughing or sneezing and sanitising hands upon entering the church.
• Please do not attend if you are unwell or experiencing cold or flu-like symptoms.
• Please do not attend if you have been in any COVID-19 hotspots in NSW or Victoria in the last 14 days.
• Please book for Weekend Masses* by calling the Parish Office on a Wednesday or Thursday between 9:00am to 3:00pm, on (02) 6674 1284.

We look forward to returning to normal Mass numbers when the Covid-19 restrictions are lifted.

Vaccinations for Year 10 and Catch-ups for Year 8 - TOMORROW

A reminder to our Year 10 families about the vaccinations taking place TOMORROW, Tuesday 28 July.

Forms were issued to Year 10 students on the first day of this term, and a signed permission slip needs to be returned to the College for the vaccination to take place.

In addition to this, a reminder that the previously contacted families of Year 8 students to receive catch-up vaccinations will also take place on Tuesday 28 July.

NSW Health would like to remind families to ensure that students have breakfast on vaccination day to help avoid faints.

Bike Safety

To assist in the safety of our students who choose to ride their bike to school, the College requests families to ensure that their child(ren) wears a helmet. There are a number of students who have been arriving to and departing from school with their helmets on their handlebars as opposed to being correctly worn on their head.

Further information regarding helmets and safety gear can be accessed through the Transport for NSW website.

Sports Uniform Change in Practice

Due to the current restrictions, the Lismore CSO has recommended that students avoid using change rooms for sports lessons. At present, we allow students who have sports or practical PDHPE lessons on a given day to wear their sports uniform. For our Year 7 and 8 students, there will be no change. Stage 6 students are allowed to wear their sports uniform on Wednesdays. 

In Stage 5 (Year 9 and 10) and Stage 6 (Year 11 and 12), students who study PASS or SLR as an elective are required to wear their formal uniform to school and change into their sports uniform. This practice will cease until further notice. Any student who has practical sport lessons for PASS and SLR will now wear their sports uniform all day, on the allocated practical day. 

Teachers will be provided with a document outlining the allocated practical days for the relevant subjects and students who choose to wear their sports uniform when they do not have practical lessons will be dealt with in accordance with College policy and procedure. 

This new practice will take effect from today. Thank you for your understanding.

Mr Eamon Brown
Leader of Pastoral Care and Student Welfare

Big Science Competition Results are in!

Congratulations to the Year 9 Accelerated Science students who participated in the competition this year. The competition was completed online and covered critical thinking and problem solving skills in science.

Congratulations in particular to Harrison Lucas who received a High Distinction (top 5%) and Luca Jones, Mitchell Poole, Lauren Davis, Phoebe Derrick, Felix Loughran and Will Whalen who received a credit in the competition.

Each student who took part in the Big Science Competition received a certificate and a sticker. 

Ms Fiona Murray
Assistant Leader of Learning – Science

Skills and Thrills is Going Digital! Have you Pre Registered?

Shortly SkillsOne will be taking our highly successful Parents Showcase digital, with our free video for parents due out on August 10 2020. The Skills and Thrills Digital Parents Showcase is an engaging and informative 20-minute video created to highlight vocational education and training (VET) and the success stories that emanate from VET pathways. The Digital Parents Showcase will help parents better understand vocational pathways, including apprenticeships/traineeships and school-based apprenticeships/traineeships and give parents the knowledge they need to help their children make informed career choices.

Topics Covered in the Video:

• Apprenticeships and Traineeships
• TAFE/ Private Training Providers
• Industry trends
• Covid-19 impacts on industry
• Funding options available (Smart and Skilled)
• Vocational Education and Training (VET) Options: School-delivered VET, SBATs and EVET
• Where to find information
• Resources and support services

How Parents can access the content:

• Content will only be available for a four-week period from August 10 to September 4 2020. Content cannot be downloaded or saved, so must be watched during this time.
• To participate, parents need to pre-register their interest to receive viewing information and updates at www.skillsone.com.au
• Content will be free for parents
• Live Q&A Panel discussion on August 26 (evening) on SkillsOne Facebook
• Parents can pre-submit any questions to do with careers/ industry to info@skillsone.com.au

National Skills Week 2020

August 24-30 2020 – National Skills Week will set out to bring to life the positive messages, highlighting the talents, the skills, the career pathways and the value of apprentices and trainees across Australia to the wider public and employers. The week is dedicated to raising the status of practical and vocational learning. Find out more at https://www.nationalskillsweek.com.au/.

SCU Head Start Program Semester 1

Of note is Gace Stimson-Thurecht's achievement of a High Distinction for the Australian Legal System course. Well done, Gace!

Univerity of Queensland Online Open Day

The University of Queensland is welcoming all prospective students anywhere in the world to experience UQ at our fully-online Open Day.

UQ Open Day Online - Sunday 2 August, 9am to 6pm

If you're curious about UQ study options, course information, accommodation, entry requirements or pathways - you'll find the answers to their questions, and more:

• explore our world-class facilities through virtual campus tours
• video or text chat with academics, staff, and current students
• watch exclusive on-demand content about all things UQ - including in-depth looks into programs, accommodation, sports, scholarships and more.

Register now and secure your place.

Ms Frances Stegeman
Leader of Careers and EVET
Leader of Learning - Work Readiness Pathway

How Teachers Assess Your Child’s Learning

I know we’ve all heard it before but 2020 has shaped up to be one crazy year of change and uncertainty. When learning and teaching (and parenting) went online in April, the face of teaching changed more in six weeks than it has in the past six decades. The change meant that teaching practices have had to shift - there was no alternative. The types of assessments at the end of a unit of work were no longer fair or possible. Consequently, teachers were required to emphasise more ongoing assessments to monitor student progress in learning.

These ongoing assessments are what teachers call “formative assessment” and can be viewed as “snapshots” of learning. Examples are short quizzes, feedback on daily work, one-minute written responses, summarisation, creating diagrams and class discussion. Teachers use the information that they receive from formative assessments to guide themselves and students with their understanding of learning and to plan their next steps in the learning process. These types of learning tasks were abundant in the Blended Learning Environment and many teachers on staff at SJC have spoken to me about how they have never known where their students (your children) are at with their learning better than they have over the past six months. Of course, formative assessment is not new to teaching but the nudge towards this practice, through necessity, has sharpened the teaching practice of many teachers and is one of the shining pieces of silver in the lining of a COVID world.

Parents of children in Year 7 would be familiar with the journey the College is taking to improve learning in that year group. We, as a staff, did not envisage we would be thrown into replicating this with other year groups so soon but it has happened. As a result, formative assessment is the major type of assessment that teachers are currently using in Years 7-9. What this means for you as parents are that the teachers of your children know where your child is at with their learning on a much more regular basis. This can only be good for your child.

The difficulty that remains for students (and teachers) of Years 11 and 12 is that the Higher School Certificate (HSC) is an ever-present driver of teacher practice. Due to the nature of preparation required for this process teachers have returned to more traditional practices around the end of unit assessments for courses. This does not mean that formative assessment is tossed aside and teachers still use formative assessment to guide their daily practice. It simply means that the end grade for work is mainly based on the end performance rather than the snapshots produced throughout a unit of work. Children in Year 10 have also returned to this process of assessment as the grades from this year of study will be the first entries on their Record of School Achievement (RoSA).

Study Skills Handbook - Tips for July

Multi-tasking? Myth or reality? It all depends on who you talk to…

Ask any student and they will tell you they can multi-task with ease. Do homework, watch TV, listen to music and check their phone all at the same time, no problem. Ask the academic researchers though and a different story emerges.

Dr Larry Rosen, Professor of Psychology at California State University, explains that what is actually occurring in this ‘multi-tasking’ is ‘task switching’. Instead of doing two things at once, students are actually switching their focus from one task to another and back again, in a parallel fashion, at high speed, resulting in them staying on task for an average of only 65% of the time period and for a maximum of only 3-5 minutes at a time. Constant task-switching results in it taking much longer to complete the individual tasks not just due to the interruptions, but also because there are delays as the brain switches between tasks and refocuses.  This brief bottleneck in the prefrontal cortex delays the start of the next task and the more intense the distraction, the longer it will take the brain to react.

A study conducted by Dr Rosen’s team sent varying numbers of text messages to students in a lecture then tested the students on the content of the lecture. The results were surprising, it was not the number of interruptions that negatively impacted results, it was the time taken by the students to react to the interruptions. Students who responded immediately performed worst on the tests. Those who considered when to check the message and respond (ie. in a part of a lecture they deemed less relevant) performed significantly better.

What we can learn from this is that students need to become more aware of their ‘task-switching’ and make conscious decisions as to when they choose to shift their focus – instead of being enslaved by their technology and at its constant beck and call. We need to teach students that this constant mental task shifting (even thinking about the technology has the same effect as actually checking the technology) takes oxygen and brain activity away from what they are learning. We need to convince our students that it is ok and even necessary to wait, that they don’t have to respond immediately and do have the ability to delay their check-in with the cyber world. It is all about learning that we can control our selective attention and choose to ignore distractions.

We need to train the brain to stop thinking constantly about technology. However, resistance for too long can create anxiety and a fear of missing out, creating ‘continuous partial attention’ in students as oxygen is diverted to activate and maintain thoughts about social media at the expense of classroom material.

Dr Rosen’s team has determined the best approach for students who find it difficult to pull back from their technology devices is to set an alarm on their phone for short regular ‘tech breaks’. They may start with 15 minutes and gradually increase this amount over time to around 30 minutes. The phone will be face down on their desk on silent mode or off, and when the alarm rings they let themselves check messages and status updates for a minute or two, then set the alarm again. Dr Rosen’s studies found that knowing they can check in 15 minutes creates less anxiety, whereas depriving them of the phone completely did not stop them thinking or obsessing about possible e-communications which took away from their ability to focus fully on their homework. It all comes back to teaching the concept of focus.

Finally, Dr Rosen argues that we cannot simply remove technology and other distractions; they are too intricately woven into students' daily lives. Instead students should learn metacognitive skills to help them understand when and how to switch their attention between multiple tasks or technologies.

Visit the Dealing with Distractions unit at www.studyskillshandbook.com.au to learn more about managing your distractions.

Our school’s subscription details are -

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Mr Carlo Trimboli
Leader of Pedagogy

The SJC Athletics Carnival will take place this week on Friday, 31 July

As mentioned last term the theme of this year’s athletics carnival is “Back in time”, students are encouraged to come to school in their costumes, do not forget to bring a hat and lots of water. Every student has the opportunity to earn points for their House across both Championship and Novelty Events. The athletics carnival is always a great College community event and an enjoyable day for all students and staff. The only money your child needs to bring is for purchasing anything from the BBQ or the stall with snacks if they wish to do so.

If students are interested in the 1500m (competitive) event this will be held at lunchtime on Tuesday 28 July.

Unfortunately, this year due to our ever-changing environment, we are unable to invite parents/families to come and watch. We thank you in advance for your understanding.

Similarly, it is also unfortunate for the students who place 1st or 2nd in a championship event as they are normally eligible to compete at the Diocesan Carnival, however, this event has been cancelled.

Ms Madeline Ilic
Coordinator of Sport