Learning and Teaching

St Clare’s College, in aiming to develop a student-centred success culture and a staff-centred enabling culture, attaches the highest importance to its Teaching and Learning Principles. The principles aim to guide excellence in teaching and learning practices, while recognising that effective teaching and learning involves partnerships between students, teachers, parents and the wider community.  The principles aim to support all students to successfully navigate their adolescent years and emerge as informed thinkers and life-long learners, well equipped to cope with rapid societal change.

Deliberately positioned in the centre of the image, a cross symbolises the importance of our Catholic faith and core Christian values.  Our significant role models, St Clare and the Holy Spirit, are referenced by the repeating flame shape, symbolic of the fruits of the Holy Spirit and St Clare’s example and influence in our lives.

“… what a child can do today with assistance, she will be able to do by herself tomorrow.”

Lev Vygotsky, Interaction Between Learning and Development

The overall circular design of the image reflects the ongoing nature of life-long learning for our spirited learning community as we strive to provide an excellent environment in which to grow academically, socially, spiritually and personally. We are mindful that we teach students, not subjects, as we strive to engage the ‘head, heart and hands’ of all in motivating and intellectually stimulating learning experiences. The accompanying quotations, one regarding the learner and one focussed on teaching, also provide guidance for effective curriculum design.

“Teaching has an extraordinary moral depth and is one of humankind’s most excellent and creative activities, for the teacher does not write on inanimate material but on the very spirit of human beings.”

The Catholic School on the Threshold of the Third Millennium, paragraph 19