For this individual reflection, I will be discussing how participating with the group project as well as

undertaking the unit of Contemporary Teacher Leadership has helped me in becoming a better

teacher leader. As well as applying the concepts we have learnt in the unit regarding leadership,

the development of the group project would not be possible without the commitment and

contribution from each of the members.

For the group project, the team and I created a program entitled “Ladder to Literacy Program” which

focuses on improving the literacy capabilities of students to ensure that they can prepare

themselves for challenges that involve higher order literacy skills such as creative writing, extended

responses, text analysis, etc. The school of interest for this project was the Patrician Brothers

College Blacktown because their NAPLAN literacy results from 2014 to 2019 were shown to be either

around or below the national standard (My school, 2019) and also it is an all-boys school.

When reviewing relevant educational documents, it was shown that girls outperform boys in literacy

with a big margin in NSW (ACARA, 2018) and that poor literacy skills within males were linked to

various factors such as poor engagement, low self-confidence, socio-economic background, etc.

(State of Victoria, 2016). As such, Patrician Brothers College Blacktown is a perfect school to

implement the “Ladder to Literacy” program. As the program progresses, we aim to improve the

literacy skills of the students and we can also collaborate with educators and improve on each

other’s educational practices, which can result in the development of our pedagogy and leadership

skills (Frost & Durrant, 2013).

During the development of the project, the main challenge we encountered was how to put the

strategies into practice. The “Ladder to Literacy” program looks informative and attractive in theory,

however we would like to ensure that it can translate well when being implemented within schools.

Examples of the challenges range from how to train the teachers to expertly take charge of their

students when participating in the program to how the students will engage with the program and

how we can collect data and evidence to measure effectiveness.

 CTL REFLECTION

From analysing relevant educational documents, we have managed to formulate strategies on how

to efficiently implement our program. Firstly, the group decided that a mixed method research

approach would be suitable for assessing data and the overall effectiveness of the program (Detlor

et al., 2012; Kervin et al., 2016). This can be achieved through using qualitative analysis to review

pre and post surveys and observations from teachers, and quantitative analysis to review pre and

post test results, NAPLAN results and their academic improvement in different subjects. By

connecting both qualitative and quantitative data analysis, we will be able to gain more valid and

credible results to determine the effectiveness of the program (Kervin et al., 2016). In the initiation

of the project, we can start with the reviewing of Year 7 students’ NAPLAN results and conducting a

survey to determine their academic motivations and literacy skills. The program will continue into

year 8 and then we conduct a post-test and survey to reflect on their potential improvement (Detlor

et al., 2012).

Furthermore, our group determined that the program would be part of the action research model,

which aligns with the principles of the teacher-led development framework. This is because action

research involves both the researchers and the participants collaborating with each other to reflect,

evaluate, and improve on their own practice (Kervin et al., 2016) whilst teacher-led development

includes collaboration to manage change, experiment with practice and gathering and interpreting

evidence (Frost & Durrant, 2013). Therefore, the program will not only improve on the students’

academic abilities, but also improve on the teacher’s pedagogy.