Our Teaching and Learning Framework was developed to guide our staff and provide a foundation for how we approach our day-to-day teaching program.
This framework is a roadmap for how everyone at Victory College contributes to our mission: “to equip each student to live a purposeful life”. The College’s mission is directly linked to the College’s educational goals. The framework guides everyone involved in the teaching and learning process at the College to consistently act in ways that will help us achieve these goals.
The Effective Teaching and Learning Framework also gives clarity to teachers in a profession that is characterised by extreme complexity. Teachers can often be over-burdened by the amount of educational programs and approaches that they could use in order to satisfy their desire to do the right thing by Victory’s students. This framework brings it all together in a no-nonsense kind of way. It is well-founded in current research about effective teaching and learning practices. By comparing effectiveness of individual strategies to student outcomes, the elements of this framework provide teachers with clear guidelines about putting first things first and spending their valuable time on things that are most important.
The centre-piece and moral purpose of Victory College’s Effective Teaching and Learning Framework is also derived from the above mission statement. Achieving this mission is most directly linked to the work being done in each classroom. Therefore, “classroom strategies and behaviours” make up the dimension of teaching and learning that is given the highest importance. Within this dimension, nine design questions are used to structure and classify educational practices that have a proven relevance to high academic outcomes.
The second dimension, “planning and preparation” is indirectly linked to achieving our core purpose as it influences the effectiveness of the strategies in Dimension 1. Marzano’s tenth design question deals with Dimension 2 effectively.
The third and fourth dimensions, “Reflecting on Teaching” and “Collegiality and Professionalism” complete Victory’s foundations and best practices in effective teaching and learning.
The Lens: Christian Worldview
All teaching and learning is viewed using a Christian worldview lens (perspective). Victory College’s worldview is referenced in the doctrinal statement of Christian Outreach Centre’s constitution and framed in regards to teaching in the College’s educational frameworks. Whenever teachers plan and deliver instruction to students, they consider how to use the instructional activity as a vehicle for students to develop a comprehensive Christian worldview.
