Catherine is the Library team leader, a Year 7 History teacher and Year 7 Homeroom teacher. She has been part of the teaching community at De La Salle College, Malvern for four years.
Catherine’s main role as Library team leader is to co-ordinate a team of both a teacher librarian and library technicians to provide reading programs, information skills education and supervised study spaces within the main libraries. The college has two key library branches with a number of satellite collections with both online and physical resources for staff and students.
Catherine collaborates with classroom teachers and teaching teams to instill a knowledge of online databases, writing bibliographies, note taking, plagiarism and other research skills used in the classroom.
“One of the things that I am proud of is that in my four years at De La Salle, I have worked hard to make sure all students have access to reading material appropriate to their learning needs, including studentswith learning difficulties,” says Catherine.
The college libraries provide eAudio books, dyslexia-friendly books as well as books to extend students’ reading abilities for those students who are part of the Gifted and Talented Education Program (GATE). The Library team collaborates with teachers and Learning Support Officers to ensure that no student is excluded or struggling with their reading and writing skills. The team also encourages students with a love of reading to expand their interests through exploration of reading material.
“Key to my role is encouraging students to have a lifelong love of reading,” says Catherine. “We encourage students to make time to read, increase their reading ability and to read for pleasure.”
Catherine loves to read and enjoys sharing this passion with students by creating memorable and fun events such as the Book Week Quiz, booking interesting guest author presentations and hosting the annual father-and-son event, Blokes and Books Breakfast.
This year, the Library team hosted the Writer in Residence program with much-awarded Melbourne author, Claire Saxby, as the guest. The program was an opportunity to consolidate a number of reading and writing activities and do these with a feature author. Claire participated in the “Blokes and Books Breakfast”, a three-day high-performance writing masterclass for selected students in Year 7–11, author workshop for Year 5 and 6 Primary students, author visits to students in Year 7–8 classes, and a Book Club presentation.
By inviting an author to visit the college for a week, staff and students gained valuable knowledge about the process of writing a book. The highlight of the week was the high-performance writing masterclass where Claire gave students fabulous tips and tricks and added to the confidence of each writer.
“I really enjoyed the Writer in Residence program because I learnt lots of techniques for gathering ideas, starting your piece and writing with purpose,” says Heath Ryan, Year 7. “The topics weren’t boring for teenage boys and all the activities we did were teaching us something while not sacrificing the element of fun.”
De La Salle College educates over 1,000 students across three campuses – Tiverton, Holy Eucharist and Kinnoull. Each campus is aligned for […]