About Us

Our vision is supported by our mission statement of “the quality of the programs we offer will never be better than the quality of the teachers that deliver them”. Our mission is to ensure our teachers are continually developing their skills, knowledge and understandings that will enable them to provide high quality learning opportunities and learning experiences for all students at Templestowe Heights Primary.

2023 saw the completion of construction of a brand new, state of the art Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts & Mathematics (STEAM) building as well as the renovation of a new library, toilet block and shared meeting spaces. This is all part of a $13.1 million grant from the state government in recognition of our projected growth in our student population for the coming years.

Our teaching and learning spaces are flexible and all have interactive whiteboards, desktop and netbook computers, iPads and a dedicated bring your own device iPad program for Year 5/6 students. An indoor basketball stadium, school chickens, community garden, two outdoor adventure playgrounds, a synthetic outdoor basketball court and bat tennis area, a multi-purpose room and a passive play area all occupy our spacious grounds.

Our students are motivated learners and we are fortunate to have supportive, committed families that are active participants in their child’s learning journey. We pride ourselves on being a collaborative learning community and we both encourage and provide opportunities to strengthen the home-school partnership.

Students at Templestowe Heights Primary School participate in a wide range of inclusive and engaging curriculum, sporting and recreational programs. The Performing and Visual Arts program is a strong feature of our school environment, which includes ballroom dancing (culminating in a School Ball), School Production and an Art Community Show.

Students have the opportunity of being part of the Junior School Council, Sustainability group, School Choir, camps program, inter-school sport, chess club, after school art classes, and the instrumental music program. Students also participate in Italian lessons with a dedicated Italian language teacher. We have a strong whole-school focus on student wellbeing that includes a cyber-safety program and the Positive Education framework.

We welcome visitors to Templestowe Heights Primary School and have a comprehensive Pre-school to Prep transition program to meet your child’s needs. I encourage you to call to book a group or personal school tour on 9850 1796 to learn more about our wonderful school.

I look forward to meeting you personally.

Rhys Coulson

Principal

Virtual Tour

Our Learning Journey

Setting the Standard for Explicit Teaching

Have you heard?

Victorian government schools have been given three years to move to structured phonics and explicit instruction from prep to grade 2 after State Education Minister Ben Carroll announced a system-wide shift in June 2024.

Templestowe Heights Primary School implemented Explicit Teaching four years ago and has been leading the way ever since. The school has been selected as one of ten host schools to share knowledge and help other schools implement the program successfully. In the past year alone, the school has hosted over 160 schools, sharing their knowledge and helping other schools to improve literacy outcomes.

What is Explicit Teaching?

Explicit instruction is a systematic, engaging and success-oriented teaching approach. It involves fully explaining and effectively demonstrating what students need to learn – complex ideas and processes are broken up into smaller steps which can be built upon. Learning new information happens most effectively and efficiently when teaching is clear, systematic and does not leave students to construct or discover knowledge and skills without guidance.

Why did Templestowe Heights move to Explicit Teaching?

The Covid pandemic changed everything. Early on in remote learning, it was identified that students couldn’t sit thought a normal 60-minute reading lesson. The solution was to cut out unnecessary information and provide explicit instructions in short bursts.

The results of the following year’s phonics test spoke for themselves. In 2021, the year before the school implemented structured reading, 24 per cent of year 1s were categorised as struggling. In 2022, it was two per cent. The number of students in the fluent category grew from 55 per cent to 87.

Principal Rhys Coulson praises the effect the teaching method has on students. ‘With a consistent and predictable learning environment, students come in every day knowing exactly what is going to happen, and because children are experiencing so much success in their learning – that’s very motivating for them.’

‘The benefits that we see at Templestowe Heights Primary, of using the model is it that it follows the way that children learn effectively and it allows us to teach effectively.’

Our Teaching and Learning Approach

Introduction

Templestowe Heights Primary is aligned with the Science of Learning, following the research and insights about how we acquire knowledge effectively and efficiently. Knowing the conditions in which learning can be most successful, helps teachers better meet the needs of their students. We draw on education, linguistics, psychology, neuroscience and cognitive sciences to further our understanding of the mechanics of learning and how we can optimally teach. We design sequences of learning where all students can experience success.

We crawl before we walk and we walk before we run. Similarly with language acquisition (or the development of any complex skills), we need to understand the single sounds of our alphabet before we can decode other words or understand what a complete sentence should be before we write a paragraph. The teaching of mathematics is grounded through the mastery of key skills and knowledge of number sense that allows students to apply across other disciplines of mathematics. For example, when we know how to calculate numbers using the four operations, we can apply this to measure objects or understand statistics.

At THPS we implement an adaptive and responsive teaching model (Glaser, 1977; Snow, 1980). At the centre of our responsive teaching model is our tier 1 curriculum and instruction. It aims to provide all students access to a high-quality, classroom instruction tied to a guaranteed and viable curriculum.

We unpack the concepts, skills and knowledge we want students to acquire into small chunks and scaffold through high quality talk, questioning, checking for understanding and modelling. Our teaching and learning model allows us to target a single learning objective with extensive modelling, practice and feedback, followed by small or individual support and additional practice for those that need it.

Rosenshine’s (2012) ten principles guide our planning and delivering of the curriculum from the macro (our syllabus) to the micro (individual lessons).

Our curriculum is aligned to the achievement standards of the Victorian Curriculum’s (v 2.0) 8 Learning Areas and 4 Capabilities. We have a non-negotiable curriculum of 10 hours of literacy (reading, writing and speaking & listening) and 5 hours of mathematics each week.

Through our Core Knowledge Curriculum, we investigate and question big ideas that integrate all learning areas and capabilities (including concepts such as Social Justice and Identity).  This innovative curriculum aims at providing all students with sequential understandings of foundational knowledge necessary to thrive as a citizen in the real world.

In addition, all students participate in our specialist program, where they have lessons with a separate teacher for Physical Education, Italian, STEM, Visual Arts, Library and Performing Arts (music and drama).

Our extra-curricular lunch time program caters for student-interests and are inclusive. Each term our dedicated teachers (as well as some outside providers) run these lunch time or after school activities to offer students an opportunity to try or further their interests in structured activities. These include robotics, Lego, choir, remote control cars, gardening, dance, basketball, soccer, running, music, art, singing and chess.

All our lessons are sequenced and break down the concepts, skills, knowledge and key competencies from the Victorian Curriculum that we expect our students to master. We now understand that in order for anyone to learn a new skill or concept and commit it to their long term memory that it requires multiple exposures and retrievals. For that reason, we regularly return and review skills and concepts that students have already been introduced to.

For example, we know when introducing the five times table or the long ‘e’ sound, we can’t simply ‘teach it’ for one week and assume the students will be able to retrieve that knowledge later on in the year. We need to regularly return to this skill or concept, over spaced time intervals to embed the learning. Hermann Ebbinghaus’ (see below) Forgetting Curve research helps us to better understand the theory that sits behind the evidence that has been replicated, empirically, ever since by cognitive scientists.

Our teaching approach ensures we regularly return to the key skills, knowledge and understandings that we want our students to learn and master.

English Curriculum

Our English curriculum follows Scarborough’s (2001) Reading Rope framework. We move from learning to read (Foundation-2) to reading to learn (yr 3-6). Students are exposed to and build a solid foundational knowledge of phonetics, phonics, syntax, morphology and writing composition. We introduce students at Year 3 to rich literature, utilising Doug Lemov’s (2016) framework of the five plagues of the developing reader. The systematic, sequenced teaching of writing is centred on the Hochman Method (Hochman, 2009), progressing students from sentence level to composition writing. Our core and general knowledge curriculum provides students with necessary background knowledge to enable them to form deeper understandings of the  content and topics they are taught. We break down the various components of language acquisition and sequentially teach:

Mathematics

Number sense and automaticity are to maths, what phonics and fluency are to reading. Students are exposed to and build solid foundational understandings of whole numbers, place value, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The strong foundational understandings then allow students to transfer their competencies to solve unseen mathematical problems, interpret data and use units of measurement. Mathematical mastery of these key skills and concepts play a vital role in allowing students to be confident, capable and efficacious learners.