School teachers and leaders across Australia are under more pressure than ever as longer hours, heavier workloads and rising expectations take their toll.
In recent years, many principals have prioritised professional development to tackle increasingly complex challenges facing their schools, notably the youth mental health crisis, growing achievement and equity gaps, and the ongoing proliferation of AI tools in the classroom.
A major study by Monash University found that while most teachers access PD, just 18% consider it ‘plentiful’. As Australia’s schools prepare for major reforms, the push is on for targeted learning to help schools adapt and improve outcomes.
At Trinity College, staff knew they needed more than the usual tick-the-box professional learning sessions.
In 2020, what began as a casual “journal club” among a handful of curious teachers has since grown into a school-wide program transforming how lessons are taught and how students learn.
The College’s ‘Catalyst’ program gives teachers time and space to dig into the craft of teaching – testing new approaches in their classrooms, using live data to track progress, and sharing strategies with colleagues.
It’s deliberately flexible, with cycles that bend around teachers’ workloads and student needs, not the other way around.
The results are hard to ignore.
In the past 12 months, the school has seen sharp declines in the number of students needing intensive literacy support, big jumps in the proportion exceeding benchmarks, and a visible lift in student confidence. For many teachers at the school, the change has been equally profound: they’re more connected, more responsive, and more in tune with their students than ever before.
A community of colleagues, mentors, and collaborators
On 8 August 2025, this work was recognised as the Australian Education Awards 2025 when Trinity College received the Best Professional Learning Program award.
“This honour belongs to the collective at Trinity College, and I’m so fortunate to be part of it,” Lesley Johnson, Director of Pedagogy at Trinity College told The Educator.
“Trinity is a community of colleagues, mentors, and collaborators who shape, support, and challenge one another because we care deeply about making education better for all young people.”
Johnson said this networked approach is key to what has strengthened and sustained professional learning at Trinity College in recent years.
“At Trinity we believe the pillars of an effective professional learning program include embedded learning anchored in everyday classroom practice; relational, small-group collaboration that makes it safe to try something, get feedback, and adjust; and clear mechanisms that build knowledge, prompt action, and turn strategies into adaptable steps,” she said.
“Together, these foundations support networked, collaborative, practitioner inquiry as the main approach to develop educator practice, keeping the focus on student learning, belonging, and wellbeing, and normalising the routine use of practical evidence to check impact.”
Built from the classroom up
Johnson said that through combining local priorities with research partnerships, quick feedback, and practical tools, Trinity College’s Catalyst program grew into a shared effort that made improvement visible, manageable, and meaningful across schools.
“We built Catalyst with staff at the table from the outset because solutions need to grow from real classrooms,” she said.
“Teachers identified questions that mattered locally, then moved through short cycles of plan, act, reflect so improvement stayed visible and manageable.”
Johnson said the approach was multi-faceted and layered to differentiate for a wide range of interests and needs across the College’s 400 teachers.
“For example, micro-credentials offered enough structure to guide the work without locking people into a single route, and our partnership with the University of South Australia added academic discipline, while the Trinity Research Institute kept the focus on what would make sense for our community,” she said.
“Quick feedback loops, simple artefacts, and regular sharing helped ideas travel across our large and diverse network of six schools. We were confident it would land because it respected professional judgement, provided tools that saved time, and made improvement a shared effort where impact could be seen across sites.”
Shared language, greater confidence, lasting impact
Johnson said the biggest change at the College since the creation of the program has been cultural.
“Reflective conversation is now part of how we work, and a shared language helps ideas move between our multiple schools,” she said.
“As the ideas spread, teams took on a wider set of challenges and refined approaches together, which lifted literacy progress and strengthened engagement where feedback and goal clarity improved.”
Johnson said teachers across the College now describe feeling more confident and more willing to try new approaches responsibly.
“The scholarly side has grown too, with national presentations and peer-reviewed publications that recognise teachers as knowledge creators. We are also seeing fewer students needing intensive catch-up in some areas, more students moving beyond benchmarks, and steady gains in self-efficacy.”
A responsive model for ongoing improvement
Johnson said that for Australian teachers, the most important professional learning starts with “recognising education as a complex ecology.”
“Cause and effect are seldom linear, so rather than chasing a single best practice, teachers need support to be pragmatic and adaptive,” she said.
“Professional learning should help them run small, safe-to-fail probes, observe closely, and tune constraints to amplify what helps and dampen what doesn’t.”
To avoid simplistic cause-and-effect claims and to balance evidence-based practice with practice-based evidence, Johnson said teachers need strong data literacy and sound research habits.
“Professional learning should deliberately build these capabilities,” she said. “At Trinity we are putting this into practice by strengthening a tier of networked middle leadership so leaders can guide pedagogy and coach colleagues within their own schools.”
Johnson said this distributed approach respects professional judgement and is anchored by the College’s “carefully sequenced” strategy for professional learning, together with its underpinning philosophy of education – the Trinity Education Model.
“Staff will continue to build knowledge and skill, develop fluency and mastery in key areas, then adapt approaches to their individual contexts,” she said.
“We will keep improvement cycles short and visible, refresh micro-credentials so they stay useful, expand coaching, and make inquiry manageable and well supported.”
Johnson said above all, the College will remain responsive to the needs of its students and teachers, shaping the learning so it stays relational and rigorous.
“The aim is steady, shared improvement that teachers feel in their planning and students notice in their learning.”