Stuart Crichton

WoodLinks State School

Stuart Crichton is a key leader at WoodLinks State School (WLSS) who consistently strives to improve the capacities of students and teachers.

In his role leading the Mentoring Beginning Teachers program, he has been instrumental in laying the foundation of a strong and effective Beginning Teacher Program.

The program which is based around the school’s Improvement Agenda, the Queensland Department of Education and Training’s ‘How to Teaching Reading’ module and regional targets set for reading has contributed to significant advances in teacher’s capabilities and student results.

Stuart has mentored 18 of WLSS’s 25 classroom teachers in their first year of teaching over the past three years.
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In his coaching role he is then able to further assist teachers through their second and third year as the need arises.  
He created a mentoring program titled ‘REALISM’ which is based upon resilience, empowerment, authenticiy, legacy, sustainability and mindfulness.

Along with building capacity to improve student outcomes, Stuart’s personal goal is to ensure the positive wellbeing and sustainability of his mentees is paramount which in turn will produce strong educators, with effective pedagogy, who will leave a legacy to be proud of.

Stuart’s work has been acknowledged across the district; he is an active member contributing to the Professional Learning Hub based at Silkstone State School.

He has also been invited to join the Metropolitan Region’s working party to collegially plan the continuation and implementation of professional development to support beginning teachers across the metropolitan region.

He recently presented to 350 first-year teachers at the Brisbane Exhibition Centre and received acclaim and positive feedback.

As part of the school leadership team, Stuart was a catalyst in adopting a reading pedagogy to explicitly teach students strategies and to build capacity through the NAPLAN Intervention Program and the 4-Reads Reading program at WoodLinks State School.

Students in Stuart’s class are meeting regional standards.
 
He also works with students achieving below National Minimum Standards and U2B (Years 2 – 5) to strengthen and refine their abilities in reading.

Here he has achieved an effect size of 0.89 with some of the groups involved, and has case-managed other students to improve their ability to access texts, normally beyond their means.

Stuart has created resources to help teachers improve their own students’ reading and he happily supports others with the creation and implementation of quality reading resources.

Because of his work there has been a notable improvement in reading results across his year level which has had a flow-on-effect to the students of those teachers involved in the Beginning Teacher Program.  

Teachers plan curriculum tasks in collaboration with Stuart, where he shows them the step-by-step processes of backwards mapping – where teachers plan tailored lessons based on the required assessment task.

Congratulations Stuart on your nomination.