You’ve built a career around language, literature and learning, what drew you to English as a discipline, and what does leading that area at Fintona mean to you?
From infancy, my mother fostered in me a love of reading. I immersed myself in books and found joy in escaping into the worlds of the characters, discovering new places and possibilities in the stories they told. Reading was, and still is, a joyful experience for me. While I was immersing myself in literature, I became acutely aware of the power, and the absence, of literacy in the lives of those closest to me. My maternal great-grandmother (whom I never met) grew up in a small rural village in Italy and was denied access to education entirely. By all accounts, she was a deeply intelligent woman, yet she spent her life feeling she lacked agency because she could not read or write. Then my maternal grandmother, one of five children, had to leave school at the end of Year 8. A girl in her family simply wasn’t afforded the same opportunities as her brother, despite loving learning deeply.
Those familial stories had a profound impact on me. The influence of these stories deepened when I began teaching English as an additional language to migrants and international students in the United Kingdom and in Sweden. While living and working in Sweden, my appreciation for language and literacy developed further. Despite most people speaking English and being wonderfully accommodating, I found I couldn’t reach my potential or fully participate in conversations without competency in Swedish. That experience gave me a profound empathy for the students I was teaching. I understood, on some level, what it felt like to be capable yet constrained by not having competency over the mother tongue of a country. It is through these personal and professional experiences, layered over time, that my commitment to teaching and learning has been truly forged.
For me, it is a privilege to lead this learning area at Fintona, and I wish to acknowledge the team of dedicated professionals I teach alongside. Together, we work collaboratively to develop, implement and enact the English curriculum from Years 5 to 12. The vision we share, to promote literacy and foster a genuine love of literature in our classrooms, is one I hold deeply. That shared professional vision aligns closely with my personal one, established through my life journey.
The Jeff Northfield Memorial Award recognises an ongoing, current commitment to teacher research. What drives this kind of research practice for you? Can you give an example of how you have applied research practically in the classroom in recent years?
What drives my research practice is a genuine interest in formative feedback and student engagement, and, at the heart of it, a belief that an effective teacher should ultimately be working toward making themselves unnecessary. I want to empower students to become active, independent learners who have full agency over their own learning, rather than remaining reliant on me. My goal is to nurture lifelong learners, and teacher research is how I interrogate and refine my practice in service of that goal.
In recent years, this has translated directly into how I structure feedback and design learning tasks. Drawing on what I have learned through research into formative feedback, I have made my feedback more explicit and purposeful. I now provide students with annotated sample responses so they can see clearly what quality work looks like, and I ask them to actively engage with their own feedback by highlighting their written responses and comparing them against those examples. This moves feedback from something passive, something a student simply receives, to something they must interrogate and act upon. I also incorporate regular peer feedback opportunities, encouraging students to develop the critical eye needed to evaluate writing thoughtfully, both in others and in themselves. Across all these approaches, the goal is the same: to ensure that feedback becomes a genuine tool for growth rather than simply an endpoint, and to place the student, not the teacher, at the centre of that process.
Being selected for the 2026 Teaching Excellence Program is a significant recognition. What does that kind of acknowledgement mean to you, and what are you hoping to explore or bring back to the classroom?
It is genuinely an honour to have been selected as a participant in the 2026 Teaching Excellence Program (TEP). What excites me most is the opportunity to learn alongside passionate and dedicated educators from across different sectors, Government, Independent and Catholic. There is something professionally invigorating about stepping outside your own context and engaging in rich, cross-sector conversations about teaching and learning. To be afforded time to reflect on my practice and engage in research is rewarding. I often tell the students about my involvement in research and professional learning opportunities as I think it is important they see teachers as learners too.
What I hope to explore further through the TEP is my practice as an inquiry practitioner, with a particular focus on student engagement and how to empower students to become truly active and independent learners. I am especially interested in developing students who are academically buoyant and resilient, young people who can navigate challenge and setback with confidence, and who understand that struggle is a natural and valuable part of learning. I am currently focusing on the research of Dr Amy Berry and how we can foster intrinsic engagement in learning.
AI is generating a lot of conversation, in classrooms right now. Where do you stand on it, and are there any new ways you have incorporated it in the classroom this year?
I have adopted a moderate and nuanced position on the use of AI in the classroom. AI does have real affordances, and used critically, ethically and judiciously, it can be a genuinely useful tool. But I am conscious that without careful guidance, it limits students’ capacity to think independently, to wrestle with ideas, and to explore learning creatively. Dependency is the risk, and dependency is the opposite of everything I believe good education should cultivate.
As educators, I think it is incumbent on us to teach students how to use AI effectively, efficiently and wisely. That means deliberately designing opportunities in our classrooms for students to think and create for themselves, ensuring AI assists the learning process rather than replacing the effort that learning requires. The thinking still has to happen, and it has to happen in the student’s mind. Learning needs to be purposeful, challenging and effortful for it to occur. AI, when used without purpose and if it removes challenge and effort, will circumvent the learning process. This is the real danger of AI; if this occurs, then the student becomes a passive recipient of knowledge and too reliant upon the tool.
Where I have found it most useful is in generating plans for practice essay topics and, occasionally, producing sample responses. It is in that latter application where I think the most interesting classroom possibilities lie. Rather than simply presenting students with a polished sample, I use AI-generated responses as a learning activity, guiding students through the process of critically evaluating the quality of the writing against the assessment criteria. This is fundamentally a metacognitive task. It asks students to think about what good writing looks like, to articulate why it works or where it falls short, and to apply that understanding to their own work. Used in this way, AI becomes a means of sharpening critical thinking rather than bypassing it, which aligns with my broader philosophy about how these tools should sit within the learning process.
Beyond the classroom, are you using AI in your own practice – say, for planning, research, or professional development? What’s working, and what are you still working out?
My use of AI in my own practice is deliberate and contained. I sometimes use it to proofread my writing or to edit my writing. I do use the AI overview on Google as an initial point of research, but then I always engage in further research and cross-reference all resources. I use it as a starting point, but beyond that, my engagement with it outside of the classroom remains limited at this point.
What are you currently reading? Is there a book, fiction or non-fiction, that has genuinely changed the way you think or teach?
I am currently reading The Digital Delusion by Dr Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist, and it has been a genuinely affirming read, affirming in the sense that it gives neuroscientific grounding to what I have observed in classrooms over my 25 years of teaching. He articulates what I have long sensed: that overexposure to technology is adversely affecting cognitive development, particularly in young people. I have seen a measurable decline in literacy competency over the years, and this book offers a compelling neuroscientific explanation for why. The suggestion that technology use at the scale we now see is producing real physiological changes in the brain, with consequences for attention, memory and deep thinking, has both unsettled and clarified my thinking. I find myself returning to its ideas constantly and modifying the way I teach.
When a Fintona student looks back on their time in your classroom, what do you hope they remember, or have taken with them?
I hope they remember that learning can be delightful, that encountering an idea or a text can genuinely excite you, challenge you, and change you. I hope they leave as critical thinkers and compassionate world citizens, with the understanding that literature and language connect us to something larger than ourselves: the universal human experiences that unite us across time, culture and circumstance. Above all, I hope they leave my English classroom as independent thinkers, curious, resilient, and confident in their own voice.