In her relatively short time at Goroke P-12 College, Louise has been instrumental in developing the school’s award-winning agriculture program, and had a profound impact on senior secondary education, particularly in VCE Agriculture, Business, and Biology. She’s developed a free podcast, an affordable textbook for VCE Agriculture, played a key role in staff capacity building and implemented whole-school literacy changes, including new testing and intervention programs.

Grant Quarry: You initially wanted to be a doctor and studied a Bachelor of Science at Monash University, but realised at the end of your degree that you were keen on being a teacher, and so applied for the Teach For Australia program. Can you tell us a little about that?

Louise Hobbs: Yes, I was placed in the Wimmera at Goroke P-12 College, and started off as a paraprofessional, so four days a week, and then one day at home studying.

I was really thrown into the deep end with VCE, but I loved every minute of it, and saw so many things that I wanted to change and things that I wanted to make better. So, after I completed my Master of Education I applied for a role as one of the leading teachers at Goroke. I didn’t think I was going to get it by any means, but I did!

We have a fantastic principal here and an absolutely fantastic team, and I do think we’ve been able to make some really terrific changes. We can promote great programs and push students toward achieving their best and really support and foster a nice climate here as well.

GQ: Your school has about 80 students. Can you tell me a little about your day-to-day role?

LH: I’ve been in the role for two years this year, and it’s a little bit of everything. It’s a role I share with my lovely colleague, Renee McCush, and we focus on academics and aspiration. It’s all about supporting students with career pathways – running things like pathways information sessions, updating our school handbooks, looking at what sort of subjects we can offer, career action plans, but also hiring new staff.

Alongside that I do our daily organisation, developing our timetable, putting that online, and we don’t have an assistant principal at our school, so there’s also behaviour management and supporting school policy.

I’ve also ended up doing a lot of work in the literacy space supporting change, and Renee has taken on maths.

GQ: Gee, that’s a big role and such rapid progression! Was it a giant leap from qualifying to be a teacher to being a leading teacher?

LH: Oh, definitely, I probably didn’t really know what I was getting myself in for, but I knew I wanted to step into middle leadership, and I knew I wanted to take another step because while it’s great being a classroom teacher, there were things that I saw happening and I thought, ‘I’d love to have an opinion. I’d love to have a voice on that’.

So taking that next step really did allow me to do that, but it was with so much support from my principal, Kylie (Smith), from my colleagues, from Renee, and also it was really nice to have support and backing from the whole team at Goroke to say, ‘yep, we see you want an opportunity, and we can support you to do that’.

I actually think a fantastic thing in country schools, is they can be a great opportunity for career progression, because there are so many jobs to do, there are so many jobs to fill.

I still have a full teaching allotment and I still have all my classes with that work. Because we have so many jobs, people are more than happy if you want to step up. You’ll be supported to do so, which can help your career in the long-term.

Louise’s many initiatives have led to student participation in various state competitions, including the Royal Melbourne Schools Poultry competition, the Cows Create Careers program and the Quantum Victoria’s 3D Printing competition.

GQ: What is it you love about your job?

LH: I do love being in the classroom with students, but probably when I think about the leadership component, I’ve really enjoyed working on restructuring our literacy block. Like I said, I did a Bachelor of Science, but I always had a big interest in English, and it’s been awesome to actually have the opportunity to attend professional development, bring learnings back to staff and literacy meetings, present it to staff, and go, ‘right, let’s look at the data. Let’s have a PLC inquiry cycle, and then let’s actually use that support and drive the change needed’.

We’ve been doing a teaching sprint with our EAL program, and it’s been wonderful to be part of. It’s such empowering work, and it’s even better when you start to see students improving from that work. This is a new initiative this year, and it’s been so awesome to see students’ DIBELS testing improve just in a six-month period. So, you know it is working, we are starting to see success and we’ve got to keep going.

GQ: Your school is renowned for its award-winning ag program. Can you tell me a little about it?

LH: I suppose I really love competitions. I had a teacher when I went to school, who was so passionate about making sure that we had the same access to opportunities as students in Melbourne. He’d say, ‘here’s a science competition. Louise, what do you think? Do you want to enter?’ And I’d say, ‘Yes, of course I do!’ So I suppose I’ve brought that same sort of inspiration into my classroom, except in the agriculture space. It’s been incredible to have success with a lot of programs like the Royal Melbourne Show Schools Poultry Competition, Cows Create Careers, and the Australian Wool Innovation’s School Merino Wether Program, which was piloted this year. It was just a fantastic opportunity.

It was so great to see our students from Goroke P-12 College competing against students from Ballarat Grammar and Geelong Grammar schools. They were just so proud to be there, representing Goroke and just showing it doesn’t actually matter where you go to school, you can have access to a fantastic education.

GQ: Is it difficult to draw engagement and interest in ag or are kids pretty keen to get involved?

LH: Before I arrived, we didn’t have an ag program up and running, so students were keen to get into it and get their hands dirty. We had a great garden program going on, but there wasn’t really anything in the agriculture space, so students were really willing to learn.

I do find, especially around country areas and country schools, it is so important for us to be offering agriculture, because it is one of our main employment industries.

There are so many students who go through our schools who end up working in agriculture, but it’s also not just viewing agriculture as being around sheep or chooks, because there is so much science to it. It’s so important that students understand that science, whether it’s looking at having a negative DCAD diet to help prevent milk fever in dairy and diving into general animal nutrition, or whether it’s being able to understand soil pH and how key fertilisers like urea and Supa are going to affect that for your agronomy.

“To receive my Early Career Teacher Award was a real honour, a real privilege, and very humbling, because there are so many fantastic teachers right across Australia,” Hobbs, pictured above at the presentation ceremony in Canberra, says.

GQ: You’ve produced a textbook for VCE students. Has that proved helpful for them?

LH: That’s been a bit of a passion project of mine this year. There isn’t an aligned agriculture textbook, because in Victoria only about 200 students do VCE ag each year. I wish more students did it, because it’s such a fantastic subject with such a breadth of knowledge, looking at science, looking at sustainable business practices, it’s got all the works, but the problem is, because it is so broad, you really do need somebody that’s got science and business know-how to be able to do it well and to really apply it.

Because it had those small numbers, it wasn’t necessarily economically viable for the big textbook companies to make a textbook about it. So I just decided to use my prize from an ABC Trailblazer award which I was fortunate to win, and I really wanted to take this further.

I want to provide better access, because with these resources more schools can offer the program. At least you’ve got a starting point, and it can be hard when you don’t know where to start.

I’ve also worked with Earth Ed, which is a STEM specialist centre, to create a set of free lectures that were videoed, so they’re accessible to anybody who is completing Year 12 agriculture.

GQ: Congrats on your Award win. How did you go in Canberra meeting Education Minister Jason Clare and all the dignitaries? Was it quite a ‘pinch yourself’ kind of moment?

LH: Oh, it was so overwhelming. I had (Shadow Minister for Education) Sarah Henderson on my table. My goodness, I thought, ‘I’m just little old Louise from Goroke, and here I am at Parliament House meeting these people!’

I saw David Gonski, and I ran over to him and said, ‘Please, can I get a photo?’ And afterwards I said, ‘Oh, thank you so much’. I remember referencing the Gonski Review in all my uni assignments, and it really was such an honour to meet him.

But also hearing the stories from the other Early Career Teachers and the Teaching Fellows, I just thought ‘the future of Australia’s education is in good hands’.

We have so many committed individuals and committed schools – it really struck me, and it was so inspiring hearing their stories and seeing the impact.

For more information on the Commonwealth Bank Teaching Awards presented by Schools Plus, click here.