Carly Pluck, Leading teacher, Canterbury Primary School
Leading teacher
Canterbury Primary School, Vic
Carly Pluck works to improve student engagement and learning outcomes by empowering her students to co-design their learning experiences and enabling them to have genuine input in decision-making. Her colleagues describe Pluck as “an exceptional teacher who fully engages her students in all learning, ensuring that, without exception, all students are capably achieving to the best of their abilities.”
Pluck models learning to her students and creates an environment in which it’s safe to take risks, which ensures that students know that failure is an important part of learning. By developing strong relationships with students, she challenges them at their point of need while ensuring that her knowledge of each student’s background guides learning experiences and opportunities. Pluck ensures that learning is relatable for students by providing a genuine context and purpose for all learning. She strongly advocates learning by doing and scaffolding problem-solving through trial and error in real experiences, rather than abstract concepts.
In 2016, Pluck developed and coordinated a collaborative project with several primary schools, which was profiled by the Victorian Department of Education as a strong model of collaboration between schools for improving learning outcomes. She also created a Maker Festival, which was used to launch Education Week for the Department of Education, and has presented at a regional New Pedagogies for Deep Learning conference on empowering students and building student-led learning environments.