Christ’s College – mastering lessons to motivate students
19 Sep 2025
At Christ’s College, we are very fortunate to have leading educators who specialise in enhancing staff development to benefit students across every year level while tailoring the best individual learning.
Today, mastering the science of learning to motivate and engage teenagers is at the heart of new research by College educators Dr Graeme Swanson and Dr Tom Hawkins.
Both have presented their findings – titled ‘A Novel Statistical Approach to Targeting Interventions for Student Motivation and Engagement’ – at the 2025 A Matter of Translation Conference, hosted by Anglican Church Grammar School in Brisbane.
“We wanted to unpack the different ways that student motivation and engagement predict learning progress, for different year groups,” Dr Hawkins explains. “Unsurprisingly, the ways that Year 10s are motivated and engaged in learning are different to Year 13s. Importantly, for student learning, knowing the details of how the boys are motivated and engaged at different times in their secondary school journey can allow us to tailor mentoring programmes and teaching interventions more precisely.”
For Dr Swanson, the Director of the Centre for Teaching Excellence & Research (CTER) at Christ’s College, “it is a conference highlight to be able to share ideas that can help others improve educators’ practice and, in turn, help students”.
“It also provides an opportunity for us to calibrate our thinking and affirm that we are heading in the right direction at College. As the CTER is responsible for supporting staff in their professional growth journeys, it is vital that I keep pace with the latest research and continue to build a wider community across the education sector. At College, we run professional programmes on the science of learning, resulting in direct benefits for our students by ensuring staff use the most effective, evidence-based strategies in the classroom.”
Dr Hawkins adds that “as we learn more year-on-year, we can see whether the differences between year groups reflect the different cohorts of boys [and their unique personalities], or the pressures and demands of a particular year level”.
Buoyed by the response from fellow educators at the conference, both plan to extend their research to enhance the best learning at Christ’s College.
