Head of Campus
The power of student voice
In usual Preshil fashion, we have begun our year in a flurry of exciting new initiatives and robust conversations.
As an initial side-note, we acknowledge that the recent heat has been a concern to some parents, especially in the first two weeks of the school year. Our School has air-conditioning in many classrooms, with the aim of ensuring the right conditions for learning, and we prioritise these classrooms in summer. While our intent is to increase the number of classrooms with this facility, being mindful of the outcomes for sustainability, we acknowledge that parents may still feel that keeping their children at home is preferable. If this is so, please know that the School supports your choice. You can let the School know via Compass and students can contact their teachers for any missed learning experiences.
We have now embarked on our very Preshilian, start-of-year, well-established and newly-designed endeavours.
As a focus for this year, each student will develop their Individual Learning Goals which seek to formalise, coalesce and communicate the value of student-centred learning. They are living documents, able to be adapted throughout the year of learning to the current status of an individual’s development. They are informed documents, open to influence from a range of goal-setting and self-perception techniques and strategies. They are flexible documents, providing a platform for a range of understandings of the following three broader categories of self-perception:
- Students reflect on and articulate their strengths, encouraging them to see themselves as powerful in many ways;
- Students explain their learning needs, communicating to teachers and parents what is necessary and helpful for them to succeed;
- Students set their own goals, drawing on wellbeing, academics, careers or general capabilities, including any other vision for their personal future that they declare as significant for them.
Students have spent a significant amount of time individually, collectively and collaboratively with their teachers, in shaping these documents, so they are ready to share.
We look forward to unveiling them (via Compass) over the following weeks, engaging in conversations with all interested parties and celebrating a new season of Preshil’s long tradition of handing over the power of voice to students.
Dan Symons
Head of Campus