Teaching and Learning

The final term of 2017 brings a conclusion to many of the exciting learning journeys that we have had so far but one area that we feel our journey has just begun has been in our Pre-CAL program. This journey started way back in 2015 when we had our school review.

You might remember that while developing our strategic plan for 2016-2019 we enlisted help from the community to decide what our strategic goals would be. One area that needed improvement was our classroom structures for students who required significant support with speech, language, comprehension and social awareness. To address this we decided to create classes in year 7-10 where we could cater specifically for these needs by addressing the curriculum areas.

In 2016 we researched what this might look like and in 2017 we have developed a program tailored to the needs of the students in those classes. We have called this the Pre-CAL program.

At Concord students in Secondary 11-12 will be working towards the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL) so this program offers support for students to be ready for year eleven by offering an applied approach to learning. Within this program we utilise a weekly offsite excursion as a language experience and we use the context of that experience to explicitly teach the required literacy and numeracy skills with a more integrated approach. For example, the theme may be safety and the excursion could be as simple as walking/catching a bus to the Watsonia shops to purchase lunch but the hands on classroom elements would include students researching how to get to the destination, estimating the length of time it would take to get there, planning and costing their outing, writing emails to shop keepers to request a visit and writing a recount of the experience. Though the aims of the program include providing students with real world experiences, fostering their confidence, building independence, developing communication skills, engaging with the and the transfer of skills across multiple environments the most important element of the program is to provide a context for learning literacy and numeracy in the classroom.

In order to promote the program we will be providing some information sessions for our families to allow for a greater understanding of the overall aims of the Pre-CAL program. These will be held on Thursday the 16th of November. There will be one session at 9.30am at the Watsonia Campus and there will be a final session at 6.00pm at the Bundoora Campus in the Transition Building. We strongly encourage your attendance at one of these sessions as we value the input from our community but we also endeavor to be as transparent as possible with our information.

Banyule Nillumbik Tech School Update

In our last newsletter we talked about Concord’s involvement with the Tech School. Today we have a few examples of the work that our students have been doing in collaboration with many other schools within our network. Please have a look at the Chat bot video to get a detailed explanation of the outing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHvaH99kKIY and have a look at the attached photographs from the Tech School Day. We are extremely pleased with the students who have represented Concord School at these events so far and look forward to further involvement from our students in the future.

Kirrily Lamers,

Assistant Principal