Principal Report

Principal Message Week 4 Term 4

It has been such a wonderful feeling over the past three weeks to have all our children and staff back onsite. The remote learning experience has taken a backseat and we have relaunched ourselves into the year and term. 

Whilst I learnt to enjoy the communication online over time, nothing beats being onsite and I can without hesitation say our children are just revelling in the opportunity to be back in the classroom and at school with their teachers and friends. Despite it being Term 4 there is a lot of energy and enthusiasm - in some ways, it feels like the beginning of the year all over again. 

We have learnt so much about our children this year and the remote learning experience provided us with a level of insight that we haven’t always been privy to. At the end of last term, we asked for your feedback with regards to Remote Learning 2.0. Overwhelmingly the results were extremely positive. Yes, there were still a few challenges with regards to balancing work and remote learning for families and maintaining motivation but overall the response indicated that this time around there was more balance, greater communication and flexibility and that the smaller zoom sessions facilitated better learning engagements.

One key aspect for me was parent-school partnerships. The survey highlighted that parents felt very supported by staff and that the regular contact we put in place during this time to help facilitate this worked extremely well in ensuring children were engaging with their learning. Another key takeaway was that parents felt that they now had greater insight into how their children learn. Using a platform such as Seesaw has been an enabler and this is something we would like to explore further and utilise more often now that we have returned.

I commented earlier that we have all learnt a lot about our children this year. This experience shed a different light on what assists us to become good learners. It is interesting to note that the top 10 skills noted by the World Economic Forum as essential to developing for the future are:

• Analytical thinking and innovation
• Complex problem-solving
• Critical thinking and analysis
• Active learning and learning strategies
• Creativity, originality and initiative
• Attention to detail, trustworthiness
• Emotional intelligence
• Reasoning, problem-solving and ideation
• Leadership and social influence
• Coordination and time management

These are essentially what they call soft skills. On Tuesday night staff attended a Professional Learning session with Kath Murdoch. The evening was focused on the PYP – Approaches to Learning or ATLs. The ATLs are essentially five categories of interrelated skills and associated sub-skills which support students to become self-regulated learners and are grounded in the premise that learning how to learn is fundamental to a student’s education. 

There is a strong correlation between the future skill set needed listed above and these ATLs. I can’t help but think how vital it is to develop these essential skills if we want to ensure children become self-regulated learners who know how to ask good questions, set effective goals and pursue their aspirations with the determination to achieve them. These skills will also help to support their sense of agency. Encouraging them to see their learning as an active and dynamic process.  

I keep coming back to what did we learn during remote learning about our children and how has that translated back to the school context. And for me, I can clearly see that whilst it has been a challenging year we collectively, school and home, have greater insight into our children as learners. This is such a valuable and powerful realisation and it is from this that we need to ensure we draw out the best of what this experience has provided and use it as we look to the future and for the future of learning at St Columba’s.