Our MFG Newsletter

Learning and Teaching 

 

at MFG

Maker Faire 5

Last week we hosted our 5th annual Maker Faire with over 40 primary school students from 4 schools attended for a day of ‘hard fun’. This day is an opportunity for our students to run workshops and showcase their learning as well as an opportunity to coordinate some STEAM related activities with Deakin University.

The day was a wonderful success and the primary school students had a taste of virtual reality, earthquake simulation, Microbits, Spheros and creating with the Makey Makey.

Thanks to all of our students who ran workshops and to Ms Jo Toone (Leader of STEAM initiatives) for coordinating the day and Mr Casey McGarigle.

 

Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP)

All of our staff participated in the Cultural Understanding and Safety Training at our Staff Professional Learning Day on the last day of Term 3. The afternoon session was spent revisiting our RAP and prioritising our next steps for 2020.  Thanks to Susan Ryan for attending this session - your support and wisdom was greatly appreciated.

In 2020 we will dedicate some Equity Funding to supporting the Truganina Group to implement some key actions from the RAP.

 

MFG Traits: Overview example 4

This year one of our goals as a group of teachers will be to develop an overview that describes each of our 11 MFG traits. Each of our teachers, as part of their Performance and Development Plans, is incorporating one or more of our traits into their teaching.

Below is another example of an overview of one of the traits.

What is this trait and what does it look like in action?

What is it to be optimistic?

Optimism involves learning to think positively about the future – even when things go wrong. It’s about looking objectively at a situation, making a conscious decision to focus on the good. Someone who is optimistic is hopeful about the future and tends to expect that good things will happen.

  • Optimism is not about the glass being half full as is commonly believed.
  • Optimism refers to your belief system about how successful you think your actions are, and how effectively you can impact on the world.
  • Optimists do better academically, socially and have better health than pessimists
  • Optimists look at the flip side of negative events for some good, some hope and some reason to be positive
  • The basis for optimism is in the way that a person thinks about the causes of events, which is reflected in the way he or she explains events.

We can teach and nurture optimism when

  • We help our students to understand the power of self-talk
  • We assist our students to slow down and think through the options
  • We support our students to reframe - Optimistic people are able to find positive aspects in negative situations, no matter how small
  • We support our students to look for the lesson - Self-blame is strongly-related with pessimistic thinking
  • We teach our students to look for the learning in every situation
  • We apportion blame fairly
  • We assist our students to practice perspective taking and recognise that children often get things out of proportion when they are under stress
  • We teach our students to wind back or tone back their language - Extreme language leads to extreme thinking. We can encourage our students to replace “I’m furious” with “I’m annoyed”, “It’s a disaster” with ‘It’s a pain”, “I hate it” with “I don’t like it” - by changing kids’ language you change how they think about events and, more importantly, how they feel
  • We help our students to set realistic, achievable goals
  • We encourage our students to use their ‘disaster meter’ - ask kids to assess negative events on their personal disaster meters
  • We encourage our students to look for the good things that happen to them.

 

Strategies and Techniques that we use to develop and teach this trait include:

Our community has:

  • an understanding about what the future looks like
  • the ability to articulate actions/concepts around sustainability
  • ownership of Global footprints - meeting the needs of today without compromising the needs of future generations
  • control of their future and the understanding that this empowers optimism for the future
  • an understanding of pathways options and opportunities
  • an identity as a learner and set goals to improve our limitations
  • appreciation that mistakes and failure are central to learning progress and improvement
  • the language of learning to describe and understand ourselves as learners in a wide range of contexts

HITS

  • Multiple exposures
  • Setting goals
  • Differentiated teaching
  • Questioning

 

Dylan Wiliam’s Formative Assessment Strategies

  • ‘Self-Reports’
  • Plus, Minus, Interesting
  • Self-assessment as a routine park of classwork (see reflection prompts pp217)
  • ‘Learning Portfolios’
  • Learning Logs

 

Project Zero Creative Visible Thinking Strategies

 

 

Marzano Strategies

  • relationships that are conducive to effective reform efforts: (1) optimism, (2) honesty, and (3) consideration.

 

References and Sources

Mr Damien Toussaint

Assistant Principal (Learning and Teaching)

 

Mr Damien Toussaint
Mr Damien Toussaint