the Nor'Wester

A Message from 

Hannah & Keir

“We would like to acknowledge the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people, the first people to dream, create, wonder, dance, play and learn on this breathtaking land. This land was cared for and respected for tens of thousands of years. The First Nations people lived in companionship with the animals and the life on this land. We acknowledge that this is stolen land and we pay our respects to elders, past, present and emerging.” 

Rayma Atkinson (2023 Suzanne Peterson Award Recipient)

Transition Inquiry & Step Up

Last week our teaching teams had a planning day each to prepare for the final Inquiry cycle of the year. Each year we finish off with a transition inquiry, to help prepare the kids for the upcoming changes; we know change is tricky for many people, but it is not something we can avoid! So we try to help kids identify and utilise their strengths, strategies and dispositions to manage the unknowns of each new year as well as celebrating the changes and growth we have experienced this year.

One part of the transition inquiry for all our students is Step Up. This is a series of experiences our whole school participates in, to practise managing change.

  • Next Monday is our first Step Up session, with the focus of Hello New Spaces! Students will find out the areas for their cohort next year and practise being in other parts of the school. For some of our younger students, they may never have been upstairs in the main building or into a portable on the oval, for example.
  • The following Monday is our second Step Up session, with the focus of Hello New Faces! Students will have the opportunity to meet and/or get to know students from other classes or other year levels that they may not know well, or might not have spent lots of time with for a while.
  • Our third Step Up session on Monday 25th November will have the focus of Hello New Routines! Here our teaching teams have considered any new expectations, routines or responsibilities that might come with a new cohort. This may relate to practices inside the classroom (such as a learning routine) or extend to out-of-class responsibilities such as leadership roles or tending to the chickens.
  • Our fourth and final Step Up is titled Hello New Teams!; it is on Monday 2nd December and is an opportunity for the kids to get to know the teachers who will be teaching in that cohort next year. Our teachers have already started making the very popular teacher quiz, where students get to show off what they know about us grown ups.

The Wednesday following our final Step Up session (11th December) is our Whole School Transition, which is when students will be spending time in their 2025 classroom, with their 2025 classmates and in most situations, with their 2025 classroom teacher. Although Step Up and our Whole School Transition feels very similar, we want to assure you that our Step Up sessions do not reflect the 2025 classes. We do trial a few different combinations and we do take notes of partnerships that are positive or challenging, but these sessions happen while we are creating our classes so they are not our finalised lists. Some of our students who really struggle with change may spend most of their Step Up sessions with one teacher - this does not mean that teacher will be their teacher. Some students may end up with another student for all the Step Up sessions - this does not mean they will be together next year. We want to really stress this point as we have had students and families upset by something they have inferred from the Step Up groups or upset when the Step Up group is different to the class list. 

One final thing for us all to remember is that for all of us, our best and closest friends were once unknown to us, so any ‘strangers’ in their future class may just be a bestie they haven’t met yet.

 

Planning for 2025

School leadership have been planning for 2025 for a few weeks now. We have conducted interviews, almost finalised our teaching teams, started Foundation transition (with everyone else starting transition next week) and we have begun our class formation process. 

Next year we will continue to have 5 specialists and 17 classes, comprising 3 Foundation classes, 5 Junior (1/2) classes, 5 Middle (3/4) classes and 4 Senior (5/6) classes. We expect to share the teaching teams and specialist roles in next week’s newsletter, once we’ve had a chance to speak with all our teachers.

Today we started forming classes for 2025, which takes five weeks and many hours of work. We have asked your children about their friendships and learning partners that will be in their cohort next year and our teachers have input a huge amount of data into the program we use to build our classes. Our approach to transition continues to evolve in response to previous challenges, new suggestions and identified patterns; we do this with your children at the centre of our focus - but it also helps us to have positive and well functioning learning communities across the school!

Part of our class formation process is inviting parents and carers to provide relevant information for consideration when we are creating classes. We want to assure all parents and carers that we know your children very well and go to great efforts to create balanced classes for everyone. Each year I do an analysis of parent requests to teacher data - the vast majority of parent requests are already in our system by the time our Google form closes. If you feel there is additional information about your child that you need to share, please follow this link to a Google form that will ask you a short series of questions. Providing information about your child does not make any guarantees.

Whether you are sharing information through the form above, or just preparing your child for the changes that are coming, please remember that we face significant complexity when finding the right combinations for our 400 students and for a number of different reasons, some requests cannot be granted. If, after seeing your child’s class list for 2025, you have questions about why certain decisions were made, we are very happy to talk through our thinking and reasoning with families, but we cannot guarantee any appeals will be upheld.