Principal Report

Today is the last day of May and of Autumn, which means tomorrow is the first day of winter. We have certainly noticed the changes to the weather this week with the beginning of the week being very cold and these past few days quite grey, rainy and windy. In the Wurundjeri calendar, we are in the middle of the Waring season, also known as the wombat season and the Bunurong people (south of where we are located but close) call this time of year ‘plenty cold winter’, a time that was used for the elders to teach the young people while sitting around the fire in the cold evenings. 

This week is reconciliation week, and this year’s theme is ‘Now more than ever’ encouraging all Australians to proactively learn about our shared national history. Fittingly, we also received the final proofs of our new house artwork which has been completed by Simone Thomson who also created our values artwork and worked with our community to design and build the indigenous garden opposite the new stadium. Shane Hunt will be sharing these designs and the process behind them later in this edition of the newsletter. 

Last week, the staff at the college spent the curriculum day learning more about strategies and techniques to support improved student voice, agency and leadership, particularly in classrooms. When we talk about student voice and leadership, often we think of things like our student leadership programs, our school captains and prefects, our house captains and our year 7 ambassadors but the reality is that these programs are great for the wider school program but their impact on the teaching and learning environment is minimal. What we are wanting to build here at Heathmont College is a community of connected learners who have agency, voice and demonstrate leadership in the classrooms and in their learning. This requires more than a program, it requires a shift in how we approach curriculum planning and pedagogy to hand over elements of the design of the learning environment to students so that they can help us to create the environment that they can learn best it. On the curriculum day last week, we had an external speaker, Haley Dureu from Mentone Girls Secondary College come and talk to us about her work in the student voice space, including the work that she is currently completing as part of her Doctoral dissertation. Then a range of workshops run by our teaching and leadership staff and finished up with a session looking at the student feedback we have been collecting in our classrooms from students and discussing how we use this to improve our practice and the learning environment. It was a very engaging day of learning for our staff and I look forward to seeing the way in which teachers and classroom support staff implement these learnings in the coming months. 

On the student front, we have had a number of things happening around the college. The Year 12 cohort recently attended Careers Expo at the showgrounds where they were able to learn about potential options after Year 12. According to students I have spoken to, it was a very helpful event for many of them. We have also had students competing in sporting competitions with our Intermediate and Senior interschool sports days. We had students out at the SWAT retreat with Maroondah Council and have had many visitors from the local primary schools here for our Indonesian and German cultural days. We have junior (years 7 and 8) sport days coming up, an Aspiring Leaders Conference that our student leaders are running for our local primary schools, in conjunction with Maroondah Council as well as a myriad of other activities including outdoor education excursions and camps and 9Life activities. Lots to keep us warm and busy for the last four weeks of the term and of the semester. 

Kerryn Sandford

College Principal