Deputy Principal - Teaching & Learning 

As we warmly welcomed the new Year 7 cohort to the Senior School, our teaching staff greeted them with enthusiasm, and a renewed commitment to enhancing the students’ time spent in the classroom by reducing their exposure to screens. This deliberate move away from embedding technology in every lesson in every subject was undertaken after members of our teaching team undertook a research project in conjunction with the University of Queensland. And the research is clear; students are more able to gain and retain information when they are not overly reliant upon technology. We are hopeful, too, that students who are less connected to technology will be more able to make connections with one another. 

Of course, our students do not operate within a vacuum, and they are coming of age in a time of unprecedented technological change. Yet the communities in which they are being raised are attempting to wrestle back some of their childhood. In Australia, this has meant a social media ban, and while there is no doubt the ban can be refined and improved, perhaps we can be hopeful that this generation of Year 7s will begin to experience what those of us who grew up in the 1980s did: boredom. For these children, waiting, and daydreaming, once natural parts of growing up, have been replaced by constant stimulation. One of my favourite comedy skits is performed by the Irish-American comedian, Des Bishop, who riffs on how modern "mindfulness" is just what people in the 1980s and 90s called "being bored" or "waiting" because they didn't have smart phones to distract them. He highlights that before the age of the smart phone, you were "forced to be with yourself", and that this forced presence is now marketed as a new age concept.

Of course, children now wait for the bus with an entertainment device in their hands, earphones at the ready. So, it is up to us to help children learn how to be bored. For something beautiful happens when children are bored: their curiosity is aroused. As they start asking questions and searching for meaning, the brain activates reward pathways linked to motivation and pleasure. This neurological response helps sustain attention, strengthens memory, and guides children toward discovering what genuinely interests them.

If our goal is to raise capable, thoughtful young women in a world obsessed with productivity, we must also teach them how to nurture themselves, how to rest, watch, read, imagine and create. These experiences teach them not just how to achieve, but how to dream.

Ms Lisa Hanlon

Deputy Principal - Teaching & Learning