From the Principal

It’s been a very busy term as usual with plenty of excursions, sports, a camp or two and of course the hard-fought Sports Day, won by Karla.  A highlight of the term has been the Morioka Chuo Study Tour which wrapped up at the end of last week and saw 13 Japanese students staying with APHS families and attending our school.  

The students forged strong connections with their Aberfoyle Park families, and it was a joy to see the mutual pleasure that Aberfoyle Park and Morioka Chuo young people took in getting to know each other.

Staffing news

• Julie Mohtasham has won the B3 Assistant Principal of the Senior School position behind Fran Charlton.  Because of her expertise as a SACE coordinator, she will additionally retain that aspect of her former role.
• Kat Hosking has won the Year 11 leader position behind Julie.
• Ross Dempster has joined us in a 0.6 contract role teaching Mathematics.

• Ben Dening, our B2 Student Pathways leader has accepted another position at Tonsley Technical College.  He will be leaving us on Friday 27 March, and we wish him every success in his new position.

   

Student Free Day

Our student free day held on 6 March focused on our current work on implementing the South Australian Curriculum.  Staff attended presentations by curriculum leaders on how they were explicitly teaching not just the content, or concepts of the SA Curriculum, but also the skills or capabilities required to demonstrate learning in a subject area. For example, Sharmaine Mills explained how she had taught her class about liveability in HASS, not just by exposing them to measures like the Global Liveability Index, but also by drilling down into one aspect of the Index – infrastructure – and teaching those students how to analyse a feature of infrastructure such as public transport. 

Sharmaine’s students compared public transport in different places and developed an understanding of how this could influence views about how liveable a place is.  Sharmaine noted that this did indeed take longer with her class, but also described the richness of the students’ learning and the assessment work they produced as a result.  

After the curriculum leader presentations, the staff worked in Curriculum teams to further develop units of work with a focus on the explicit teaching of the skills that make the content in each subject useful.  

The Student Free Day gave the staff valuable time to collaborate and learn from each other while developing engaging and relevant learning experiences for our students. 

Reading proficiency

The beginning of year testing of year 7 and 8 students’ reading proficiency is complete, with the trend of year 7 students reaching us with improved reading continuing as it has for the last 3 years.  Year 7 and 8 staff are now using reading fluency lessons weekly and or using engagement norms in their classes to build students speed and accuracy of reading, whilst developing their vocab knowledge and comprehension.  

Eliza Mather, our buy-in Speech Pathologist, has developed placemats for each year 7 and 8 class so that teachers can see which type of strategies work best to develop the proficiency of each student.  

Eliza, Chris Brookes, our Lead Teacher focussing on reading, and Michael Walker, our Digital Technology teacher, are collaborating to plan an online game to develop students’ reading through the application of morphology – that is, the addition to base words of prefixes and suffixes.  

Students in Michael’s year 12 Digital Technology class will develop this game as an assessment task later this year, with testing of the game with year 7 and 8 students to occur late in 2026.

Chief Executive’s Student Forum

On 16 March, 6 students in years 7 to10 joined students from approximately 50 other schools at a forum hosted online by the Chief Executive of the Department for Education in South Australia, Professor Martin Westwell.  The students were Siri from year 7, Joe and Mary-Jane from year 8, Indi from year 9 and Ciara and Cecilia from year 10. 

This was the first in a series of forums to be held including these students, with the aim of the students acting as researchers to inform and influence learning in their school.  In this forum, students were asked to reflect on the learning experiences that they had at our school, and identify areas of strength, areas of development, and areas worth exploring further at our school. 

The results were fascinating.  Our students said:

• That the creation of a safe environment in which making mistakes was an important and normal part of learning was a strength of our school
• That teachers giving students opportunities to explain their thinking rather than just give answers was developing at our school
• That teachers giving students opportunities to ask questions rather than just give answers was worth exploring further at our school

Hearing authentic student voice about how learning is going for them is an essential part of planning and delivering excellent education.  Staff will be considering ways to incorporate what we are learning from our students during staff meetings during term 2 this year.  

I look forward to hearing more from the next student forum and working with the staff of the school to respond effectively to the insight that students offer.

Parent-Teacher Interviews

On Tuesday 7 April from between 3:00pm and 7:00pm we will hold our term 1 Parent Teacher Interviews.  This event follows the publication of student reports for the term on Wednesday 1 April, just before Easter, and is a great opportunity to discuss achievement so far and how it can be built on during term 2.  

Bookings for parent teacher interviews will open early in the week starting 30 March, and information about how to make a booking will be sent home as this occurs.  Please consider coming along to meet and talk to your child’s teachers about their progress so far. 

As term one draws to a close, I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a safe and happy holiday break and I look forward to welcoming students back to school for the start of term 2 on Tuesday 28 April.

Article by Cassie Dickeson | Principal