Teaching and Learning

At Assembly on Wednesday, I spoke to our Senior School students about how the classroom is at the centre of school and while it’s easy to see the wonderful things that occur outside of classrooms, we need to ensure that teaching and learning remains our number one priority.

At the start of the year, Dr Hirst challenged with the idea that ‘extraordinary is within the grasp of us all’, prompting each of us to ask how we are going to strive to be extraordinary this year.

Personally, I want our students to do the ordinary things extraordinarily well. That’s a goal, and I certainly don’t expect that to be what we achieve from the first day. The focus is on simply doing the ordinary things better. There are four areas to focus on in the classroom, and they are the things that I explicitly ask from students:

To be prepared: to have what I need at the start of class and know what I want to achieve
To be present: mentally and physically for 50 minutes
To be positive: to remember that we all want to improve, and we are all capable improvement
To be respectful: to respect that desire to improve in others and to try to help them on their path

We had our Elevate Study Skills sessions for Year 10, 11 and 12 on Tuesday, with a guest speaker running an age-specific seminar with each year level. Three things stood out from these sessions. They’re simple ideas but they require consistent attention for students to be successful.

Look after yourself: eat, sleep, and exercise. In The Age on Wednesday, there was another report about the link between physical and mental health. The clinical evidence is unequivocal about the importance of establishing a routine for these fundamental daily actions.
Plan and execute your study: know what you are going to do and when you are going to do it.
Be persistent: get the most out of each class and be willing to experiment and keep an open mind.

In a sense, these are the ordinary things that are necessary. Students cannot produce top quality grades on a regular basis without doing these things. We don’t expect students to be perfect in the pursuit of these goals; if they start to move away from them, they simply need to reset and start again.

One of the ordinary but important parts of school life is homework. This term, we are trialling a ‘homework club’. Students who neglect to complete homework will be instructed by their teacher to attend a lunchtime detention on the next Friday. Please note that students who do not attend the lunchtime detention will receive a Friday after-school detention.

From my perspective, we have started the year doing the ordinary things well. The measure of our success in the classroom will be whether we are able to maintain these actions and make them part of our routine.

Ralph Carolan