Principals Report

Dear Parents and Friends,

It was fabulous to see so many parents at school over the last 2 days accessing the parent / teacher interviews.

Effective parent-teacher conferences can boost family involvement and help promote positive outcomes for you, your students, and our College community.

We hope your interviews provide a great opportunity to:

• share academic progress and growth based on classroom observations, testing data, assessments, portfolios, and assignments
• share with us your views about your students' strengths, needs, behaviours, and learning styles
• discuss enrichment and or intervention strategies to support your students' learning
• discuss challenges that may be interfering with your students' learning and growth.

On Monday and Tuesday this week I was part of a staff team who travelled to Melbourne to take part in the Berry Street Education Model.  The Berry Street Education Model is a progressive training course. It enables teachers to both increase engagement with challenging students and improve all students’ self-regulation, growth and academic achievement.

Students engaged in the work of this model achieved more than two years academic growth in one year following implementation of the model (based on data evaluated by the University of Melbourne).

The 5 Domains of BSEM:

The five domains of the Berry Street Education Model correspond with the child-development capacities that each student must build in order to be ‘ready to learn’. We focus first on building their capacity to engage and then nurturing their willingness to engage.

Body: Building students’ capacity by increasing physical regulation of the stress response, de-escalation and focus. 

Relationship: Nurturing on-task learning through relational classroom management strategies.

Stamina: Creating a culture of academic persistence by nurturing resilience, emotional intelligence and a growth mindset.

Engagement: Motivating students with strategies that increase their willingness to learn.

Character: Harnessing a values and character strengths approach to instill students’ self-knowledge for future pathways.

We look forward to sharing more with you as we progress this work across the College.

We trust the term break will provide an opportunity for students and families to rest and regenerate before our final term of learning for 2018.

Happy holidays!

Kind regards, Claire Kelly