Collingwood College

Principal's Report

 

Dear Collingwood College Community,

 

HIGHLIGHTS OF 2019

 

TEACHING AND LEARNING

 

Victorian PLC Initiative.  

For a number of years now Collingwood College has been working in partnership with Fitzroy High School in the rollout of DET’s Professional Learning Communities (PLC) initiative.  The program was so successful in the senior school that this year, as stated in our AIP, we rolled the initiative out from P-10.

For those of you who are not teachers! … PLC’s are simply an approach to school improvement where groups of teachers work collaboratively at the school level to improve student outcomes.​  The PLC’s start from a simple idea: students learn more when their teachers work together.  

This year our entire leadership team undertook the training, and completed projects with all teaching staff over the course of three school terms.  The feedback and evidence has been nothing but positive.  At one stage, the entire school (P-10) was working on the same writing strategy - sentence structure.  For this five week cycle, and without going into too much teacher speak, we completed pre-testing, had robust professional discussion in our Learning Community groups, we developed and implemented targeted strategies for all students, not just tail end, builT a visible data wall and completed post testing.  Imagine the feeling when the results showed that almost all students had made over 6-month improvement in just five weeks!  So it is with little surprise that you will hear more about this initiative as we firmly embed into our practice.

 

Curriculum Audit

The Victorian Curriculum F-10 is a framework that sets out what every student should learn during their first eleven years of schooling. The curriculum is the common set of knowledge and skills required by students for life-long learning, social development and active and informed citizenship. More info here… https://victoriancurriculum.vcaa.vic.edu.au/overview/about

As a government school, Collingwood College is required to comply.  While this might sound easy, over the last decade there have been many updates and changes to the standardised curriculum.  You may have heard or read in newspapers about CSF, CSF#2, VELS, AUSVELS, Australian Curriculum and now the Victorian Curriculum, which as the most recent framework has been in existence for a number of years.

Electives in 7-10 needed required shuffling and alignment.  Next year students will have more time in the areas of Health, Science and Maths as we have refined our offerings.    There is no doubt students will benefit from the change and long term this will assist all our students when making decisions about their senior schooling pathway.   Also worth noting, is that this adjustment enhances the Steiner program in Yrs 7-10 as the timetable recognises the work completed in Main Lesson.  Previously, we were combining home group and period one to make a ‘main lesson.’ 

 

Four Lesson Days for 2020 in Secondary School.

As mentioned after a review of curriculum offerings from Years 7 to 10, Collingwood College has updated our timetable to allow for more time to be spent in the areas designated by the Victorian Curriculum.

This will mean some changes to the range of electives available in Years 7 to 10 but does not make any difference to the program already determined for offer at VCE and VCAL at both Collingwood College and Fitzroy High School.

As part of the curriculum review process undertaken at Collingwood this year the staff have been engaging in discussions and professional development to help improve student outcomes across all year levels.

Extensive research about greater time allocations for subjects in blocks has confirmed for us that the previous arrangement of 45-minute lessons could be improved by taking our lesson times to 75-minute sessions.  Increased time in lessons has been a model taken up by many secondary schools in the last few years. The additional time without movement or disruption contributes to greater time spent on task, more time for greater depth of learning that is also enhanced by more opportunity for teachers to interact with individuals. Below is an extract from some of the research that has helped to inform this change which will occur across Collingwood College and Fitzroy High School in 2020.

Larger blocks of time allow for a more flexible and

productive classroom environment, along with more opportunities for using varied and interactive teaching methods. Other benefits listed by Jeffrey Sturgis (1995) include:

  • more effective use of school time, 
  • r