From the Principal

On Purpose

Natalie Jensen, Jason Barton and I attended an outstanding day of workshops last Thursday, run by the Centre for Strategic Education, called “Leading educational thinking and practice”.  Sounds dry, perhaps, but it was highly provocative, exciting and, for our team, affirming.

As a result of this day, Preshil will engage in a number of highly innovative networks and projects, but more of that later.

Many of Preshil’s core values and directions, particularly the possibilities opening to us through the IB programmes, were re-affirmed including our emphasis on:

• the opportunities to think and operate globally, rather than in the constraints of parochial educational boundaries
• purposefully cultivating cross-disciplinary learning
• exposing students to real, rich and diverse experiences
• valuing creativity and the arts as central, not peripheral, to learning
• prioritising the emotional wellbeing and resilience of our students as a key capability
• ensuring that learning is collaborative rather than competitive
• measuring progress against individually designed goals, rather than as a deviation from norm-based standards
• valuing each individual and supporting their ambitions rather than how students can increase the School’s status
• teaching Philosophy across the School with its emphasis on ethical judgements and critical thinking.

We also need to invest more resources and attention on:

• refocusing our Careers program on ensuring our students have the skills and orientation to navigate the completely transformed tertiary and employment landscape
• cultivate the entrepreneurial skills necessary to see and create new possibilities
• develop much richer forms of feedback and assessment of learning across the School
• increase our participation in the most generative and like-minded networks around the world.

We acknowledge how lucky we are at Preshil to have parents and a community that is forward thinking and supportive. The sad message coming from so many schools is the stranglehold they operate in with religious affiliations, unassailable conventional traditions and parent groups who demand academic achievements above all other considerations.

All schools must come to terms with educational bureaucrats and politicians holding back change and insisting that our children are tested (“face the front and no copying”) on 'essential' facts, distilled from centuries of educational practitioners on 'how to hunt a Sabre-tooth tiger', or some equally archaic set of  'factual' knowledge. (Along with “No talking and tuck your shirt in before you start.”)

One session at the conference, led by Valerie Hannon, an acknowledged world leader in educational change, focused on the urgent need to think about our purpose in schools. All ongoing institutions become mired in assumptions, but in the case of schooling it is our children who will be shaped by our failure to rethink what education is for. We know it is no longer sufficient to prepare students for an industrial model of society; there has to be ongoing realignment and agility if we are even to keep up, let alone prepare the way forward.

In the preface to Hannon’s new book Thrive, Charles Leadbeater, international authority on innovation and creativity, comments: "We are in danger of educating a generation of children to become not very good at jobs that robots will do better."

While this statement might have us pondering the future role of robots, a later session elaborated on a current example of a robot, unidentified as such, being voted by students as the best of the online tutors available to help students. This ‘tutor’ was not just the fastest and most accurate, but was voted the most cheerful and helpful…. Oh dear.

Sir Ken Robinson adds: "HG Wells famously said that civilization is a race between education and catastrophe. [Valerie Hannon] argues with clarity and concision that this is not an empty aphorism. On the contrary, humanity faces existential challenges and radically transforming our dominant systems of education is essential to meet them. That transformation has to begin with reframing the fundamental purpose of education…."

Sir Ken Robinson has been urging such a transformation for over a decade – and yet in that time the VCE still looks remarkably the same. The ATAR still ranks all Year 12 students in a simple 1 – 100, relies on a highly competitive and reductive examination system and privileges a hierarchy of content-based subjects. And NAPLAN, despite the rich data it actually offers teachers, has not, at this stage been adapted for computers but still needs to be completed with a pencil!

Marilyn Smith

Principal