Principal's Report
August 2019
Opening of the Kurunjang Community Hub
Kurunjang residents have now received a new home for community activities and classes, following the opening of the new Kurunjang Community Hub last week. The council officially opened the hub and invited representatives from both Kurunjang Secondary and Kurunjang Primary School. I was thrilled to attend and see the opening of what is a very impressive building.
Our Local Member of Parliament, Stephen McGhie and the Mayor of Melton, Cr Bob Turner, jointly opened the new facility.
It is anticipated that the Hub will be an important activity space for our community. The Hub features a teaching kitchen, edible garden and classrooms and community spaces. Students at the hub can take classes in healthy eating and food preparation, and adults will have the opportunity to take accredited courses and enjoy cultural cooking classes.
There’s also space for student support services, community meetings, and school and community activities.
The state government contributed $2.35 million towards the new hub, while Melton council added $300,000. As I mentioned earlier it is a very impressive building.
We, as a school community, look forward to using this facility extensively.
Years 8 to 12 Course Selection
All students have either undergone or are in the process of course-counseling with staff to choose their course for next year and for Year 10 students for the next two years of schooling. The parent attendance for the accompanying information sessions were excellent, and in many cases higher than previous years.
It is great to see families attending and making informed decisions.
I wish to thank and acknowledge the work of many of our staff who are willingly contributing many hours of additional advice to our students and parents. We are also hoping the refining of the course selection process introduced this year by members of our leadership team and the additional counselling from our Careers practitioners will contribute to better outcomes for our students.
AVID Professional Learning
Our early finish on Wednesday 17 July 2019, enabled the College to facilitate an AVID Professional Learning opportunity for all teaching staff to support our focus on Differentiation.
As part of the AVID community, we have access to the professional development and support networks of AVID Australia. To support our implementation, a workshop was given to all staff by by Donna Kortvelesey who is an experienced AVID staff developer from the USA and was very ably assisted by our Teaching and Learning Coordinator, Dominic Snape.
The workshop itself concentrated on ‘Scaffolding Lessons Through WICOR’.
‘Scaffolding instruction’ refers to specialized teaching strategies geared toward supporting learning when students are first introduced to a new subject. Scaffolding gives students a context, motivation, or foundation from which to understand the new information that will be introduced during the coming lesson. Donna also emphasized the difference between scaffolding and differentiation in teacher lesson planning.
Earlier that day in the morning, Donna also ran an intensive workshop for members of the Leadership Team on how to incorporate data in decision making.
We were fortunate to secure the services of Donna once more to work with staff as part of our journey with AVID Schoolwide.
Both were Professional Learning programs of the highest order.
-John Mitsinikos
College Principal
