Principal Report

5 ways to help your kids learn!

• Reward effort, not only achievement.
• Encourage them to take risks with their learning.
• It’s ok to make mistakes. Use it as an opportunity to learn what could improve the outcome next time.
• When praising your child, focus on the strategies and skills they used to learn about a specific subject, rather than their innate talent or skills.
• Be mindful of the messages you convey at home. For example, referring to yourself as ‘I was bad at maths’ or ‘no good at spelling’ can reinforce their conceptions of themselves.

School Values

Being Safe, Respectful and Willing to Learn are our school values. Students who display our school values, like the three lads above, often will find themselves on the receiving end of of our SWPBS reward system. SWPBS is School Wide Positive Behaviour Support, where you ‘find’ students who are doing the right thing. This is a program we have had at the school for the last few years and now that we are consistently back face to face, we are really encouraging positive behaviour. Students receive recognition for consistently displaying school values. Staff talk to the value students have displayed and give the student a ‘Rooward’. Students can gather the ‘Roowards’ and cash them in at our weekly SWPBS canteen. One of the rewards is a milkshake – which costs 15 ‘Roowards’. That could take a week to save up, but as you can see from the looks on the faces, ‘well worth the effort’!!

Staff Professional 

Development Day 11/3

On Friday March 11th Edenhope College had a student free day. The day was set aside for staff professional development and the focus for the day related to our new staff instructional model and the planning that goes into setting up curriculum. Led by our Learning Specialist Rachel Munro and Assistant Principal Chad Frost, staff looked at collaborative planning in various faculty areas. Working collaboratively was an area that our 2020 school review targeted to help strengthen student outcomes and without ‘remote learning’ impeding progress the day was met extremely positively by teaching staff. Although most of us work individually as teachers there are many strengths different people have, so teaming up/working together points to a better overall result. In our case we are looking to challenge and engage students more within the classroom. Student voice in the 2021 Attitudes to School Survey has shown that student engagement has improved and as a school we want to continue that improvement.

As a school, embedding a new instructional model, collaborating more as faculties, we are working towards building a more robust whole school curriculum continuum (say that 20 times fast!). This is the goal for us to reach by the years end. From there we’ll continually review/reflect and look at ways to support, challenge and engage our students!

Curriculum Development

Leadership and staff have been working together on a new instructional model for curriculum delivery across Edenhope College. An instructional model is a structure for how all staff plan and deliver their curriculum to students. It gives a level of consistency of what students see in the classroom and is a vital part of school improvement.

When you look at our new ‘draft’ instructional model, although shaped like a circle it steps through what each lesson needs to be broken up into for students to learn best. It breaks the lesson into four main areas where you:

1/ ‘Prepare’ the students for what they are about to learn. 2/ Topic ‘Introduction/Explanation. 3/ Independent work. 4/ Revise/Conclusion.

With the instructional model comes explanations of each area on the model which is especially important when we have new staff come to the College to work as CRT’s or work full time. It also sets standards for all staff to work. We have had an instructional model at Edenhope College, but it was over 10 years old and needed to be reviewed.

The feedback from staff is they found the PD day highly valuable and supportive. We will all continue working together and challenging each other to build our skill base so that students benefit!

March School Council Elections

Thanks to the five parents who have put their hands up to to become school council members for the next two years. With the five new parents on board we have nine parents, four DET members and one student representative. We had our AGM last Wednesday the 23rd of March and this is the largest school council board we’ve had in my time at Edenhope College. Having larger numbers augers well for getting parent and student voice into our learning environment. If you’re a parent or general community member and you’d like to help improve our school - keep us in mind at the start of each year and put yourself forward when we call for school council nominations.

Equestrian Elective

Great to see Mrs Price’s equestrian class finally making it to the classroom. Over the year, students will look at the animal husbandry, equipment and the skills associated with this elective as well as potentially competing in equestrian competitions. By the looks on these faces I think getting Mrs Price into the classroom was well and truly worth the effort.

Hands on Learning

On Monday 21st of March we commenced our Hands on Learning program at school. It is a program aimed at developing self confidence and various life skills within students and is project based. Students will be led by our Technology teacher Christian Haack and our Chaplain Brian O’Leary. The program runs each Monday with students coming out of class for the day with mainly hands on tasks. Teamwork is one of the keys for the program as students work together on projects both in and out of school. We ran the program at Edenhope College seven years ago and have decided to fund it again. There is a lot of directed decision making for students, they set individual goals and get exposed to many different skill sets needed to complete tasks. If there are any community projects needed please send them the College's way, as it is as much about out of school projects as in school!

Edenhope/Balmoral/Goroke Senior School Camp

Most senior students (Year 11 & 12), attended our senior camp to Deakin University, Warrnambool over the 16th – 18th of March. Students were exposed to the lifestyle of living on campus by staying in student accommodation. They shared the ‘uni’ experience with students from the other schools. Many vocations were looked at including Environmental Science, Nursing, Robotics, Media etc. Local university graduates were on hand to answer any questions the students had and we left informed on pathways to many different careers that the university catered for. Students also visited the local TAFE and had a tour of Midfield Meats, which they enjoyed. They also enjoyed activities like 10 pin bowling and spent a few hours at the beach.

Trevor McClure

Principal