assistant principal's message

Dear Parents and carers,

We are all back together! Synonyms to describe this experience include: assembly, powwow, get-together, social, gathering, reunion, reintegration, amalgamation and Reunification…look out for this one night only special event…it is sounding like lots of fun! 

For me, the word is WONDERFUL. It has been so lovely seeing the children again, enjoying watching them reconnecting with friends and their teachers. This is a powerful reminder of the social worlds of our children and how important they are! During my career, I’ve often reflected on the ‘secret lives of children’, during the time of remote learning, families have had a far broader window into these lives, especially the academic one, than ever before! 

So as to share in these insights as well as hearing from your children directly, we asked families to fill in the remote learning handover survey. To date, 168 have been completed. A massive thank you to families for doing this.

A snippet of the student feedback includes:

What do you want to keep from this time?

1. More inquiry learning

2. More digital technologies

3. More independence or autonomy

4. Movement breaks regularly in a day

5. More creativity & art

6. More comforts, more time with family

7. Less work

8. More quiet time at school

9. More lessons that extend over lessons or days

In order to explore the above data as well as the other student responses, we have already had some great discussions including:

• With teacher and family members at the Education Committee, looking at the data from both curriculum and student wellbeing perspectives, 
• With teachers at the Wellbeing committee,
• With JSC – students giving further insights when thinking about favourite ways of learning, being more independent, and feedback.

Two immediate actions:

1. Teams consider how they are able to integrate some of what students want to keep into classroom programs. Pleasingly, many teachers are already using many of the successful approaches learnt during this time, for instance, the Senior Team is trialling more flexible and child directed learning program, while further developing the essential organisational skills.
2. Parent teacher interviews – given the shared understandings gained during this time, the Senior students and their families will be invited to Student Led Conferences. This will be a time where everyone will share successes, areas for improvement including setting goals going forward. Stay tuned to more information about these! 

Last night, I had the pleasure of reading through all the family comments. It was incredibly pleasing to read your insights into how your children approached learning remotely. Learning about your children’s strengths, any surprises, curriculum preferences, challenges and learning assets, reiterated the need for students, especially as they mature and have more agency in their learning, to attend Student Led Conferences. Regardless of the format of our next teacher and family meetings, these surveys will form a very important platform for discussion. For this reason, I ask everyone to please complete the survey on https://forms.gle/q8v393bg8FsnhoVf9.

Take care,

Wendy White