Berry Street Educational Model
Kristen Cutting
You may have read the article in The Age last week about the Berry Street Education Model in schools. At PMPS, we have been fortunate to have some staff complete the 4 day BSEM training in August of last year.
The Berry Street Education Model (BSEM) equips both mainstream and specialist schools with practical, classroom-based strategies to increase the engagement of all students, including those with complex, unmet learning needs.
The education model enables schools to support students’ self-regulation, relationships and wellbeing to increase student engagement and significantly improve academic achievement.
This year, classes from Year One to Year Six have been trialling a key component of BSEM, the ‘Ready to Learn’ routine each morning. This is a structured routine that is a way of getting all students engaged as a team and ready to learn.
The structure of this is as follows:
- Welcome – saying hello as a group and sitting down ready to start
- Acknowledgement of Country – acknowledging our traditional owners
- Taking the roll - greeting each student and marking our class roll
- Announcements - special events, birthdays and opportunities for students to share their announcements or questions
- Values Chat - an opportunity to talk about values based learning including topics such as our school values, empathy, respect, gratitude, being an upstander
- Positive Primer - something fun to get students ‘primed’ for learning and might be a game, a song, a funny clip, a dance or a quiz
- What Went Well (WWW) – a quick reflection where students share 1-3 words how they are feeling (happy, energetic, ready to learn, curious, joyful)
The great thing about Ready to Learn is that, while there are specific slides that I make as part of my role, each class has the autonomy to modify and personalise the routine to directly address the needs, age and interest of their students. This might look like a dance in Year 2 for a positive primer and on the same day in Year 6, it might be a funny clip instead. One class might be reviewing mindfulness in their values chat while another might be talking about respect due to some problems in the yard in their cohort.
Many PMPS families were able to experience our amazing Ready to Learn program in action during Education Week. If not, and you would like further information, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Kristen Cutting