LEARNING & TEACHING @ MFGSC

Capturing ‘The Essence’

Every teacher tries to convey important messages about learning and what they value most through the language they use with their students. My Year 7 students reminded me the other day that I use the term ‘the essence’ a lot when talking about ideas, poems and novels. This was a great opportunity for us to discuss why I use this term so often.

The ‘essence’ is just one way of describing what is at the core or the heart of a concept, topic or idea being studied or discussed. Our teachers look to create learning opportunities for your children that enable them to show their understanding of what’s most important – the core, the big ideas, the heart, the essence of the topic, concept or idea.

Recently, I asked my Year 7 students to write a poem that captured what they felt was the ‘essence’ of a series of important chapters in the novel Blueback. We discussed these in depth first and the students had to be clear, and explain in their own words, the ‘essence’ they wanted to explore in their poem. Here’s Maddy Sharp’s poem – I wonder if you can read between the lines and describe the essence she is trying to communicate. 

Beginnings and Endings

The deep blue sea is water,

It makes up ninety six percent of earth,

Three hundred and twenty six million trillion litres of sea water cover the Earth,

475,239,304,489 fish live in the sea,

It’s two point five miles deep,

The deep blue sea that’s what it is,

But it so much more

than just a vast body of water.

A safe haven it is,

A home,

A face filled with memories,

A family,

A deep connection with who we are.

It's where we come from.

Bacteria, coral, fish, reptiles, dinosaurs,

it's where we end.

At the edge of the cliff he stands,

he throws his mother’s ashes,

into the wind,

they scatter and are set free.

Five hundred lanterns flicker,

they float like clouds,

across a lake filled with sadness and memories.

I didn’t see the sea until I was 12 years old.

You grew up in it and with it.

You knew what it felt like from an early age.

I was 1000 miles away from the beautiful sea,

when I saw it I knew it was my dream to explore it,

I knew by the salty smell,

the misty waves.

It took me somewhere else

A place I never would have found if it wasn't for the sea.

My hand punches the trickling water,

splashes kick the water.

"This is where I truly belong,"

head first and I kick,

I see the life underneath the ocean’s surface,

Sea vs people,

we lose and we always will,

swim, kick, breath,

I'm alive,

I grow still,

memories grow here,

happiness spreads over me and I remember,

the water shimmers.

I shiver and I am back home.

AusVELS: The Victorian Curriculum

AusVELS is the Foundation to Year 10 curriculum that provides a single, coherent and comprehensive set of prescribed content and common achievement standards, which our teachers use to plan curriculum, student learning programs and activities, assess your daughter’s progress and report to you on her learning progress and achievement.

AusVELS incorporates the Australian Curriculum F–10 for English, Mathematics, History and Science within the curriculum framework first developed for the Victorian Essential Learning Standards (VELS). AusVELS uses an eleven level structure to reflect the design of the new Australian Curriculum whilst retaining Victorian priorities and approaches to teaching and learning.

Your daughter’s End of Semester Report includes an AusVELS Learning Standards Summary.

You can find more information about AusVELS at http://www.education.vic.gov.au/school/teachers/support/Pages/ausvels.aspx

Main Assessment Tasks and Learning Tasks

One of the benefits of Compass is that you are now able to access ongoing information about your daughter’s learning and progress throughout the semester. Our aim in the future is to use Compass to provide you with on-going reporting about your daughter’s learning progress instead of relying on the end of Semester Report.

You can view the specific AusVELS levels that your daughter achieved, her results and her teachers’ feedback relating to some of her main Assessment and Learning Tasks by viewing her Learning Tasks on Compass.

https://mfgsc.vic.jdlf.com.au/Login.aspx

If you are unsure about how to access your daughter’s Learning Tasks using Compass then please contact Mr Bruce Bauer at the College on 4243 0500.

Approaches to Learning

The End of Semester Report also includes the teachers’ judgements about your daughter’s Approaches to Learning, in each subject, using the following scale:

1. Needs Attention
2. Acceptable
3. Very Good
4. Excellent

Each of your daughter’s teachers has commented on two Approaches to Learning:

1. Effort
2. Behaviour

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES: Approaches to Learning 

A new curriculum and subject has been developed and offered in 2015 called ‘Digital Technologies’. The teachers of this subject have also assessed other Approaches to Learning: Character and Collaboration. We will use feedback from teachers, students and parents to determine how we might go about incorporating Character and Collaboration in other subjects in the future.

An explanation of each of the Approaches to Learning is below. 

School Mate App launched

The Department of Education and Training has released an App which is designed to help you better understand the curriculum we use to teach your children every day.

The App, called SchoolMate, is available for free download now in the App Store for iPhones and iPads and in Google Play for Android phones and tablets.

Our school, like all other government schools in Victoria, uses AusVELS as the basis for the learning programs we run at school every day.

Our teachers adapt the curriculum to meet the needs of our students and community, for example, designing learning programs around what your children are interested in, or around days or celebrations that are important to our community.

SchoolMate is designed to give you an overview of what children are expected to learn in Victorian government schools across every subject from Prep to Year 10.

Anyone for Chess?

In the last Newsletter I wrote about a game of chess I played with some Year 8 students and that chess is a playground for strategic thinking, one of the dispositions that we value and promote at our school.

•       The disposition to be open-minded

•       The disposition to be curious

•       The disposition to be metacognitive (thinking about your thinking)

•       The disposition to be seeking truth and understanding

•       The disposition to be strategic

•       The disposition to be sceptical

During this century people who can solve complex industrial problems and process greater levels of detailed information will have an advantage. Governments across the world have turned to investigating whether chess can deliver benefits to children both academically and behaviourally, with some governments already taking action (e.g. the European Parliament, in 2011, called on all member states to introduce chess into their schooling systems).

A growing body of international research over the past four decades indicates that chess can be used as a tool to lift academic performance in maths and reading as well as improve student concentration and engagement with learning. It’s logical that we should be looking at how we can incorporate chess into our existing programs. 

Damien Toussaint, Assistant Principal, Learning and Teaching