Heard on the Hill Term 2, Week 6

WEEK 5 (last week)

Sorry for my lack of input into last week’s Heard on the Hill. You might have noticed that I was out of the school until Wednesday afternoon last week. Monday and Tuesday I attended the South West Education Region Principals Conference. The two days were jam-packed looking at regional data, listening to the regional director talk about our regional focus. I was lucky enough to sit next to the Director General for an hour or so before her presentation to the group. The second day started with an hour-long fabulous Welcome to Country followed by Kevin O’Keefe’s presentation on progress in building cultural responsiveness in our schools.

While listening to all the speakers I was mindful of the great work that we already do across the school in many of these areas. I know that Aaron Wilkinson and Kristy Carriage are leading a group of students in the Reconciliation march on Wednesday and that the Outdoor Education classes incorporate on country learning in their excursions down rivers and across the land. There is fabulous work advancing our real relevant projects and problem-solving going on with the Careers classes creating an expo of guest speakers to share experiences with our Year 10 students and our PBL students contributing towards providing bicycles for those in need. Our transition programs and support offered to our feeder primary schools has not only eased the anxiety of transition for many Year 6 students but the work done by Sharna Mason and Mark Woodland in working with our network school has provided great support to have our future students better prepared for secondary school.

Across last week you may have seen some visitors in the school looking at our facilities and programs. They were here to see the work that you all are doing and if I don’t say it often enough you are fantastic. Well done.

Shared Instructional Framework

This week we are looking at Independent practice

The purpose of independent practice is to increase students’ fluency, enabling for a more automatic recall of the skills that have been learnt.

Independent Practice

Independent practice tasks should closely match the objective (learning intention) in our instructional framework.

Tasks should not include skills or concepts that have not been taught

Although called” Independent Practice”, independent practice can be completed individually, in pairs, or in small groups.

Clearly defined success criteria or expectation about the completion helps students be successful with the tasks.

Nuts and Bolts

Students with the wrong Jumper

When you see a student with the wrong jumper please ask them to remove it and put it in their bag. If they are likely to be too cold, ask them to pop over to student services to swap their incorrect jumper for a loan school jumper.