Evolving Teaching and Learning
Enrolments 2021
While we are only in the latter part of Term One 2020, we are well into planning for next year including interviewing and confirming places in classes for 2021. I strongly suggest that if you have children you wish to enrol for next year that you do not delay in completing an application if you have not already done so. Once classes are full we will not be able to guarantee a place. While this year we have three Prep classes there is no guarantee that there will be three classes in 2021 and places are filling quickly. No action is needed for students currently enrolled in Prep to Year 11 in 2020 as they automatically rollover into Year 1 to Year 12 for 2021. If you have a child at St Peters Kindergarten, however, an application for enrolment into Prep for 2021 does need to be made.
Evolving Teaching and Learning
We were delighted to have the opportunity for a team of staff to attend a Learning Environments Queensland Chapter session with Dr Stephen Harris to discuss his innovative work and leadership of the contemporary model of schooling at LearnLife Barcelona (formerly known as Dream School Barcelona).
Stephen is the Co-Founder and Director of Learnlife, Barcelona and now spreading the innovation to Germany and other parts of the world. He is a globally respected visionary and catalyst for change and action in K-12 education. Stephen provoked our thinking about the nature, purpose and form of schooling and learning necessary to meet the needs of our young people in contemporary society and a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.
He emphasised the importance of the capabilities of what he described as the EQUIP model in developing future-ready students: Explore (discover, prove, search); Question (ask, challenge, investigate); Understand (know, expand, reflect); Imagine (become, invent, envision); Produce (create, design, construct).
Stephen’s work aligns with the priorities of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Their future of Education and Skills 2030 project report emphasises the critical nature of learner agency:
“Future-ready students need to exercise agency, in their own education and throughout life. Agency implies a sense of responsibility to participate in the world and, in so doing, to influence people, events and circumstances for the better. Agency requires the ability to frame a guiding purpose and identify actions to achieve a goal.”
We are all learners and at St Peters we are always looking to next practice, to the ‘more beyond’ and how we can better serve our young people. To this end our Primary teachers are working with Kath Murdoch’s inquiry learning approach this year to develop student agency and future ready skills, to be able to frame an inquiry, to explore and research, leverage resources, resolve tensions, create, present and put values into action. In Secondary School, Mrs Grotherr is leading the teaching team in exploring the possibilities for Junior High curriculum and pedagogies to ensure we are developing future-ready young people as we step into the exciting new learning environment of the Junior High Precinct.
I must commend our staff to you for the example they set as life-long learners, for their commitment to our young people and best and next practice and for their capacity for authentic, professional collaboration.
Later this week we welcome Professor Stephen Heppell, an international authority on contemporary learning from the UK … but that is a story for another day.
Craig Schmidt
Principal
