Future-Proofing our Students
I have always loved learning and am naturally curious, but I had never planned on being a teacher. It was my second job teaching architectural drafting at Footscray TAFE to apprentices, when I was saving to go Europe, that led me to education. The Victorian Government started to talk about mandating education-related qualifications for TAFE teachers which resulted in me undertaking a Graduate Diploma of Education. That year changed my life. I still remember my first practical, in an inner city Melbourne School, where I was so determined to make sure that I knew every student in my classes, the best way that they could learn and how to engage them in their learning. I came up with any number of crazy ideas to ensure that every student gained the knowledge and skills they needed to pass their assessments. It was not an easy ‘gig’, but it made me realise that teaching was ‘my gig’.
Over the years, I have had the joy of teaching hundreds of students across three different States and continue to learn as much from them as they learn from me. I have seen our students' needs change as technological advancements have given them access to information anytime/anywhere. This can be argued as both positive and negative, but it cannot be denied that their world has grown wider and more agile and changed the nature of the workforce that they will now be entering. Last year, a student in one of my classes was able to tell me how much money he was making in cryptocurrency, another had a ‘side hustle’ that was bringing in a monthly income that easily superseded his peer’s part time job at McDonalds whilst another was designing t-shirts for a local surf brand. How amazing is that? We need to be thinking about how we meet the needs of these students, how we scaffold our learning from K to 12 to include these much-needed entrepreneurial skills, and how we learn from industries and backward map the skills that they say they need. We want our students to use feedback and design thinking processes to improve their ideas as new ways of living, learning, and working emerge.
As we look to future-proof our students, the Anglican Schools Commission has been consulting and working with all twelve Schools in the Commission to develop an overarching ‘Vision for Learning’. This vision was shared with St Mark’s staff at the beginning of the year. It outlines the aims for our learning community (staff and students) to be;
- Collaborative: working together to learn with and from each other
- Purposeful: making a meaningful contribution to our local, national and global communities
- Inquisitive: Creative and computational thinkers who can think strategically and innovate
- Inclusive: supported and recognised for individual strengths and talents
- Courageous: seek out challenges, persevere and demonstrate resilience
- Connected: question and contribute to the world around them, understanding that their voice can have an impact at a school, local, national and global level.
We are really excited that the release of this vision is now the impetus for us to develop our own school-wide learning framework, the ‘St Mark’s Way’; how we teach, learn, behave and relate to each other at St Mark’s.
We recognise that our students' needs are very different at ELC to Year 3 to Year 7 to Year 12. We want to provide a dynamic, contemporary, engaging, challenging and authentic curriculum. Our focus on learning will be on how to learn well, promoting a positive learning mindset and maximising learning with productive cognitive and behavioural techniques. Our teaching will emphasise the capacity of all individuals to learn, educating our students to embrace academic challenges and to benefit from the struggles they encounter. Learning theorists call this the ‘learning pit’ and it is in facing these challenges that our students reach their ‘ah ah’ moment.
Over the year, we will be researching, investigating best practice, creating strategic working parties, speaking to students and sharing our findings with you. It is an exciting time to be part of our Community as we plan to be a ‘lighthouse School’ and continue to be a leading ‘School of Choice.’
I will also be teaching across the School in ELC, Junior School, Middle School and Senior School over the Semester and cannot wait to shine the spotlight on all that we are already doing brilliantly and share this with you.
Ms Roseanne Madden
Deputy Principal