2021 New Year excitement

Hi,

It's a new year.  All that preparation done last year and over the holidays is about to bear fruit.  Graduates are getting ready for their first classes, students are entering high school for the first time, students are preparing for their first run at Year 12 ATAR.

For us it is a year of firsts.  New programmes in all year groups, teachers have their own classrooms, expectations of what teachers need to do have been clearly developed, feedback to students through Connect, SENN, SEQTA and Reporting to parents has been reimplemented and refined over the last year.  Kids have been placed into classes where they can perform and things should come together nicely.

Every so often things fall nicely into place and you can make a push for improvement.  This never comes without a good deal of hard work and last year was surely a year of hard work to put the building blocks in place.  If teachers follow the grading guidance given, participate in streaming processes actively, engage with the new BMIS, instructional model and business plan and actively communicate well with each other there is a huge potential for improvement.

I put my preliminary work on Connect and can see 15 of the 20 ATAR Methods students looking at content and preparing for the fast paced start in a course that doesn't let up until second semester.  I'm really interested to hear from students about what they thought about the preliminary videos, how to make them more interesting and whether the time and effort of producing them was worthwhile.  The great thing is that I only have to do them once, now is just identifying errors and re-recording them when required.  It's really interesting watching students through analytics and the time that they put into preparation.

I also released the teaching videos for the first six weeks of term and some students have engaged with these too.  This is a continuation of my "Just in time" approach to teaching - giving students information when they need it, in a form they readily consume, with access to help to avoid frustration.  If they're a little ahead - this will help them adjust to the additional work requirements of ATAR 11 classes and hopefully reduce the Exam anxiety and typical low performance in Semester 1.

It's great to see teachers actively working together to develop courses of work.  We have some strong teams developing courses that cater to student needs and move away from it's what's in the text, to a student centric, syllabus and engagement approach to instruction.

Our kids and parents are a little blame happy, some look to who to blame before reflecting on what they could have done to rectify the situation.  This is something we have to target in earlier years to give students back a 'locus of control' and get them to realise there is a lot they can do to improve their results before starting the blame game.  Revision, study, work ethic, work practices, attendance, engagement, ICT usage all impact on results in addition to instructional techniques.  These other things do not happen overnight - students have to be shown these to do well by parents and teaching staff.

Here's to a great year!