Innovative Learning Environments Expo 1

Sandown Racecourse Springvale, Tuesday 20 July 2010

Presentation transcript

Personalising learning - Leading practice: age and stage

Silverton Primary School

Introduction: This podcast is brought to you by the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development, Victoria.

Tony Bryant: Thanks everyone. Jesus, there’s a crowd isn’t there? Sort of a – and it’s a great view when you’re up here. We were just talking when we arrived. Earlier in the year we were in New South Wales and we had rain and the horses went the other way. So we started looking for the horses if they come through. Look, thanks for having us. And obviously in the next 30 minutes, what we’re going to try and do is share some of our thoughts about personalised learning. And obviously, at our particular school, we can talk about a lot of things from open spaces to ICT to personalised learning and all those sort of things. And we’re trying to focus today just on personalised leaning rather than trying to cover everything but there will be things that we will pick up. And we’re more than happy to speak to people afterwards or on another day when you go back to your schools and you want to – things comes to you and you want to us ask us questions and please contact Amanda or myself and we’ll help you as much as we can.

We’re going to start over a little video that was produced by some our children which will give you a bit of an oversight into our school and we’ll pick up some of the areas I just spoke about around the open spaces to personalised learning and the ICT. And it goes about three minutes and I think it’s probably not a bad introduction to talk about a little bit later on.

We asked our children to make video about our school and let’s see what they came up with.

VIDEO

Sidney: Hi, my name is Sidney.

Elise: And hi, I’m Elise. Welcome to the special edition of Silverton News, where we will be looking at why Silverton Primary School is unique and different.

Sidney: And different.

Elise: To any other school.

Sidney: Silverton Primary School is located in Jacksons Road, Noble Park North, Melbourne, Australia. We have 371 students at our school. Our school is multicultural, 76% of our school is from non-English speaking backgrounds.

Elise: Our school is unique in lots of ways, starting with the design. As you can see, it’s an open plan, unlike traditional classrooms. There are a few walls and the students share the space of our four flexible learning centres which extend to outdoors as well. We have an information resource centre which includes the library and ICT lab. We also have a visual arts workshop, an instrumental music room, the environmental science room along with a vegetable garden, the canteen, a general-purpose room, a TV studio, as well as a radio station, which are all established around a central courtyard and a pond.

Sidney: At our school, we use a lot of technology. Now I mean a lot of technology, ranging from PCs, laptops, voice recorders, foot cameras, digital cameras, digital video cameras, web cams, iPod touches, Nintendo DS’s but wait…

Elise: But wait, there’s still more.

Sidney: …there’s still more. Digital microscopes, probes, MP3 players, interactive whiteboards, projectors and a Nintendo Wii for the Grade 5 and 6 students. All of this ICT is embedded in the curriculum and not taught in isolation.

Elise: Wow, isn’t that amazing?

Sidney: I know.

Elise: And the great thing about all this is that all of the students have access to all this technology whenever they need to. Now we will cross over to our school principal, Mr. Tony Bryant.

Tony Bryant: Pair the children for 21st Century technologies. Well the pedagogy here is very much aligned to children having choice, enquiry-based learning and project-based learning. The use of equipment is their choice, the subjects and the topics that their doing is their choice. So it’s about giving the children that particular choice of what to do, how to do it, when to do it and what they’re going to finish with.

Elise: Thank you, Mr. Bryant. Some of our outside ventures that the students have been involved in include the Robocop, where the students programmed a robot to dance, Wakakirri, where students write and perform a story through movement, music and visual arts. And the Water Health Conference, where seven students presented their views on climate change and developing countries in a creative and entertaining way.

Sidney: Personalised learning is a priority at Silverton, so we have discovery time for prep to 2x and reality groups for 3 to 6s. These activities range from interest-based or authentic learning and gives us an opportunity to try new and exciting activities or plan and implement projects for our school community. Here is an example of a reality group.

Boy: One of the reality groups last year was to paint the walls in the boys and girls toilet as they looked very uninviting. We spent a lot of time discussing what colours we should paint them and what things we should put in them. We decided to go with the lilac and pink for the girls toilet which represents dawn and blue and yellow for the boys which represents the night sky. We had pink flowers in the girls and yellow stars in the boys.

Sidney: At Silverton, students have the opportunity to develop skills and talents through our instrumental and dance programs.

Elise: Thank you for watching. We hope you enjoyed our special edition on why our school is unique. Bye!

Sidney: Bye!

VIDEO ENDS

Tony Bryant: And we’ll pick that up a bit later on about some of the technologies. Now we don’t set ourselves up as experts in this area. Like everybody, we’re on a journey like you are. Maybe we’ve been in that journey a little bit longer, so we’ve overcome some of those hurdles that you are experiencing at the moment. And with all these great spaces you’re going to get, obviously, you’re starting to think about how they’re going to be used. Fortunately, our school was built that way, so we’ve been able to do some work there for quite some time. So really, we’re going to the fountain but we really haven’t had a great drink of it yet. We’re still just gargling it, so, on our journey.

Before we started the journey, some of the things that we needed to look at is, what do we want to do in these spaces and why do we want to do it and I’m not going to go into the theories. But we did a lot of research and understandings about, what do we need to prepare our children for, for the future. And I’m sure that other speakers in other parts have talked about this sort of things as well. So we talked about the 21st century schools which I’m sure you’re all well aware of as a holster. And we talked around about the pedagogy that needs to be in place to support those skills for the children for their future. And I think the most important one is there that we know that people construct knowledge and understanding based on what they already know and believe. And I think one of the things that we’ve changed the most is coming from where the children are at, to take them somewhere else, rather than decide as a teacher what the children need to know. And I think we’ve overcome that hurdle quite a few years ago and when that happens then you’ve got an opportunity to move forward. Take the learning and the knowledge away from the teachers to put it into the hands of the children and the teachers’ role then changes.

And so, in real terms, the teachers must know their children a lot better than what they knew them in the past because by knowing your children, you know how to support them. And that was one of the major principles that we had to instil into our staff to actually get change happening and a change in the teacher’s mindset because it’s very, very easy to change the environment. It’s very, very hard to change the teacher’s mindset. And obviously, going into these great new environments, with the same mindset you’ve had in the past, what’s going to happen is you’ll do the same things in a different space. And if you want to change the mindset then you need to go back earlier and start looking at why we need to change children, why we need to change the teacher’s mindset, and that will get back in to some of these areas about the skills that we want the children to adopt for the 21st century. How we’re going to support those children to adopt those skills and what sort of things that teachers need to know. And we talk about the role of the teacher might become superfluous. I believe the role of the teacher is going to become more important than ever because without the teacher’s support, the children, whatever track they go on, are going in meander. But the role of the teacher is very specific to cater for the needs of the individual child.

So what is personalised learning? We’ve had lots and lots of definitions about it but I think if we go back to looking at student-centred approach to teaching and learning, focusing on a number of things. First of all it needs to be, the learner led. The child has to have a big say in the development of their own learning. Student voice is very, very powerful in our school and when Amanda talks about some of the concrete specific things that we do in our school and the children do, you’ll see that the children have a big say in their learning.

Peer and self-assessment is very, very critical. In the past, it was mainly teacher assessment but the child having a big say in their own learning. Today at our school, our mid-year reporting is a child-led conference. The children are leading the parent-teacher interviews today at our school. And the preppies, from Grade 6 are sitting there and the preps are talking to their teachers and talking to their parents about their learning, about the goals they need to set in place for the next semester, about their targets, about their strengths, about their weaknesses, showing them their work, showing you examples on their digital portfolio. So the role of the teacher at this interview stage has changed. The children’s reports are not going home until after the three-way interview because we didn’t want the parent to come up and have the teacher regurgitate what was on the report and everything that they could read. So today, it’s all about the child’s learning and that’s running from preps to Grade 6.

The individual student needs need to be catered for. We know that students learn in different ways. We know that students have different interests and passions and we’ve got to cater for all those needs. The collaboration between the students and their teachers is more important than ever.

The use of ICT is really a mediator in all this. That’s a form of being able to personalise, whether you go one-to-one computing or one-to-one devices. My personal view is, we go one-to-one devices where the children have a choice of using the device that they think is appropriate for their particular learning. And the device might be everything from a PC, to a NetBook, to a laptop, to an iPod Touch, to an iPad. Anything that will allow them to do their research and it doesn’t always have to be going onto a laptop or a PC. The child needs to make those decisions. It needs to be available for whatever they need. In our school, there’s around about 400 children and about 430 devices. So children have an option of which device they want to use to go out and do their research.

The learners create the knowledge, and I think that’s extremely important because our children through their studies will create knowledge, place it on to their iPods etc, so the younger ones can pick it up, all they’ll put it out on to the internet and Amanda will talk about some of that in a moment. But I think the use of ICT, and people say our school as a big ICT school and it might have a lot of ICT but that is only the enabler or the mediator for personalised learning. It’s not about the ICT. And in fact, we don’t even have an ICT teacher and the reason we don’t have one is because in the old days when the children went to ICT, marvellous things were happening but it didn’t happen back in the classroom. So the role of the ICT teacher changed, she is now a peer coach and so she spends some of her time peer coaching and the rest of her time she spends film making, working with a small group of children for three or four days continuously on a particular project. Over the school, they all create movies but suddenly, all the ICT staff happened back in the classrooms or in the learning centres. And it was a big change and a big focus on the use of ICT by the children, when we didn’t have an ICT teacher. That didn’t mean to say we need someone highly skilled in that area, we still have that same person, but just a role change.

Some of the benefits, increased student motivation and engagement. Do you want to click that over? And lower absences. And you’ll see here, in the last five years, we’ve got an SFO of .78 which is quite high. So that put us on the bottom 10%, socioeconomically in the country. And our absent rate is really low. The parents love us, which is nice. They leave us alone as well. But I think the interesting thing, if you look at the teachers around the children’s motivation. You look at the children about the engagement and motivation. It’s been a significant rise over the last few years. What we’re noticing now though is our children have become very critical. And I think they think what’s happening in our school happens in all schools and they become very critical and they expect more. I think the more you have, the more you want, and so we taught them a little bit about that.

Particularly, around their learnings, we spoke to them the last couple of years because they thought student safety was an issue and the reason why they thought that, they’ll be saying, “If I’m concentrating on my learning and a child came up to me and said, ‘Do you want to play football at lunchtime?’ they’re interrupting my learning and they become very, very critical.” And we said to get real, you know. Get real, you’re allowed to do that and that sort of stuff but it was funny how the children’s attitudes changed.