Head of Middle School Mr Matthew Ivulich has been instrumental in the implementation of the successful International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme at the College. Chloe Kingston, Brayden Hill and Karen Escobar enjoy some ‘open air’ learning with Mr Ivulich in 2010!
An Inspiring Community for all A
s a Catholic co-educational secondary College community, we strive to build an educational program that is inspiring, creative and challenging for a student community that is culturally diverse with a range of abilities. In the main, the majority of our students come from our surrounding Catholic parish communities, many of whom attend Catholic primary schools. Their parents are very supportive of the ethos of Corpus Christi College and prefer an education for their children that reflects the natural ‘co-educational’ life beyond schooling. They want them to be happy to learn in a safe and nurturing environment and wish for academic success at the end of Year 12 with graduates who want to make a positive difference in the world. In the past three years, the College has incorporated a number of changes: incorporating many new Curriculum
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Council WACE courses in Years 11 and 12, including Psychology; the move to offering senior Curriculum Council courses to Year 10 students; the inclusion of Year 7 students into the middle school which incorporated the International Baccalaureate (IBMYP) Middle Years Program and the 1:1 Laptop Program.
So how do schools embrace change and continue to grow, nurturing all community members in the process? Although all schools want to provide the very best facilities for their students, it is the quality of the professional relationships between teacher and pupil that makes the difference. Having a community of dedicated teachers who are: committed to their professional practice; customise learning for individual students; provide a balance between direct instruction and
collaborative learning for students in the classroom; provide students with a variety of learning sources and present content which is meaningful to them, with assessments that are developed so that students know and understand what they have learned; challenging each child to use their God-given talents, is our goal. Therefore, nurturing the continued professional growth of teachers, and the leaders who support them, is crucial to the operation of a highly-functioning school. All schools are now digital schools, something that is very necessary in the 21st Century. There is no doubt that our students have embraced mobile technologies such as laptops, mobile phones, iPod Touches and iPads, and that they are certainly more engaged with their classwork when these devices are used. Yet these devices are simply