Choose your own adventure: pathways in Middle School

Meredith Plaisted, Deputy Head of Middle School – Student Learning

There are a few common questions sometimes feel unanswerable and can create a sense of uncertainty: What do you want to do when you grow up? School is more than an ATAR, why don’t you become more involved? Do you know that you are likely to have a variety of part-time jobs? And that you’ll probably have about 17 different jobs across five different careers? What are you interested in? What makes you happy?

There’s a lot of pressure to know all this by the time students finish school, but some of us will be trying to find the answers for the rest of our lives. What we do know, though, is that our students have exciting pathways ahead of them. They will need to be great decision-makers, they need attitudes and values that will empower them to be in charge of their wellbeing, and they will need to be able to call on a huge range of skills.

Investigating chemical reactions in Science.

The Middle School Elective and Core Enrichment program is one of many ways in which we prepare our students for their future and help them figure out the pathways they might want to take beyond school. Every Year 8 and 9 student spends the equivalent of one day per week studying some of over 35 of these ‘free choice’ subjects. Taking a stroll around Middle School during these elective blocks brings all sorts of surprises.

Visit Astro-science and walk into a darkened room as students use spectroscopes to break light into its colours, discovering the elements that make up the stars of the night sky. Students become scientists, making sense of the molecular structure of our universe.

Pop into Passport to the World and join in the fun of a Kahoot as students test their knowledge of the names, capitals and locations of countries of the world – you can’t fully understand a country and its culture without understanding its place in the physical world.

Programming robots in Creative Silicon Chips.

Make your way to Mathemagicians and feel like an intruder as the students are so focussed on the next magic maths puzzle. I still don’t know how they were multiplying and dividing 11-digit numbers in a matter of seconds – but they certainly did! Thinking outside the square, looking for the unexpected and indeed the expected, collaborating with like-minded partners; these students were loving the opportunity to specialise in their area of interest.

Wander over to Product Design and Technology: Wood and you see hammering, sanding, measuring, drilling, laser cutting – the list goes on. What impresses you the most is the way students are the project managers. Given the design brief of ‘a game from four pieces of wood’, they are in control of what to build (think imaginatively: pinball machines, pool tables, skate parks, marble runs) and how to build it (think outside the box: become a problem solver as your teacher is only a guide).

The Middle School Elective and Core Enrichment program is one of many ways in which we prepare our students for their future and help them figure out the pathways they might want to take beyond school.

Spend some time in a Changemakers or STEAM class, and you will hear from groups of students as they grapple to find solutions to many of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Working in groups can be frustrating but deep down they all know that when everyone brings their own skills and works collaboratively, three heads are better than one!

And if you are not exhausted from all that, head up to the Carey Room and into Indigenous Studies: a subject to which Carey students are flocking. Clearly they are relishing the opportunities to listen, discuss, form opinions and take action on the issues faced by our First Nations Peoples.

Before you know it, that’s the 100 minutes and it’s bell time. We will have to leave Ancient History, Theatre, Find Your Passion, Total Sports, Food Studies, Creative Silicon Chips and the other 20 or so subjects for another day.

Building games in Product Design and Technology: Wood.

When you add in choices in Languages, C-Change, sports and performing arts, Carey Middle Schoolers really are making choices, shaping their values, clarifying their interests, controlling their learning and taking action on their student journey. This level of student agency is ‘rooted in the belief that students have the ability and the will to influence positively their own lives and the world around them’ – a priority of the OECD’s Future of Education and Skills project. Our students are well placed to make their mark on the world by finding their passions, working to their strengths, and discovering the answers to those tricky questions.

Feature image: Analysing the elements in light in Astro-science.