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Adolescent Success Middle Years School of Excellence 2022
At Cornerstone College, one of our Strategic Intentions is to ‘Empower Innovative Teaching and Contemporary Learning’. Keeping up with current best practice in education is vitally important if we are to prepare our students for life beyond school in a world that is changing at an ever-increasing rate. We are proud of the structures, pedagogies and methods of assessment that have been implemented at Cornerstone College over the last 5 years, that are in line with what is considered best practice. We are also proud to have recently been recognised for our hard work in this area, by the leading Middle Schooling Association in Australia known as Adolescent Success, as one of only 6 schools throughout Australia and New Zealand to be awarded their Middle Years School of Excellence. This award was in recognition of the work achieved in the Middle School to: • Implement a new structure at Year 8 that allows for Team Teaching and a deliberate focus on the
Capabilities • Establish a new Year 9 subject (Ignite), which uses
Inquiry Learning as its foundational pedagogy • Create and use Learning Progressions as an assessment method to highlight where students are at with their learning and their next steps of improvement. This is all down to the hard-working, creative thinking and brave educators we have here at Cornerstone, who recognise that we don’t innovate just for innovation’s sake, we innovate and implement to allow our students to be prepared for an uncertain future and create positive change in their world. Cornerstone has and continues to be at the forefront of innovation, and in 2014 introduced Year 7's as it expanded middle schooling in the College. Cornerstone College has been recognised on a national level in 2019 by The Educator's Innovative Schools Awards and as a Middle Years school of excellence in 2022 by Adolescent Success and is considered an exemplary model to foster student learning and wellbeing. This recognition highlights the contemporary teaching and learning practices of Cornerstone's Middle School. An integral part of the success of the Middle School is a commitment to ongoing development such as the College’s recent engagement and contribution to The Meta Praxis Project. This project has built capacity in learners, teachers and learning organisations to emphasise transversal 'capabilities', alongside knowledge-based disciplinary skills. At Cornerstone, Middle School teachers specifically focused on developing critical thinking in their subject areas and developing an assessment matrix and learning progression for critical thinking.
