2019 Achievements
PRINCIPAL’S EXCELLENCE ASSEMBLY ADDRESS Last year, 2019 was, in most people’s minds the last year of an incredible decade where many things changed and many did not. Throughout that decade and the one before all we heard about in schools was “twenty first century skills”. I am not sure how our audience feels about that phrase. I hope I will never hear it again because it created tensions between education decision makers – at one end those who wanted us to stay locked to a heavily content based curriculum in secondary schools; at the other end those who wanted to do away with subjects and move towards skills based teaching. Neither side was right and in 2019 schools like Rooty Hill High School were being asked to share our work because we have a curriculum that embeds the ACARA capabilities as a way to teach the content of each subject. We have been on this journey since 2013 and in 2019 the focus on both the VERBs (what we do) and the NOUNs (what we learn about) underpinned every program, lesson and assessment task in the more than 50 courses taught in the school. Last year 2019, was, in our minds, the year that our work to give students voice and agency was realised. To have a voice is important because it means you are part of the debate and the conversation. Using this strategy with students has been around a long time especially in leadership and wellbeing programs. Student voice is a good start and programs can be seen in many schools. We believe that schools will need to shift their strategies to focus on student agency which we define as having control over their own learning, assessment and personalised learning plans. In 2018 we conducted a trial, using #MyLearningHub, of students uploading evidence in each subject and “annotating” that evidence to say (in their own words) how it showed what they had learned and what they could do. We also asked students and parents about report comments and the blunt, funny and critical comments they made showed us it was time to change so we introduced student constructed report comments validated by class teachers. How did we know we had done our best in 2019 and what measures did we use? We use a practice called “Outcomes Based Accountability” that allows us to measure how much we have done, how well we have done it and what difference we have made.
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