A moment with Mrs Terrie Jones

"In the past, educational discourse has acknowledged the importance of the home-school partnership but in this pandemic year, we have all danced together on a shifting carpet of momentous proportions and at dizzying speed"

In 2010 I read a book written by Dr Leoni Degenhardt, an educational leader I admire very much. The book titled, Dancing on a Shifting Carpet: Reinventing Traditional Schooling for the 21st Century was born out of her work leading a school in Sydney and based on the work she had recently undertaken for her doctoral thesis. In it she argued that a paradigm shift in education was necessary and that an important precursor to that shift would be a change in the way educational leaders, specifically Principals, lead schools. A decade on and much has changed in education and progressive schools like St Michael’s have led much of the thinking around how to prepare students for a world that is, as ever, uncertain and complex, where we are more interdependent than ever before and where new and creative ways of thinking and doing are urgently required. Dr Degenhardt’s subsequent work as Dean of the Association of Independent Schools Leadership Centre framed the leadership required to transform schools as ‘purposeful partnership’ and I think the challenges posed by 2020 have brought that into sharp relief and rendered it a reality. In the past, educational discourse has acknowledged the importance of the home-school partnership but in this pandemic year, we have all danced together on a shifting carpet of momentous proportions and at dizzying speed. And while not all of the ‘dance’ was elegant or choreographed to perfection – there have been challenges, stumbles, pivots, corrections and even some bruised toes – our routines have been mostly effective, endlessly creative and importantly, built upon shared values, deep listening and mutual respect. This edition of The Crest includes some of the voices of the partners in this incredible community – our students, our staff, our parents and our alumni. They are representative of you, of me, of this place and time. Please know how grateful I am to all of you for together we engaged in this purposeful partnership and made manifest ‘The School’, this school named for St Michael, in its extraordinary 125th Anniversary Year. I am certain that editions such as this one will serve as a record of our journey and hopefully, inspire and console future generations of Michaelians as they confront and crest the challenges of their time.