Innovative Learning Environments Expo 1
Sandown Racecourse Springvale, Tuesday 20 July 2010
Presentation transcript
Developing and living an educational rationale. What does it look like in action?
Dandenong High School
Emcee: Today I’d like to welcome you to the Session 1 of the Innovative Learning Environments Expo. Our presentation for this session is from Dandenong High School. Today we have Susan Ogden who is the Assistant Principal of Dandenong High. We have Ashley Pratap. I’ve forgotten your last name already. Ashley is a student from Dandenong High School and Katie Watmough as well, who is actually one of the school/house leaders, and I wasn’t quite sure of the term. We also have, do have the principal of Dandenong High who’s hiding down the back there. I’m sure you will enjoy this session. If you have any questions, please keep them to the very end and we’ll get to them if we have time at the end, which I’m sure we will. So, would you please join me in welcoming the representatives from Dandenong High School?
Susan Ogden: Thank you Lyn and hello everybody. I’d like to begin, contrary to what Lyn said, by just letting you know that if at any time during the presentation mine or my team members’ teeth chatter, it’s not because we’re nervous or we have a lack of conviction, it’s because it’s freezing in here.
Good morning. My name is Susan Ogden and I’m the assistant principal for curriculum at Dandenong High School. I’d like to begin this morning by introducing my fellow presenters as Lyn has already done. Katie Watmough is an assistant principal and the House Leader of Banksia House. And what that title means I’ll explain in a little more detail later. And Ashley is one of our Year 8 students. It’s our pleasure this morning to share with you the Dandenong High School experience of what I’m going to call “the reinvention of our school.” That is the time of significant change and this morning I’m going to make particular focus on the development and living of an educational rationale. So as many of you may be aware simply by travelling past the school, Dandenong High School is currently undergoing significant change. We have been through a merger of three very different schools.
We have moved from a traditional teaching and learning model and traditional and, I would say, unimaginative learning spaces to a dynamic supportive learning community with architecturally designed, purposefully built and engaging learning spaces and what we think is an innovative teaching and learning model based on the principals of deep learning, collaboration and inquiry. This morning each of us in our presentation will focus on a key aspect of this change process. I’m going to be talking to you about the development of the education rationale or the educational vision and the challenges that we have and continue to face and how we approach them. Katie, is going to share with you the experience of a teacher and house leader through this process and through these changes and particularly focus on the development of the teaching and learning model. And Ashley is going to share the student experience.
But, as we begin, I’d like to start with setting the scene. I’d like to talk about three key elements of that and then I’d like to show you some visual images and some pictures. So the context. In 2005 which seems seem like a long, long time ago, a decision was made to merge three very different schools from three very different, three very different sizes in the Dandenong area. Dandenong High School, 1400 students. Cleeland Secondary College, 550 students and Doveton Secondary College, 175 students; that is 2100 students located on the one site. I’ll talk about the reasons for that decision. Data showed from the three schools, incompleteness in the educational provision and a lack of pathways and pathway opportunities. The decision was also based on the reality from the three principals from the three schools that in order to provide the community with an educational environment that would meet their needs and provide the opportunities for students to meet their potential and achieve success, the three schools would need to come together.
And as I said earlier, though we’re very different schools, although we’re from the same geographical area, each school had a different culture, community, and different approach as to teaching and learning. And if we can start, Katie with just the first image and many of you that aren’t familiar with the school, Dandenong High School itself, one of those schools, a very traditional environment with a very traditional face to it. Although many differences, the schools had one thing in common and all three recognise the need to better serve their community and use the merge as a catalyst to develop a new school with an innovative teaching and learning model, state-of-the-art facilities, and a dynamic, supportive and engaging learning environment.
The other thing I wanted to talk to you about today because it’s really important to understand our change and our journey is the community that we serve. So Dandenong High School one of the oldest, largest, and most culturally diverse secondary schools in the state. And I’m talking about it now as the three schools being one. It’s situated in the southeastern region. It’s a low socioeconomic community with a high refugee or new arrival population. As I said, we have 2000 students with 74 nationalities and 77 different language groups and 85% of our student cohort speaks a language other than English at home. We have 21 indigenous students, 20 international students and as I said a large number of recent arrivals, many of whom have had an interrupted or little schooling.
We also have a transient population in a mix of cultures. Because although we have always been multicultural, the actual cultures and language groups have changed over the years as the new refugee wave comes into the area. And so therefore, in our planning and in our changes and in our move forward we had to be aware of our large number of ESL students and the fact that our student learning data was also reflecting the need to support literacy across the school.
Now before I move to my third background focus point which is the new model which is where we are now, I’d like to show you some images. Okay, okay again, the front of the school. And now the images I’m about to show you are the—that was then. That was the school that we originally had and that’s the Dandenong High School building and for many of you these images maybe are faintly familiar. This is one of the staff rooms in the school. This is where 25 staff used to have their staff room and their base. Staff space over there again. People are starting to, to smile and to nod and to remember. And it’s, it’s interesting too that—I’m about to show you the new buildings and the new staff space. There were 25 staff in that space who are now very distressed and actually finding it very difficult to leave that space but that was their original staff room.
One of the classroom areas or the walkthrough areas. This is the start of the building so this is when we had started to build but again the old shell of the building and the classrooms being very much the shells and bells model so small classrooms with 25 students and one teacher in the front of them. Again, that’s the central courtyard behind the front building and then we move to the now.
So before I talk about how we got there, let me just tell you what our new model is and I’m going to do this very briefly and then I’m going to show you some of the new buildings. But one of the things we all want to stress this morning is that the changes at Dandenong High School have not just been about the buildings. Okay, so I’m mentioning a few things about the new model, Katie and Ashley are going to explore those in a moment. So, because we had such a large school population when we came together as one, that’s 2100 students and some of them came from much smaller schools with tightly-knit communities.
It became very important to make sure that the students had the opportunity to connect with the school and feel like they belonged to a community, so one of the central aspects of our model and our structure of the new school is our seven houses. There are seven house buildings located on the Dandenong site. They house 300 students in vertical model that is 50 students that year seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven and twelve. Within that house building we also have a teaching community of 25 staff who teach the students in that house. When a student comes into Dandenong High School in year seven, and as Ashley was, they are placed in Darwinia House, they stay in Darwinia House until they leave at year 12.
Our teaching is based around collaborative teaching or team teaching and we have a 3 to 50 model. So that group of 50 students in English and Humanities have three English Humanities teachers who work together to teach those students and support the students in their learning and this is in year seven to nine. We’re actually going to look at moving the 3 to 50 model to year 10 in 2011.
As I’m about to show you, the learning takes place in architecturally designed ICT-rich learning spaces. These are not huge barn-like open spaces, they are purposefully designed which means that there are key breakaway spaces which are designed to cater for different types of learning and I’ll show you some images in a moment. The model also caters for a breadth of curriculum for years 10 to 12 and there is a focus on inquiry-based learning, essential questions, immersion weeks that take place once a term where students can actually take part in their own learning inquiry and really engage in independent learning in areas of their interest. We have an individual learning plan that students in year 7 to 12 also underg