Stories of Innovation

Jennie [Vine] and I working with the teachers in a similar way to the way we expect the teachers to work with the children. We have coaching conversations according to what we know about them as teachers and where they are in their thinking and in their skills and in their abilities.

The project around the Trivia Night was based on investigating ‘faith’. We picked up from where the kids had left off the year before, looking at how things had changed through time. From there, we moved onto examining how ideas change the world.

As the principal of Wooranna Park Primary School, Ray Trotter has guided the school through some remarkable changes since 1997. Today the school commands international attention for its on-going effort to aim towards ‘next practice’ for meeting the needs of its students. His paper “One School’s Journey To Create A New Education Paradigm”, written originally…

There’s this big disparity between people coming from Spain to see us and people down the road not even knowing we exist. If we passionate about changing the way things are taught then we need people to know what we’re doing.

School Story Experience is an educational service for school leaders and their school communities. This article highlights how, at its core, it helps manage the complexities of communicating a schools’ vision and mission through 21st-century digital communication strategies and tools. Most importantly, it sets out how we view the service as a pedagogy-based one, rather…

I went to Thailand in a group made up of two lecturers from Monash University and three teachers, myself, a teacher from John Monash Science School and a teacher from Elwood Primary.

In 2018, I had the privilege of interviewing three teachers about their work with Year 2 students. They reflected on how early it’s possible for children to view themselves as active citizens in Australian democracy, built on the belief that their voices have power and agency. The discussion began with Mary Boutros pointing out the…

There’s no point in giving them ‘answers’. I think some people want that control which dispensing knowledge gives them. They just want to get to the end result.

To change the technology, we need to educate from the ground up, on decentralization and distribution. We need to understand about distributed networks, as opposed to all these single points of failure for all these systems.

It’s time for our students to see themselves differently. How do we build in them incredible character and an eternal thirst for learning? How do we develop them into people who don’t settle for the status quo or content to be passengers passively sitting in the backseat?

It all started with the overarching idea we were exploring that year around the theme of identity. As a teaching team, we knew we wanted the kids to feel empowered, empowered enough so that they would be motivated to take action in some way to have a positive effect on their world.

It pushes you so hard, sometimes it’s overwhelming. But it pushes you to find a balance between teaching kids those really important skills, those building blocks, and then, allowing kids to be independent, autonomous … to teach each other, to create spaces, to research, all those things.