The mid year student reports have been sent home today. They should really summarise what students, teachers and parents already know about learning achievements, goals and support. Our school Learning Plan is increasingly focussed on stretching students’ learning by not only developing their academic knowledge and skills but most significantly working on the development of personal and social capabilities.
Consequently you will see that for your child there may well be goals or next steps for learning improvement that are about managing impulses, being resilient, understanding relationships, making stronger decisions, working collaboratively, negotiating and resolving conflict. Our teachers are working strongly as a team to better understand how to design more powerful learning tasks that given students opportunities to work on improvement these skills. We believe that the academic improvements we are striving to achieve will come with a strong mix of personal and social development AND academic rigour.
The personal-and-social-capability from the Australian Curriculum gives a detailed overview of the personal development elements we are working to develop. Play is the Way is one program we use across all classes to support this learning.
Of course it is most beneficial for all learners if parents understand the learning goals and use whatever opportunities they may be able to orchestrate at home and in the community to creatively and diplomatically work on them, together with their child, without it it all being too heavy and tiresome.