I asked Principal Natalie See why she placed so
much important on the process of drafting.
I think as teachers we're so time poor at times and we've got such a crowded
curriculum that we're always moving so quickly through what we're doing.
And sometimes skimming the surface and
not giving children time to do multiple drafts and improve what they're doing,
and look at it as "I can develop this and I can improve it".
Because we're looking for the next thing that we're doing.
So, multiple drafts has been a great mind shift for us.
So if they're working on projects for a much longer period of time,
you must have really had to change the way that you think about units of work and
the way that the curriculum is taught across the year..
Absolutely, sure.
We have to look at how we integrate key learning areas, and
how we look for common core things between our units so
that we can actually tie lots of our key learning areas in.
And we're finding that that's allowing us to teach
an provide opportunities in more meaningful ways.
So the learning is a lot deeper.
So we're not skimming the surface and
looking at lots of things over a longer period of time.
We're actually combining these things and teaching them in a deeper way.
And the learning's sticking with our kids because they actually see that they can
deeply understand something and spend time and have time to do multiple drafts and
explore things that we never considered that they'd be able to find out.
And that what you looked at today in terms of is the law fair,
that comes out of students co-creating a unit with some students in Adelaide,
where they went across and spent time going through the project base learning
process with students they hadn't even met before.
And co-creating that PBL unit because that's based on their passions and
their interests, and it ties in with the curriculum areas that we're doing.
So we told them the curriculum areas that they needed to be covering and
that's the project that came out.
Another school we visited that has invested a lot of time integrating project
based learning was the Northern Beaches Christian School.
Steve Collis explained why they use PBL.
So project based learning is a framework that we've really embraced over
the last few years, along with other techniques as well.
But project based learning really tries to wrestle with the question of
why does the learning matter.
The why of learning.
Is it just some disconnected cerebral abstract disconnected activity
happening in this weird space called the classroom or in fact can we make learning
actually happen the way it does in any other context.
You have a real problem to solve with real consequences for real people.
And so, we've really embraced that challenge in kindergarten right through
year 12, there's no reason why kindergarten kids cannot be engaging with
real world problems and have their solutions and their imagination and
the output of their hard work actually go out and benefit other people.
And so, there's a whole bunch of mechanisms that we look at to
help that happen.
You can have the outside world come in, so you invite parents in,
local community members, business leaders, council members, the mayor.
But also we can publish out to the world, and
using technology, that's really effective.
We can publish YouTube channels, or blog websites,
or in one instance we have our own version of Amazon.
Where the students publish their own books and
anyone in the world can purchase that online, it arrives in the post.
And so suddenly it's real, there's a real audience and we're actually