Last week I shared our Horizon journey at Catholic College Wodonga with Australian and New Zealand Catholic Principals’ conference in Adelaide. This journey was led by our Learning and Teaching Leaders and Deputy Principal Learning, Teaching and Innovation. They researched, explored and developed our response to what we saw as a lack of engagement in learning from a group of students at CCW. The journey, which I have spoken about in earlier posts, now takes on a different meaning for us as educators, as we need to consider where Horizon, in 2020 which we are calling “Pathways” does fit as we move to a vertical curriculum structure, .
The presentation at Korero 2019, which is below, charts our journey to date and explores what we may do to continue to allow our students to engage in a individualised learning program, that has exceeded my expectations. The presentation also contains a slide listing resources which was originally shared with me by Greg Miller (https://gregmiller68.com/), which we are currently using as a part of our research in considering what skills our students need, to engage in the world beyond CCW.
Late last week, we conducted our interviews for the new Horizon cohort for this semester. I was involved in the interview for a Year 9 boy. I listened to a young student discuss how a traditional school pathway is not igniting his passion. His passion is music and his project will be the recording of an album over the six months. At this stage he believes the album will contain between 12 to 15 tracks. He was able to discuss the resources we have that can help him, the staff who have expertise with whom he could work and the VCE classes from which he could learn. In the space of ten minutes I was once again reminded that a standard, lock step education offering does not work for all students. Horizon will provide him with the opportunity to dive deeper into a passion which in turn will allow him to understand himself as a learner, leading him to design a pathway to success.
All credit must go to the Learning and Teaching Leaders from 2017 and our DP Shaun Mason as it is their vision, as well as the work currently being done by our Horizon Leader Logan Hayward as we explore how we look to re imagine Horizon in our school beyond 2019. If you would like to check out the slides and some of the audio please click on the follow link;
Darta Hovey 