Welcome back to term 3 and a special welcome to all our new students and families who joined us this term. We are looking forward to another great and busy term ahead. Please ensure that you are receiving communication from our college – if you are not receiving emails, please contact the office to update your details. You can also keep up with what is going on via our college facebook page and twitter.
During the last week of term 2, I was lucky enough to be invited to attend PBL World in Napa Valley, California. This was organised by the Buck Institute of Education, considered to be one of the leading authorities on project based learning. I had the opportunity to talk with many teachers and principals about their experience of PBL and implementing it at a whole college level. I also got to meet some really cool educators who are having an amazing impact within their college communities. I really appreciated the chance to have many conversations, which answered many questions and brought clarity to my thinking and, in some cases, challenged the way I was thinking about certain things.
For me, it highlighted strategies that I need to put in place to support teaching and learning across the college in order to ensure that we are working on delivering an integrated PBL curriculum. Being at the conference helped me to reconnect to our college vision regarding our academic program. All good things take time, and creating a fully integrated PBL college needs time to develop and grow. Students are learning a new skill set in order to succeed in this environment and teachers are focusing on creative and innovative ways to deliver a mandatory curriculum. In order to succeed in a college like ours, there needs to be a strong commitment to relevance, rigour and, most importantly, relationships by the whole college community. We still have a long way to go, but we are well on our way!
Following is a video, created by Edutopia.org, which gives more of an insight into project based learning. This is the direction in which our college will be progressing:
This is very exciting Laura!