About Me

In 2013 Boronia Primary school and Boronia Heights College will merge to form a new K-12 school on the current Boronia Priamary school site. In 2011 two staff from the Primary School (Chris Kors and Davina Ashworth)and two staff from the Secondary School (Sandy Johnstone and Rachel Gardiner) are investigating P-12 and K-12 schools around the state. We are looking at how the schools are structured and how they operate in the new style Open Learning Spaces. We have been given 50 days of Teacher Professional Leave (TPL) to help better understand the best way to work in this style of school environment. Our TPL enquiry question is; How can we as a group of new colleagues build a professional learning community which enables us to work collaboratively and develop shared norms for positive teaching strategies within a K-12 setting?

Sunday 21 August 2011

Macclesfield Primary School

In 2002 a new open plan building was built. This was designed by MYNX architects who have designed the new Boronia K-12 buildings. Prior to this they had 230 students with only one permanent building and the rest were portables.
The main flexible learning building had 6 classroom spaces surrounding an internal Gallery space. This area had no permanent furnishings so things could be moved in and out as required by both students and teachers. This makes it truly flexible.
There were also a mix of year levels in this space rather than having all classes from one or two levels working together.
There were very large sliding doors with no windows leading to this Gallery space that could be opened or closed depending on the need of the classes at the time. When we were there one whole side was completely shut off.
The principal had told us before we saw the space that there were no teacher areas within the classroom. However we did notice that all classroom areas had a teacher desk and shelving at the front of the room. This is probably because any teacher space allocation had been taken over for programs such as Quicksmart and Reading Recovery.
The most interesting thing we took from this visit was that the Principal said it is important to ask "What's the Teaching and Learning going to look like?" rather than worrying about the physical layout and furniture.
Their focus from now on is:
* Changes in Pedagogy.
* Teacher Skills.
* Improving skill sets in ICT, assessment and collegiate teaching.
* Ongoing building of team capacity.
* Changes in physical set up that are required to support the points above.



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