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 6 November 2011

Dandenong High School

In 2005 Dandenong High School, which had 1500 students, merged with Doveton High School, which had 200 students and Cleland High School, which had 575 students. "This formed a new educational entity", with 2100 students and 200 staff.
There is a high multicultural background with 77 languages other than English and 25% of the students being refugees.
To facilitate the merger they asked the questions;
What does the community need?
What do we know about effective learning?
What do our students need?

This led them to design a school with seven houses in seven separate buildings. Each house has 300 students from year 7-12 and 25 staff.

Each building has two floors with flexible learning spaces which can be entirely open or closed off as needed. Year 7-10 have their core learning in their house but go off to other buildings for specialist lessons eg technology, music and P.E. Year 11 and 12 students have their classes in the house that their teacher belongs to.

Each house has a leader who is an A.P. and two leading teachers,an assistant leader and a student coordinator. Each house also has an attendance officer.
The associate principal oversees curriculum across all seven houses. Consistency across the school is achieved by making one senior teacher in each house responsible for an area of curriculum across the entire school.
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Joint Meeting BPS and BHC: Shared Norms

On Thursday 27th of October the two staff groups came together to start working on developing a set of shared norms for the new K-12 school that could be trialled in 2012. The ideas and findings from this meeting will be presented again later in the year in a draft document for further discussion.
Below is the PowerPoint presentation from that meeting.

Shared norms
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