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, 26 June 2011

Berwick Chase Primary


Berwick Chase Primary is exclusively Open/Flexible learning Spaces. It opened in 2009 with 160 students and ended the year with 200. They currently have 415 students 83 of those are in grade Prep. The layout of this school has the Library centrally located with the other open spaces branching off from there.

They have flexible "streaming " in Prep to grade 2. This means that a prep student reading at grade 2 level would be given the opportunity to read with other students at that level and vice versa for students who are struggling. Each morning there are 2 hours of literacy and one hour of numeracy with no specialist classes in the first few hours of the day. The Principal believes firmly in planning time being crucial to the success of these open learning spaces. Each team is given one full day to plan every 5 weeks. He believes it is not possible to plan further than 5 weeks at a time.

The open learning spaces are successful partly because of the large number of adults in the spaces. Many of these are parent helpers but there are also quite a few aides.

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