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, 31 July 2011

Silverton Primary School

Silverton Primary School was built in the 1970's with open learning spaces that were soon turned into traditional rooms. In 1993 Tony Bryant (Principal) took over and opened the rooms back up. It currently has 430 students with 68% coming from non-English speaking backgrounds.
Each learning community was about 400square metres with four homegroups and four teachers. The students work together for some activities and then as a homegroup for others. The students moved around the learning centre to work on different subjects rather than each homegroup being attached to specific area. This meant that the students and teachers had ownership of the whole area.
As we have seen in many other schools acess to technology is vital in the Open Learning Spaces. At Silverton Primary there are 600 devices including I-Pads, Desktop computers with Touch Screens and Netbooks available on demand for 430 students.
"Discovery Time" runs in four two hour blocks per week. There are no themes and Kids come up with their own project ideas. In the other times they run the usual literacy and numeracy workshops as well as specialist classes.
From 9:00-9:30 each Monday morning all staff and students work in "Mentoring Groups" where groups of 10 multi-age students work with an adult in the school. These include Canteen staff, maintenance, ICT techs etc.Students usually remain with the same group for 2 years.
They also have "Early Bird Reading" where 70-80 P-4 students come to school early (8:40-9:00am) and read with grade 5&6'S who have been trained in reading with younger students. They have found this has improved the reading of students across all year levels.
In addition, weaker maths students meet in a small group 20mins prior to a maths lesson to cover terminology, equipment and pre-knowledge required for the lesson. These sometimes take place during recess. These students have shown improvement in their self esteem and attitudes to maths.
There is also a radio station that transmits 24 hours a day to a 1Km radius with programming produced by the students and an in school TV station.
As we have seen in all open learning spaces there were a variety of seating options including beanbags, couches, cushions and lapdesks as well as the traditional chairs and tables.
Silverton ps
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