The very big week

Well it was with a big breath out that we wound up the week starting May 10^th with a welter of events. The first of these was NAPLAN which ran from Tuesday–Thursday and involved our Grade 3 & 5 students.

I would like to commend our students for the work they put in over the week, their positive mindset and their approach to each other. Our teachers too for their professionalism in the way that they conducted the tests and creating a calm and supportive environment for the students. Finally, thanks to Adrienne Dudley, our Assistant Principal, for doing all of the organisational work around the program.

The second event from last week was the tree planting along 'The Banks' on the western boundary of the school. Our schedule had to be reviewed on Thursday as a brisk southerly and some heavy drizzle descended on Robinhood Road with a vengeance.

Anyhow, we showed customary resilience, saddled up for another go and got some plants into the ground.  The planting will serve a few purposes – reintroducing more indigenous species into the area (which helps the whole ecosystem) – making the site a lot more aesthetically pleasing –and maintaining the soil integrity of the bank. The other thing that programs like this do is to give our families a direct and tangible link to the school. It would be a nice thing to visit the place in twenty years time and say “ I planted that!” Thanks to Michael, Carly and the Environment team for their work , time, effort and passion.

Finally it was my first School Council meeting at Ivanhoe East. My key takeaways from the meeting were;

-School Council is very well run and has sound processes that will ensure that the School is governed effectively

-the Councillors have a genuine commitment to improving the outcomes for students at our school

- there is an appetite to re-engage the community during 2021.

The School Council is also continuing a Community Engagement sub-committee in 2021. At their first meeting they will be articulating their brief. When that is done I’ll put the roles of all the sub-committees in future bulletins.

Follow On from last week

Last week I gave a bit of information about long working memory and retrieval. The working memory can be a little bit problematic under certain circumstances. This is true not only for students but for people in general. I’m sure we can all relate experiences where we have had so much information going in that we don’t feel on top of our games. The following circumstances can lead to that sense of overload;

• too much information
• information that is too related or unrelated (confusion and segmentation)
• combining too many things in a sequence
• Underestimating the demands of creative endeavours ( thinking of new things takes up lots of brain space)
• The more instructions that need to be carried, the greater the cognitive load(even if they are well intentioned)
• Choices are good, too many choices are bad.

There are a number of things that teachers can do to minimise the risk of working memory overload.

Delivering information so that it is connected to prior knowledge. At IEPS teaching sequences are really important so that what the students learn today needs to be connected to what was learnt yesterday. Our teachers tend to plan in 3-5 week blocks which is a very effective way to develop this sense of connectedness between concepts.

Chunking using mnemonics or regular patterns. Recognising and continuing patterns is a huge part of Maths and Music. It is also a large part of Literacy as students learn the common patterns that exist in sound and symbol combinations. In the world of Literacy this is referred to as phonological awareness and it's one of the ways that students learn to read.

Provide information in both a visual and auditory framework. Through our classrooms this is very apparent in a number of ways. Teachers often use visual cues and instructions together when introducing new content. They also have prompts and scaffolds around the room in graphic form, lists, and text instructions. This means that students have access to a variety of sources of instruction or support. In every classroom there is also a rundown of the things that are to be covered during the day. All these things help young learners free up their working memory so that they can focus on new learning.

Next week we will provide some information about our Smiling Minds program.

Brett Millott.