iServi News | 30 August 2019 | Term 3, Week 6
A Community of Learners
Last week we had the opportunity to gather together as a staff to undertake professional learning around the Berry Street Education Model (BSEM). As you would be aware, we have adopted this model across the College to support the social and emotional development of students and to assist in their ‘readiness to learn’.
Our focus is to develop key learning attributes and a positive growth mindset within students to improve their capacity to learn. In adopting the BSEM, we aim to support students being able to better regulate their physical wellbeing, identify and manage their emotions, cultivate resilience, practice mindfulness and identify and use character strengths to manage their own wellness and learning capacity.
When coupled to a genuine sense of connection within a community underpinned by quality relationships and rich catholic values, our students become very susceptible to learning. The BSEM provides a clear curriculum that supports the integration of key learning readiness initiatives into the daily routines of each of our classrooms. We aim to support students to build their own capacity in managing their social and emotional lives to gain an agility, capacity and confidence to face future challenges. We want them to be able to self-regulate their own behaviours to ensure their ongoing wellness and learning.
In building a community where students feel safe and well, where they feel connected and respected and where their personal gifts are recognised and celebrated, we create an environment where learning happens. Our inclusive and relational community instils a confidence in our students to explore their talents to learn within their personalised pathway and to develop the skills and knowledge that will set them up for future success.
We are very excited at the positive impact that our clear focus on student wellness and individual strengths will have on their learning outcomes. We are most grateful to our parent community for allowing us the time to pause mid-term to spend time together as a staff to explore our own learning and professional development. At Servite we are collectively a community of learners and, as teachers, we want to model the exploration and integration of new ideas and latest research driven initiatives to improve outcomes.
As part of our integration of the BSEM, we are providing regular updates and important information in our newsletter each week to help engage parents in supporting the learning readiness of their children. Please find our next instalment later in this edition of iServi.
Parent Forum
This week we had the opportunity to share some outcomes from our recent Parent and Caregiver Satisfaction Survey with parents at the second of our Parent Strategic Forums for the year.
We also took the opportunity to explore with parents the future plans and directions for each of our core domain areas. Parents were addressed by each of the College Executive team members and then asked for their input into future planning initiatives. We are thankful to those parents who gave of their time to attend the Forum and contributed strongly to future strategic initiatives at the school. Special thanks as always to our Parents and Friends Executive for their support of the event. We look forward to promoting additional Parents and Friends initiatives in upcoming weeks.
As a learning organisation we thrive on quality feedback from our community. To this end, we have kept the Parent and Caregiver Satisfaction Survey open for another week. We invite your input to the survey which is available here.
Mr Jeff Allen
Principal