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Located in Ringwood, Kalinda Primary School caters for 21 classes across Foundation to Grades Six. As part of my project partnerships relationship with the school I was placed in the Physical Education (P.E) specialist setting. Including P.E, the school offers a range of specialist subjects through Performing Arts, Language (Japanese), Art and eLearning. Specialist classes all promote the strong community characteristic of Kalinda by ever incorporating the students learning to be celebrated by the wider school community. Whether that be by reaching parents through the schools online portal to display recent work achieved by students, or reaching the broader community through school fetes, sport carnivals, multi cultural days, whole school performances and assembly’s. Community was a typical feature elaborated through the P.E setting, by providing students with pathways in our practicing sports to local community sporting clubs where often these organisations where brought to school to run programs and lessons for the students.

 

When discussing significant teaching and curriculum priorities with my mentor, we reflected on the importance of the school as a whole supporting the same priorities to promote continuity for the students when coming into specialist classes. Kalinda Primary has a particular curriculum focus on literacy and numeracy, with science beginning to enhance steadily into the curriculum over recent years. Kalinda is delivering their curriculum through a ‘challenge based learning’ structure that has been driven by the Assistant Principle, which promotes teachers to issue the ‘challenge’ to students in their learning across the curriculum. Essentially, this finds students taking individual paths to achieve the desired learning outcome. Teachers are asked to provide the resources necessary for multiple approaches for students to take when creating their learning path, a process that in many cases has been found to be more effective than that of tradition lecture based instruction (Brophy & Roselli 2006) as students are motivated by taking their own path to achieve the result.

 

 Upon discussions with my mentor, we found the influence of the school being quite well off in a socio economic sense meant that behaviour management was not an area of significant importance, however the key areas of the professional standards in knowing the content and how to teach it, knowing their students and how they learn, planning and implementing for effective teaching and learning, and teaching towards upcoming events were a key focus within the school.