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In August, I had the privilege of attending the ReimagineED23 conference in Fremantle, alongside our Deputy Principal and Head of Senior School, Louisa Scerri. The event provided us with a valuable opportunity to hear many prominent and innovative educational leaders share their reflections and thoughts about the current challenges facing global education.
Dr Tony Wagner, a globally recognised education expert who has spent over a decade at Harvard University and is a widely published author, was one of the distinguished speakers at the conference.Currently serving as a Senior Research Fellow at the Learning Policy Institute, Dr Wagner spoke about the changing landscape of education and emphasised the need for schools to embrace the “Innovation Era” rather than clinging to the outdated “Industrial Era” of education.
In the era of innovation Dr Wagner explained, students require essential skills and dispositions, encompassing not just academic knowledge but also habits of mind and heart. Wagner explains “to have good prospects in life—to be most likely to succeed—young adults now need to be creative and innovative problem-solvers”.
With well-designed pedagogy, we can empower our students with critical skills and help them turn their passions into decisive life advantages. According to Dr Wagner “in a world that rewards the innovative, mastery is what ultimately matters for our young people” – the ability to apply knowledge creatively, in a useful and unique way.
Professor Sandra Milligan, the Executive Director of The University of Melbourne’s Assessment Centre, shared her groundbreaking work leading the New Metrics project to reimagine assessment for our 21st-century learners. Her insights were timely for Ivanhoe Girls’, given our involvement in The University of Melbourne’s “Matching Not Ranking Project” this semester and as we start our journey of reimaging our reporting system to be more competency based, focused on student growth and learner agency. In the innovation era, the critical importance of digital technologies cannot be underestimated.
In 2023, we have embarked on a journey of rapid digital transformation at Ivanhoe Girls’. Over the past 12 months, we have transitioned to a cloud-based file storage system; launched a 1:1 school-designated laptop program for Year 7; incorporated digital inking into our teaching and learning and introduced Vivi into all our classrooms.
This has enabled the creative use of Microsoft 365, and particularly MS Teams and OneNote and provided authentic opportunities for students to collaboratively learn and communicate. One of our Strategic Goals this year has been to work towards relaunching our Learning Management System, hive, in 2024. This will provide a more streamlined and consistent experience for students and parents as well as a more efficient and powerful tool for our teachers to communicate, access and interpret valuable student data in one centralised place. This year, all our teaching staff have also collaboratively created a whole school shared vision for our digital learning environment.
Travis Smith, the K-12 Education Industry Lead for Microsoft Australia, gave a keynote presentation at one of our staff days earlier this year, discussing emerging education trends and cutting-edge technology. His insights emphasised the potential of technologies such as ChatGPT in the classroom and the need for educators to understand both their capabilities and limitations. Additionally, he highlighted the benefits of stylus-enabled teaching and the neurological science behind it.
In 2023, we have also applied a wider-reaching entrepreneurial lens to our teaching and learning program. In August, a group of our Year 9 students participated in the Big Ideas Challenge, a dynamic interschools competition grounded in the framework of the Entrepreneur’s Odyssey. At the heart of the Big Ideas Challenge, students unite in small collaborative groups to identify complex real-world problems and innovatively develop solutions with the competition culminating in each group pitching their solutions. This challenge has been thoughtfully designed to instill six pivotal Enterprise skills – Problem-Solving, Communication, Adaptive Mindset, Creativity and Innovation, Project Management and Critical Thinking – all essential for futureproofing students and developing their confidence and resilience.
Future Anything will be facilitating a two-day Spark workshop for this year’s integrated end of year program for all our Years 7 and 8 students. Linked to the UN Sustainability goals, this workshop will empower our students to develop an entrepreneurial mindset by exploring their passions, analysing problems and prototyping innovative solutions as well as becoming adept at pitching and persuading others with a clear purpose.
Our entrepreneurial lens also extends to Business Week, where all our Year 10 students are given the opportunity to run their own business, gaining valuable firsthand insights into the real-life complex demands of the business world. In our Commerce and Law elective, we go a step further by providing small monetary loans to student groups, enabling them to develop, produce and market their own personally designed and developed products. These authentic experiences foster innovation and enthusiasm, providing students with tangible results and experiences to be proud of as well as an opportunity to develop those critical 21st-century entrepreneurial skills.
We are committed to shaping and transforming our learning landscape for the innovation era to enable our students to not only thrive academically but also assume their place as creators and innovators in a world that eagerly welcomes their contributions.
Dr Natalie Bunn,
Director of Learning and Innovation