Dr Kay Kimber, Director of the Centre for Professional Practice, considers the challenge for young people in building professional identities. She suggests that valuing and cultivating professional mindsets could be lynchpins for success.
Mr Mark Sullivan, Director of Instrumental Music, explores the importance of risk-taking by adolescents to develop the growth mindset that is essential for success in both academic and personal life.
Mrs Anna Owen, Deputy Principal (Academic), discusses how we prepare girls for life beyond school in the twenty-first century, by encouraging them to embrace individual learning styles, develop academic resilience and take advantage of opportunities.
Mrs Jody Forbes, School Psychologist, discusses the appeal of mindfulness in today's rushing society and how it can assist students to manage exam stress and improve performance.
The move to the new Research Learning Centre must be more than a simple relocation; this new venue must offer the flexible environment necessary to encourage and enable the blended learning styles of the twenty-first century student. At the same time, the new must never devalue the services and facilities that have proven to be valuable in the past.
Inspired by the ‘Life Series’, which explores the notion that creativity and imagination is ‘at the heart of childhood’, Ms Ruth Jans, Head of Mackay House, was prompted to consider how this translates to adolescence and the high school education system. So, what is nurturing creativity and what is hindering it?
Can participating in sport benefit your academic results and future career aspirations? Ms Sally Northcroft argues the case for encouraging the participation of sport alongside the pursuit of academic excellence.
Through the window of the late twentieth century, it was clear that educational imperatives for the twenty-first century would be about innovative ways of doing and thinking in our teaching and learning. We may have imagined but could not have articulated the impact of technology and globalisation as this new century began life with a will of its own taking us into vast expanses of uncharted territory, many of which we still struggle to define and negotiate. Education has always had a busy agenda of change and transformation in its short history of schooling but the dramatic speed with which changes are occurring in local and global society, in technology and economics, threatens to leave it languishing in an outdated past.
Let’s start by indulging in some nostalgia. Think back to the time when you were a child immersed in imaginary play; your open mind brilliantly poised and receptive to possibilities and endless adventures: a world more colourful than anything packaged or purchased. Your intrinsic creativity was limited only by your imagination. What you were doing was designing.
Connectedness refers to the feelings of belonging and social connection; it is one of our fundamental human needs. We are biologically, physically, cognitively, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. We are profoundly social creatures, and underlying most of our materialistic desires are the needs to belong, to be accepted, and to connect with others.