Canowindra High School
Context
Canowindra High School is a small, rural, comprehensive high school with strong community ties to the township of Canowindra and surrounding villages of Cargo, Cudal, Eugowra and Gooloogong.
The school's purpose as a learning community is: "To develop in students during their secondary years leadership capabilities and confidence to create and shape their learning environments at global, local, school and classroom level."
Our enrolment is approximately 315, with similar numbers of boys and girls. We have seventeen Aboriginal students and one junior student from a non-English speaking background.
Project team
- Leisa Conroy, English Head teacher
- Steve Harvey
- Ian Young
I would also like to acknowledge the work of Elizabeth Steven, who is no longer at the school, but whose previous work provided some of the strategies used. Thanks must also go to other English teachers in the Orange District who worked with the fairytales unit with regard to Quality Teaching and Lin Eccleston from Molong Central School for her feedback on both Stage 4 units.
Highlights of the project
Taking the fairytales unit to district meetings to use as the basis of work on Quality Teaching and gaining many teaching ideas and constructive criticism.
Seeing Ian's low achieving Year 7 class so totally engaged in the creation of their animation project, which displayed a very different attitude towards the subject than had previously been evident.
Although this has not yet occurred, I believe a highlight will be the Term 4 performance evening when we will present the Year 7 animations to the parents and community.
This project has given us the opportunity to further develop ideas and units that we already utilised in a much more effective manner. We have worked closely with the outcomes, but I feel that the greatest change for us was that we have made more effort to integrate technology into our work and to look at the focus areas such as gender and cultural perspectives.
Prior to the release of the NSW Quality teaching paper our district had been working with the Queensland model. Therefore, the timing of the two new focus documents was ideal. We were able to take the first unit to district collegiate meetings and brainstorm various strategies from the Productive Pedagogies paper, which helped us gain a working understanding of the philosophies underpinning this document.
We are working now in cross-district groups to create more units to share, following an inservice in which we looked at scope and sequence. It's a great opportunity; we are doing a lot less “re-inventing the wheel”.
Recommendations for future project schools
Start early and take photos along the way. If you are in a small school with few staff, it can be a great opportunity to work with teachers from other schools in the district to build up a collegiate network.
Materials
The Year 7 Animation unit program focuses on multimedia.
The Animation unit worksheets includes notes for using the Chicken Run CD-ROM.
Student photos at Canowindra High School Year 7 students at Canowindra High School completing the Animation unit.
The Fairytale unit teaching ideas offers some ideas for the teaching of fairytales in Stage 4 English.
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