TSAC Prepares Students for the Future with Authentic Learning

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At The Springfield Anglican College significant consideration has been given to how best to prepare students to enter the future workforce, so the College has embarked on an Authentic Learning Programme to empower graduates with life skills and experience.

The Springfield Anglican College recognises it is now as important to help students to develop the skills and understandings, such as teamwork, emotional intelligence, resilience, critical and creative thinking and the ability to solve complex problems, as it is to acquire and apply knowledge.

This year the College has embarked on a journey as an Authentic Learning Community, aiming to ramp up the number of real-life, real world learning experiences students are exposed. Authentic learning is an instructional approach that allows students to explore, discuss and meaningfully construct concepts and relationships in contexts that involve real-world problems and projects that are relevant to the learner and that connect the classroom to the outside world. Exposure to authentic learning opportunities will assist students in understanding the relevance of what they are being asked to learn and also engage students in their learning more so than the more traditional methods of teaching and learning.

This year parents of students from Year Four upwards will gain access to the College’s Learning Analytics programme. Rolled out to parents and students in Years Eleven and Twelve in 2015, the programme, and associated mentoring programme, proved invaluable in assisting students to identify specific areas for improvement across their subjects and, in doing so, raised their overall level of achievement significantly.

Last year’s Year Twelve cohort achieved extremely credible OP results with 94 percent achieving in the OP 1-12 band and, by their own admission, give credit to the power of the programme and support offered by their mentors. A short video capturing the views of staff and Years Eleven and Twelve students can be found on the College website.

The power of Learning Analytics programme lies in the fact that students, parents and staff can access live data about their performance and where they sit in relation to their class and cohort.

All schools have this data but few have it centrally located and available for viewing as recent as the last assessment marked.

Further, as part of the mentoring programme, students are asked to set long-term and short term goals, which are also entered into the programme and are refined as the year progresses.

Linking the Learning Analytics programme to the College’s authentic learning community journey, the College will be able to very easily monitor the progress of students as they are exposed to, and challenged by, this different paradigm of learning.

During Semester One this year, the College will be releasing details of a newly developed enrichment and extension programme to cater for the very academically able students entering Year Seven in 2017. This is an exciting initiative that will add to the range of enrichment and extension programmes and structures already well established across both campuses. Details of this new initiative will made available to the College and wider community in the early part of Term Two.

Steve Croft, Principal

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