North Rockhampton High School

Library computer suite


With Principal Judi Newman


Feed at Chutney Mary's

Yesterday we spent a great day at North Rockhampton High School where we were hosted by Principal, Jude Newman. Their school is similar to ours and it was good to see what she was trying to do.

We started by observing a Maths teacher presenting the Maths part of a Blueprint Activity which was also taught by the Maths and Science teacher. This showed us one school's way of attempting to grow integrated learning.

Jude gave us an outline of her school and what she was trying to achieve. She shared a template that was used by all junior programmes to outline course and align with the curriculum and formalise assessment and then she left us for an hour to discuss and plan. This was valuable time as we attempted to take what we saw at Calamvale and what we were now seeing and establish a model for our school. We were very impressed with the programme planning template and plan to implement in our own school. All present felt this was valuable and doable. The others with me are very enthusiastic and I am finding that I have to keep reining them in a bit!

We played around with a structure and timetable and settled on a model which had 2 Year 9 classes combined in a home room and their 16 core class periods blocked and coverted by 4 teachers. There would be two teachers in the room at all time with 32 hours of coverage which could be 4 teachers at 8 periods each. This group would pilot a New Basics type curriculum.

After lunch we had a session with the IT teacher who gave us a bit of a tour. The facilities were inferior to ours.

After waiting a long time for a taxi we all ended up at the airport where we made our way back to Brisbane and after a nice Indian feed at Chutney Mary's crashed for the night. We were all a bit tired after our planning day, the travel and poor sleep at the Cattle City Motor Inn.