Pittwater Life April 2017 Issue

Young Life
Equipping kids with skills
for 21st century
Avalon Public School is
set to trial a new learning
method designed to
help students better prepare
for the rapidly changing workforce
they will enter over the
next decade.
APS Principal Andy Rankin
(right) said the school is keen
to discover the benefits of a
new program that involves
teaching ‘21st Century Fluencies’
that will ultimately help
students cut through the
rapidly increasing disruption
to workplaces caused by fastpaced
technological change
and innovation.
He said 11 teachers had put
up their hands to learn the
mechanisms required to teach
‘solution fluency’, which they
begin in classes in Term 2.
“Skills that employers are
looking for are more aimed
at creativity, collaboration,
problem solving and critical
thinking skills, and we need to
Book Review
See What I have Done
Sarah Schmidt
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prepare our kids for this,” Mr
Rankin said.
“The school environment
that we work in was very much
created back in the 1900s to
deal with the factory model of
education and work.
“We need to give our kids
21st Century skills.”
The new guidelines were formulated
by Canadian academic
Ian Jukes, who presented his
roadmap to a group of 70
parents earlier this year.
“One particular focus is what
has come to be known as the
21st Century Fluencies: solution
fluency, media fluency,
creativity fluency, collaboration
fluency, information fluency
and global digital citizenship,”
Mr Rankin continued.
“These are skills that students
need to be taught to be
fully equipped for the workforce
of the future, along with
the essentials of literacy and
numeracy.
Speculative fiction is a genre really
hitting its strides in Australia with
debut author Sarah Schmidt turning
her hand to the gothic 1892 murder
mystery of Lizzie Borden.
Did she or didn’t she take an axe
to her father and stepmother in
Fall River, Massachusetts, and why
would an Australian librarian want
to write about it? The story of how
Schmidt was haunted by Lizzie
appearing in her dreams is just as
spooky and moody as the tale she
has spun.
Schmidt’s talent at descriptive prose teases out a story
of a dysfunctional family, placing you at their dinner table,
witness to their peccadilloes, hanging a big fat question
mark over what really happened. It is a page-turner that
will appear to readers who like their thrillers to be literary.
So dedicated to her research, Schmidt told me she spent
the night at the Borden House which is now a B&B, booking
herself in the parents’ bedroom. So intrigued by this novel,
we are doing the same later this year! – Libby Armstrong
“And these fluencies reflect
the general capabilities of the
NSW K-10 syllabus documents
taught at all public schools, including
Avalon Public School.”
Mr Rankin said that while
schools such as Avalon continued
to deliver on literacy
and numeracy as part of the
NAPLAN “tremendously well”
there remained an urgent need
to address critical problem
solving.
“I had never seen anything
that described how to do so
until I heard Ian Jukes at the
NSW Primary Principals Association
annual conference in
2015,” he said.
Mr Jukes was invited to present
to the school; in addition
to meeting with staff, parents
and students, Ian and his partner,
Nicky Mohan, provided a
day’s professional learning to
APS’ 11-member modern learning
team on integrating one
of these fluencies – solution
fluency – into units of work
from the history, geography
and science syllabi.
“They will trial this fluency
with their classes this new
term and next, before we look
to expand the learning out
across the school in 2017 and
beyond,” he said.
Mr Rankin said it would provide
a valuable framework for
the future while retaining core
teaching requirements.
“We are not throwing the
baby out with the bathwater,”
he said. “We are still teaching
the basics.
“I just believe we can’t afford
to just sit around and wait
– while the kids are learning
their curriculum we will be giving
them an extra set of skills.”
The trial would be assessed
before a decision was made to
broaden it internally.
“I think we owe it to our students
to take this approach,”
he said. “It’s not a ‘silver bullet’
– we still need to read and
write… we just want to provide
some added value.”
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