Contemporary Teacher Leadership

ASSIGNMENT 2

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Critical Reflection: Page 1

Kaitlin Trojko
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Teachers have a difficult job in ensuring children these days are equipped for the future. It is
important to understand the amount of time and effort that is put into ensuring students
have gained understanding and knowledge from their classes. Although this is seen
standard, it is also important for students to understand and make connections to the world
they live in as well. The experiential strand our group chose was sustainability. Sustainability
according to the Australian curriculum, is a priority study that connects and relates to
relevant aspects of content across learning and subjects. Sustainability is to provide
students’ knowledge and understanding for ongoing capacity of the Earth to maintain all life
(Australian Curriculum, n.d.). Due to the issues of global warming, we as future teachers are
willing to work together to create change of thinking in schools to gain sustainability
awareness. Our group worked together in how we can approach this type of change into the
school we chose. In this critical reflection, I will discuss the process in our team’s
collaboration in creating the project in relation to the challenges faced and decisions made
throughout the process.

Our group collaborated every week by working on the content within the unit, with
everyone providing their thoughts and opinions in our discussions. We believe that in order
to conduct this project, we must have good communication. By doing this, we organised a
chat on Facebook and organised meetings after each tutorial to complete the tasks. My
roles mainly consisted of being the supporter in the group by helping others out in providing
ideas or expanding them. For this last assessment, my responsibility was to find ways of
implementing sustainability within the school. Before ongoing the project, our team had our
ideas for change that focused on sustainability. Each member of the group had a passion for
the topic and found it an important factor to be integrated in all curriculum areas. Starting
our proposal, each member focused on their curriculum areas by producing potential
content or projects that focus on sustainability. Essentially, we focused on our strengths
being our curriculum areas (Clifton & Buckingham, 2001). Combining our ideas, we found
our focus in sustainability stemmed from recycling, and waste management. In choosing the
school one of our group members who was currently employed, mentioned the school they
currently worked at was St Francis Catholic College in the Wollongong diocese. This was a

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school who had students up to stage 5. We agreed this was a good school to choose as we
have the advantage in knowledge behind the school in terms of the school’s ethics, their
thoughts on sustainability, and the area.

The challenge within the next part was how we were going to implement sustainability
within our curriculum areas. With different curriculum areas, we each had our own teaching
style as some favoured in group-based learning, while others focused on interactivity. We
had finally settled on inquiry-based learning as it suited well with each of our teaching styles
along with choosing stage 5 to implement this program first. Inquiry-based learning is to
allow students to plan and investigate on their own and reflect on what they’ve learnt
(ACER, n.d.). An important attribute into developing this project I found was creativity.
Majority of the activities mentioned in our curriculum areas are based around creative
thinking and not just critical thinking. To approach this into our lessons, we would need to
encourage creative thinking within the classroom (Pink, 2005). Using inquiry-based learning
to promote this attribute, we would implement hands-on activities such as project-based
assessments and tasks, asking open ended questions, and designating time for students to
reflect on the lesson. Although this challenge may have slowed us down, it showed how
important communication and support was important in our group project.

Lastly, our group was deciding on how to measure the improvement within the school. We
found that it was a challenge in how we can measure the improvement and when we would
conduct this project. We eventually decided it was best to focus on methods that were
qualitative by conducting pre and post surveys, interviews and observations. Pre and post
surveys have shown to be an effective strategy in viewing the individuals understanding
evolve due to the implementation (Schalich, 2015). Interviews allows educators to discuss
their progress both individually and as a group on the strategies that successfully worked,
and those that didn’t. Observations was another way to measure improvement as it will
focus on both the teacher and students. All members agreed that it is important to collect
data that focused on what’s happening in the classroom as the implementation of inquiry-
based learning would be done within the lessons. In terms of when we would implement

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this project plan, we thought about arranging this closer to the beginning of the school year.
It will be a 10-week program starting in Term 2. The main development and planning of the
program we agreed should be taken place during term 1. The earlier in the year we
implement this program, the more likely students and teachers will continue and practice
being more sustainable within the school. Through the continuous improvement section,
our short goals consisted of single stage integration, school specific gardening development,
and teacher personal development and understanding of sustainability. We agreed that for
the long-term goals would be to implement a whole school approach, and for students to
take this information home and implementing it outside of school. Overall, our decisions for
continuous improvement were similar with minimal disagreements.

During our progress, good communication was present with little to no challenges. Each
group member dedicated their time and effort equally in the process to develop this project
plan and to understand the importance of team work. Due to the members concern for the
environment with issues of global warming, sustainability is an important topic to
implement in schools today and for the future. Our group collaborated at a professional
level with good communication and continuous work. With the few challenges we faced, it
showed how important it was to communicate and support each other into overcoming the
problem. This experience has provided me confidence for my future practice.

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References

Australian Council of Education (ACER). (n.d.) Inquiry-based Learning: Assessing Students’

Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority.Sustainability. Retrieved from

Clifton, D. and Buckingham, M. (2001). Clifton StrengthsFinder.

Pink, D. (2005). A Whole New Mind: Moving From the Information Age to the Conceptual
Age. New York: Riverhead Hardcover

Schalich, Marion E. (2015), Analysis of Pre-Test and Post-Test Performance of Students in a