ALL NEWS

Showcase + Screens + Survey

17 September 2020

Showcase:

The Year 12 showcase yesterday was a huge achievement. It was a magnificent experience to walk into the Sylvia Brose Hall and take in the sheer quality and volume of project work in the subjects of:

* Visual Arts,
* Design and Technology,
* Science Extension,
* English Extension 2,
* Society and Culture,
* History Extension.

The students deserve congratulations for the vision and hard work they put into bringing their creative labours to completion over a whole year. The works are for the HSC, and will be marked, but the learning that each student went through will live on as a foundation for the rest of their lives. Their works did not exist a year ago, and by creating substantial works in whatever their subject, out of nothing, they have changed the world, and themselves, in the process. What better way of learning that an individual can change the world, for the better, one small work at a time.

Screens:

What does watching a screen do to a child or young person’s mind? It’s the question that’s been hotly debated for decades since movies, TV, video, then laptops and other devices, and now phones, have become so embedded in everyone’s lives.

Does watching a screen reduce the capacity to make independent thoughts? When we hear a story, we make pictures in our mind, mental images, of what we hear. Does seeing a fixed and vibrant artificial image on a screen reduce the ability of a child to create their own inner mental pictures?

There is a significant body of research now suggesting that it does. In a paper titled Screen-time influences children’s mental imagery performance, recently published in the academic journal Developmental Science, researchers have found further evidence of this link.

Taken directly from the paper, the research highlights are:

  • Screen media provide children with ready‐made and visually dominated mental images, hence may reduce multimodal mental imagery.
  • Using a longitudinal cross‐lagged design with 266 children we tested the effect of screen‐time on mental imagery, controlling for a host of variables.
  • Greater screen‐time is linked to reduced mental imagery in children.

There are important issues for our future in a screen dominated world. Genuinely independent thought requires practice in forming those mental images. The more a child is presented with artificial images, the less practice they have in building the “muscle” of independent image generation.

Glenaeon’s primary school is device-free for this very reason. At a time when young brains are growing, we ensure that the muscles of inner mental activity are kept active. We build that mental image muscle through fostering an active image life in our students: stories, poetry, drawing and painting, sculpture, theatre, and all the active learning that goes into Main Lessons are important elements in this building of mental image “muscle”.

You can read the full research article here:< https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/desc.12978 >

Annual Glenaeon Parent Survey

Our annual parent survey will be in your inbox. The survey is an important opportunity to gather information on how you view the school and any suggestions for improvement.

One of the questions is your response to the School Leadership team. Leadership of the school is vested in the Glenaeon School Executive which comprises two overlapping groups carrying responsibilities for both compliance and education.

The Executive Risk Managers carry responsibility for critical incidents (such as the pandemic this year), risk, strategy and compliance, and meets weekly.

The Educational Executive carries responsibility for broader educational decision-making, and also meets weekly.

The Glenaeon School Executive is currently made up of the following people and roles:

  • Andrew Hill: Head of School (RM/EE)
  • Liz Nevieve: Deputy Head of School (7-12) (RM/EE)
  • Dani Finch: Deputy Head of School (K-6) (RM/EE)
  • Peggy Day: Preschool Director (RM/EE)
  • Chris Scrogie: Operations Manager (RM)
  • Rohan Wijesinghe: Finance Manager (RM)
  • Catherine Pilko: Senior Teacher Castlecrag (EE)
  • Brigitte Tietge-Rollans: Daily Coordinator (EE)

 

The survey is completely anonymous and there is no avenue for personal identity to be tracked back to anyone completing the survey. The survey is running over these final two weeks of Term 3, and there will be a number of reminders sent out as part of the survey process. As they say on the phone, “Your views are important to us….”