The Experience of a Specialist Teacher Leading the RSS Program
The Maths/Indigenous/Sensory garden that was completed in 2020 during lockdown, after getting started in December 2019 with a family working bee.
The following was written by Albion Primary School’s PE teacher, Marita Ryan, about her experience being the main RSS teacher and driving RSS action through lockdown, resulting in the completion of three modules and one star during lockdown 6, which is an incredible effort!
Our school has approx. 200 students, with 10 classes and 5 part time specialist teachers – Physical Education, Library, Visual Arts, Italian and Music. As the specialist PE teacher for 13 years, I have always taken pride in the school grounds as I see them as my outdoor classroom. I am also involved in overseeing the student leaders at our school and run a weekly session with the student leaders and/or the grade 6s on leadership. Through this session I have been able to implement many of the RSS ideas and suggested activities. Being a specialist teacher, I get to see all of the students once a week, so can often do a small talk and demonstration and the beginning or end of my PE class in the yard or their classroom, as well as having the student leaders present at school assembly.
Spending time through Covid-19 lockdown 6 I have been able to document and upload many of our practices, beginning with the Core module, then completing the Biodiversity and Waste modules which are very relevant to what the student leaders and I have been working on for many years. The Water & Energy modules aren’t as relevant to me as a PE teacher, however once I conducted the audits and spent time looking at the modules I was able to get a lot of information documented. The next step for our school is to get more hands-on activities happening and continue to use our outdoor spaces for our learning.
My plan moving forward is to get one day a term, where I can continue to work on the modules, document & upload the information onto the RSS portal. I am also wanting to get the staff more involved in continuing our Sustainability journey. The turning point I found with getting the staff on-board was when we introduced the new bin system into the classrooms and staff room – July 2021. There has been much talk about where waste should go and there now seems to be a whole school approach. We will look at our curriculum at the end of the year/start of next year to get more hands-on activities and utilise our local creek and surroundings more. I plan to attend the team year level planning sessions to do this.