Yahoo Finance Australian school's divisive four-day week move: 'Huge value'
The Catholic school in regional NSW is allowing senior students to teach themselves on Mondays after a successful trial.
Aussie teachers are divided over whether schools across the country should follow in the steps of a NSW school that recently announced a huge overhaul to the learning week. Chevalier College has been trialling having students conduct self-directed learning on Mondays this year in a program called 'Best Use of Time, Flipped Monday'.
Senior students in years 10 to 12 have been allowed to do this at home while younger students have been doing their learning in the school hall with teacher supervision. The College has now decided to adopt the format permanently.
A NSW teacher who spoke on the condition of anonymity told Yahoo Finance this could be an "exciting" switch-up of an education model that has "existed for decades".
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"It’s great to see someone experimenting to see if there is a better model. It will equip students with what life and university is actually like and build their resilience and work ethic to get their studies complete," she said.
However, another anonymous educator explained to Yahoo Finance that this could go south very easily if it was adopted across NSW or even the whole country.
"To have a day where you can work from home only works when students are self-driven, motivated and autonomous," they said.
"Most students would not have the ability to focus for five hours at home amongst their other freedoms and distractions, whereas on school grounds a clear expectation is set."
He added that having students in a classroom helps everyone learn at roughly the same pace, whereas huge gaps could emerge if they're learning by themselves.
How did the trial work at Chevalier and what did parents say?
Chevalier College principal Greg Miller said the four-day on-campus learning was part of a "raft of initiatives" that were designed to "broaden learning for students and to offer them opportunities to exercise choice when learning".
However, the school came up against concerns from some parents that students wouldn't learn as much on their own compared to when a teacher was leading a lesson.
"Not all kids will engage with this, not all kids will be able to understand. The teacher will have to spend the next couple of lessons getting those kids up to speed," Year 12 parent Nicci Brauer complained to the ABC last year when the trial was announced.
"My son finds it boring and is not enthusiastic, though does manage the workload," said another parent.
Miller explained that the format still needed some tinkering to make sure it worked for everyone.
"We didn't land it as well as we could have and there is more work to be done when doing this moving forward," he said. "Certainly, the parent feedback added weight to what was evolving as we observed and interviewed students and reviewed their survey data as well."
But he added that the majority of parents and students were keen for the format to continue.
"There are more than enough people, students and parents, who are encouraging us moving forward to do it better and get it right," he said.
Game-changer for teachers as well as students
Independent Education Union (IEU) of Australia NSW/ACT told Yahoo Finance this is a fairly monumental shift for students as well as teachers.
“Any changes to the way teachers work in any school requires genuine consultation with the staff themselves and their union," IEU branch secretary Carol Matthews said.
“The school has assured the IEU that the intent of the changes at Chevalier is to both improve student learning and address teacher workloads.
“It is widely known that teachers are already carrying heavy workloads, and any changes to timetabling, structure and programming in any school should alleviate these workloads, not add to them."
The NSW teacher said this could give educators like her so much more time to knock out essential work.
"It would make a massive impact on teachers as there would be a day to plan lessons, complete more study, and also experience a work life balance. It would also cause less disruption to class time if they had a dedicated day for excursions," she explained to Yahoo Finance.
The trial at Chevalier College was being overseen by Phil Cummins from global educational network A School for Tomorrow.
He said more than three-quarters of the 107 staff surveyed at the school said the additional time allowed them to do more lesson planning and other professional learning.
"Quite often teachers can be quite sceptical of really significant innovations, but the teachers are seeing the value of it for themselves with their own preparations for this and their own professional expertise is growing," Cummins said.
He encouraged other schools to see if they can create a similar working arrangement and see if it leads to better results.
"Every school and system can learn about using flexible scheduling informed by excellent theory to create today’s learning for tomorrow’s world from the findings of our research report which we will be releasing later this week," he said.
Principal's warning for other schools wanting to jump on the bandwagon
But Miller is a harsh critic on his school's trial and ruled out the idea of even fewer days in the classroom.
"To use very plain English school vernacular, we got a pass mark," Miller said to 9News. "It's a satisfactory start, I've seen it been reported elsewhere as a stunning success, it's not my take on it.
"On some of those Mondays, they're not doing flipped learning, they're engaging in mandatory excursions or other school events.
"I certainly would detest seeing all schools going online for five days like we experienced during COVID.
"There was a lot more fallout than benefit from that."
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