Fostering a Culture of Respect

As many of you know, schools are attracting media attention at the moment, with a focus on poor student behaviour and disruptive classrooms. Yarra Valley Grammar School has been in the spotlight regarding appalling behaviour by some senior male students.

Our Federal Education Minister recently announced that schools throughout Australia will be required to implement stricter routines for school-age students in an attempt to curb what is broadly acknowledged as poor youth behaviour.

While this may appear to be a national problem, as an experienced and long-term educator, the students I have the privilege of working with at Woodleigh are the most impressive cohort with whom I have worked in my career. They are respectful, interested, empathetic, and compassionate. They have a clear understanding of the issues facing our communities and are determined to have a positive impact on the world they will inherit.

Disciplinary actions within schools will forever be a contentious issue, not just here but across the globe. We are dealing with young people who are navigating their way through life and trying to determine the values with which they will live. They are influenced by social media and other role models who surround them daily. We would be foolish to think that young people will behave perfectly all the time – for that matter, perhaps irresponsible to imagine that adults in Australian society make flawless choices every day.

At Woodleigh, and as educators globally, our role is to influence our students to be the best they can be. To urge them to consider different perspectives and to provide them with positive role models whom they respect and can seek guidance. While it may sound like an easy solution for all the world’s issues, it’s extremely nuanced and dynamic. There is no one solution, but any approach that is embraced by a school, and certainly at Woodleigh, needs to be real, contextual, and embedded into all we do. Whether within the curriculum, on the sporting field, during camps, activities, or any other experience we offer, our staff continually endeavour to be positive role models, to support our students and to guide their thinking towards respectful outcomes. Woodleigh has always been uniquely progressive in the way we do this.

We have a Restorative mindset at Woodleigh, and we make every attempt to use any incident as a learning experience for everyone involved. Some might question whether a Restorative approach has any or no consequences. From our perspective, taking a Restorative approach has greater and more impactful consequences than a punitive one. For young people, this is a significant part of the development of their internal ethical and moral compass, and we want students to hold themselves accountable for their own choices.

At Woodleigh, we try to conceptualise our learning, always looking for opportunities for students to analyse important values such as equity, respect, and empathy. Let’s be realistic; adults telling students how to behave and what not to do, isn’t always effective. Our many student experiences, from forums to assemblies, and more, highlight real-world examples of lives impacted by different events and how we can respond compassionately and with empathy.

Clear in our philosophies and evidence-based approach to teaching and learning, Woodleigh facilitates a contextualised experience for students that is connected to the real world. We have a community of experts on our staff and within our parent body that we often connect with our learners to create meaningful learning opportunities. On occasion, we also engage with agencies and experts in a highly considered and thoughtful manner in order to complement and strengthen our existing programs and holistic approaches to school life.

You may already be familiar with many of the programs and experiences that are embedded into their time at our school, and I’d like the bring the following to your attention in particular:

• Our school values of Respect for Self, Respect for Other and Respect for the Environment, coupled with the Compassionate Systems Framework.
• A contextual approach to wellbeing through Homesteads and an extensive camps and experiences program where collaboration, respect and safety are experienced within safe and supportive structures.
• Rights and Respectful Relationships embedded through the Health and PE curriculum at Senior Campus.
• Partnership with Elephant Ed, sequenced from Years 7 to 10 focusing on consent, respectful relationships, sex education and social media.
• Health and Homestead curricula that build upon these sessions and partnerships with Elephant Ed.
• Partnership with Burn Bright for Year 9 students, focusing on leadership and respectful relationships.
• Body Safety Program and Rights and Responsibilities Programs at Junior Campuses.
• The Resilience Project at our Junior Campuses

Above and beyond this, our school has an amazing culture of respect, and the people who choose to work at Woodleigh are drawn here because they share an understanding of what a genuinely holistic education looks like.

But even with a great culture and the best intentions, things will sometimes go wrong. This is to be expected in an environment of young people, and we work with our community to restore these situations if and when they occur, helping everyone involved to learn.

There are also situations when a young person’s behaviour breaches all our community’s expectations of decent behaviour or poses an unreasonable risk to others. All schools are confronted with this situation, and it is not unique to the Woodleigh experience. When this situation does arise, we must understand our responsibility to protect those in our care. Any decision resulting in the departure of a community member is not taken lightly and fortunately, is also very rare at Woodleigh.

If you would like further information regarding our approach to wellbeing, learning or how we embed genuine and authentic concepts into the curriculum, please do not hesitate to contact your Head of Campus, one of our Heads of Learning, Homestead Coordinators, or our Director of Wellbeing.

I am thankful to be in a position to lead this community; however, this is a community of leaders and that makes my role greatly rewarding.