ROOTY HILL HIGH SCHOOL

Rooty Hill, NSW

Rooty Hill continues working on teaching, learning and assessing creativity using its Creative Inquiry Cycle to program the five core creative habits identified in the Centre for Real-World Learning’s five-dimensional model of creativity – imaginative, inquisitive, persistent, disciplined and collaborative. In 2017, the school has developed tools and lesson designs to build the capacity for creativity across all subjects, with all teachers and all students. The impact on student agency over learning was recognised as a major innovation by the Expansive Education Network in the UK, and an upcoming publication on teaching capabilities and dispositions authored by Professors Bill Lucas and Ellen Spencer will include the school’s work on self-assessment of capabilities using the school’s online platform.

The school is an identified leader in evidence informed practice against both the NSW Department of Education School Excellence Framework elements and the RAND corporation benchmarks of a data-informed school. Teachers, student leaders and administrative staff use outcomes-based accountability tools to monitor the impact of their work through inquiry-based learning, project-based learning, professional observation and action research. This year, it has focused its innovation on the use of ‘small data’ from classrooms, which includes observing student behaviours to develop the adaptive expertise of teachers by following the student, not the script.