As a Catholic School, Holy Family embraces pastoral care as a key tenet in our philosophy. We believe everything in our school begins and ends with our personal relationships. Our other key values are sharing and support. We try to live out our philosophy to treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves.
Holy Family believes Positive Education helps to engender a growth mindset and an open-ness to “the other” which is also in keeping with our sense of Identity. We also like the sense of gratitude promoted by the program. We have also been influenced by the educational thinking from Reggio Emilia that reminds us that every child and indeed person is both competent and intelligent. So in our school it is a meeting place for many convergent theories conveying a message of hope and optimism. We have created an awareness among our learners of their character strengths with a particular focus on the Wisdom strand of Creativity, Curiosity, Love of Learning, Judgement and Perception and the Transcendent strengths of Appreciation of Beauty, Gratitude, Hope, Humour and Spirituality.
Initially I travelled to Geelong Grammar in December 2012 by invitation as part of a Northern Connections delegation to meet Justin Robinson and the Headmaster as a pre-cursor to a group of Northern Adelaide schools working together to establish a program across our schools.
Then in early 2014 five leaders from Holy Family attended the four-day Course “Discovering Positive Education” . On return to our school these leaders spoke enthusiastically about their learning. This created a groundswell of interest leading to our school hosting a further Four Day “Discovering Positive Education “ Conference for 112 teachers facilitated by the Geelong Grammar team. Of the 112 teachers at this event, 22 teachers were from our Staff.
The following year a further 21 teachers from our Staff attended the next available Four Day “Discovering Positive Education” session held in northern Adelaide in April 2015.
In April 2016 Holy Family will host a further Four Day Conference “Discovering Positive Education for up to 200 teachers. At this session we will send any teachers new to the school who have not undertake the training together with most of our Education Support Officers. We are pleased to be able to create such cohort of understanding to support this learning in our school.
The best part of the 2016 Conference is that we are being joined by colleagues from other northern Catholic Schools. St Augustines, one of the other two schools located in the Salisbury Catholic Parish is sending 35 staff to the four day event. Wow! thats inspiring!