Dean's report

Dean of MGSE, Professor Jim Watterston

Open Day

It was wonderful to experience my first MGSE Open Day and to see the enormous amount of work and care that goes into the day. Despite the truly horrible weather we had a great turnout of potential students and their families, lots of interest in our courses and a great array of activities in which people could participate. Thank you to the marketing team for your stellar effort in organising this event and to all the staff members who gave up their Sunday to assist on the day; it is much appreciated and great team work.

Strategic Plan

Another recent all staff achievement is our new Strategic Plan which was published this week. It is quite an accomplishment to distill the thoughts and aspirations of around 300 staff into a succinct plan. I hope you all see yourselves in this document as the strategies and performance indicators came from the workshops we conducted earlier this year. This Strategic Plan is just the starting point for the work we will achieve over the next few years and we have already begun work on many of these important strategies. We are currently working on our overall Business Plan which will further outline the actions we need pursue to achieve our strategies with more focused plans around each strategy also being developed. My thanks to the Strategic Plan Working Group, and most especially Helen Cahill, for the hard work that went into bringing this plan to fruition.

Changes to the Master of Teaching 2019

This week also saw the new model for the professional experience component of the Master of Teaching being communicated to a wide group of stakeholders. As mentioned in my From the Dean’s Desk the increase in demand for our courses has led to the need to partner with more schools and early learning centres and our new model will offer greater opportunities for all metropolitan schools to directly partner with us. The new model will be operational from 2019 and we will be undertaking a consultation process about the new clinical specialist roles throughout September and refining our new package of benefits for our partner schools and early learnings settings.

Australia-Asia Bridge Program

As Chair of the Asian Education Foundation, I was in Canberra last week in a turbulent week of federal politics. The then Foreign Affairs Minister, Julie Bishop, welcomed the inaugural Australia – Pacific Bridge school teachers to Canberra to start their professional learning through the Bridge program. The Australia – Asia Bridge partnerships program, which involves over 700 schools in Australia and across Asia, has been running for 10 years. Through the program schools are supported to establish and sustain a partnership through immersive teacher professional learning, a school partnering service, and a comprehensive website of materials, ideas and case studies to support curriculum collaboration. It continues to be a successful and worthwhile program.

Jim