Standard+8.3

=Teachers assist, advise and mentor others within the school community to support and sustain the ethos and values of the school. =

I originally made contact with the Education Officer at [|Woollahra Council] as I am the staff liaison for the students’ Environment Committee and I wanted to find out whether there were Environment Committees at other schools. I had wanted to facilitate a co-operative relationship with other schools. I was then told that there is a network of schools interested in environmental issues and thus I started attending meetings of the [|ESSSN].

A number of my year 11 Biology students became involved with the school’s environment committee and after telling them about the ESSSN the two conveners of the committee came with me to an ESSSN meeting. These girls expressed an interest in forming a network of students involved in their own environmental issues and this network is starting to form.

I have recently [|facilitated] their attending a workshop to provide the students with leadership skills to enable them to inform and engage other students to develop an environmental program within the school.

In order to foster this interest, when it came time to study ‘A Local Ecosystem’ as a part of the Preliminary Biology Course we decided to study a rock platform in Rose Bay, very close to our school. As a link between the Biology class and the Environmental Committee the students are in the process of developing a [|Wiki] based on their Biology excursion.

Each year students add data so that it is becoming a longitudinal study of the [|Queen's Beach] rock platform. Students hope to open it to the internet in the near future. This Wiki can then be used by other schools in the area to carry out further research and add to the data and information, so that it can become a community resource as well as an authentic biological study.

In this way I am helping our students work towards two of the school goals by developing:-


 * A social awareness which impels to action, and
 * Personal growth in an atmosphere of wise freedom