
Telephone: 9488 1900 • Fax: 9481 6135 • info@fitzroyhs.vic.edu.au • Falconer Street NORTH FITZROY 3068
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The Alpine School

Alpine School

The Alpine School is a Victorian Department of Education, Employment and Training school specialising in leadership education for students in Year 9.

The school is situated at an altitude of 1600 metres near Dinner Plain Village in North Eastern Victoria and offers a fully residential program for one school term with accommodation for up to 45 students in a purpose-built facility.
The Alpine School accepts student leadership teams from schools selected from metropolitan and country regions each term. Fitzroy High School applies annually to send a group of up to six students.

The program will develop student skills in leadership, enterprise education and team based learning using a community-learning model.

Leadership and Enterprise education emphasizes:

Students taking responsibility for their own learning
Connectedness to programs and initiatives developed in the home school
Creation of links between the classroom and the outside world
Teamwork in learning inside and beyond the school
Self initiated appraisal of learning and outcomes
Use of technology as a tool for learning and communication
Self awareness and personal development.

There is a great deal of independence offered to the students. The students are responsible for helping maintain the school, organizing rosters, for doing various jobs around the school and generally controlling the nature of their home and place of learning.

Experiential & Interactive Learning

Much of the program involves the use of experiential and interactive teaching strategies to promote learning and skills development. This hands-on approach requires students to cooperate and communicate to successfully carry out tasks. Students learn through active involvement in tasks, which are real, purposeful and fun.

Reflection

Throughout the program students are given progressively longer periods of time to reflect on their experience. A variety of reflective activities are utilized to assist students to move from an experiential to a reflective mode.

Problem Based approach to Learning

Students are involved in identifying and examining real and significant issues within their community, devising strategies to address these issues, finding solutions and making and implementing recommendations.

Teaching about Thinking

Teaching of different types of thinking and the application of the appropriate thinking for a task is an important part of the program. Students are introduced to the concepts of divergent and convergent thinking.

Structuring of Time

Curriculum time at The Alpine School is structured into two half-day sessions or a full day session, and an evening session. Having longer learning sessions gives students sufficient time to engage in meaningful learning.

There is a daily half hour D.E.A.R (Drop everything & read/reflect) session: a quiet time for students to be with themselves.

Students are also required to regularly assist with community duties such as cooking and cleaning.

Curriculum Variety

The Alpine School program provides students with the opportunity to engage in many different learning experiences. This variety gives all students the opportunity to show their areas of strength, try new things, be pushed out of their comfort zones and take risks (whether it be socially, emotionally, physically or intellectually) and to discover new interests.

Collaborative Learning

Most of the learning tasks which students undertake are collaborative. As a school for leadership, a major focus is on developing students’ ability to work collaboratively in a team and show leadership qualities.

For more information see The Alpine School website http://www.alpineschool.vic.edu.au/

Snowy River student update #1 - 2009

Our first week at the Snowy River Campus…probably one of the busiest weeks I’ve ever had, that may be because we have a class in the evening, I don’t know. The classes here though are nothing like back home – we do things like learning about health and wellbeing (for a whole morning) and learn CPR and how to build a jetty. Everything is very hands on which makes it all lots of fun. There are a few things this week that we’ve done that are my favourites… they are the CPR training, the jetty building day and the team games day. The jetty building and teams days were great because I had a great time but also got to make friends and learn a lot about the people in my class.

We’ve only had one Community Learning Project class so far but that one went very well I think. We did heaps of brainstorming and got down exactly what we’d like put into the project and what we’d like to get out of it. It was great to finally be able to make sure that everyone is on the same page and we know what direction we’d like to go in. I’m sure we would have gotten more done if our focus in that class was a bit better but it was early days and the classes are long. Hopefully we’ll settle down and get used to everything soon and we can really do a lot with the time we’ve got.

Like I said before, the jetty building and team days were a hit with my expo group. On the teams day we played games that made us work on trust and communication and determination – like players and spies, where we all had to replicate a model of toothpicks and lollies. We all thought that some of the players were spies so we voted them out but in the end we were all players and no one was trying to sabotage the model.

During the jetty building day we had to organise how we were going to set up the jetty to get to the canoe in the water and also organised when we did everything, including eating and resting. The day was really good and we all learnt a lot about team work, knots, and the other people in our expo group. After one of our tripods fell down (along with Scotty and Jess) about an hour before we had to be finished and across the thin jetty, we managed to bring it back to shore and re-tie about half of the knots. Having that sturdy tripod for the jetty to lean on meant we could cross and complete the challenge which was great.

Living here at SRC is surprisingly comfortable. All the girls in the wings are friendly and helpful – I’d be stuffed if the student leaders didn’t keep reminding me to go to class. By the way, Megan is awesome; as is Jessie (they wanted you all to know).

We’ve all joined some committees to make sure we have almost NO free time but it’s all fun stuff so don’t worry, at least we assume it’s fun, we haven’t done anything yet.

That’s all for now, everyone says hi. Enjoy the wind.

Ingrid P.

Telephone: 9488 1900 • Fax: 9481 6135 • info@fitzroyhs.vic.edu.au • Falconer Street NORTH FITZROY 3068