The Hills Christian Community School
Summary
The Hills Christian Community School (HCCS) is an independent school situated in the picturesque Adelaide Hills, two minutes from Hahndorf and 20 minutes from Adelaide. With the opening of the Early Learning Centre (ELC), HCCS offers effective transition from 3 years until graduation from Year 10 for the school’s 369 students. HCCS has adopted the inquiry method of pedagogy and teachers work in collaborative year-level teams to plan and program using the Australian Curriculum. Teachers within the team plan and specialise in a subject and deliver the content to all three classes in a year. Whole school mapping of documents ensures consistent teacher practice.
The deputy principal of HCCS was appointed with the responsibility to plan the implementation strategy for the Australian Curriculum. The school’s timetable has been structured to enable the established planning teams to meet twice a week to look at the Australian Curriculum in depth and plan together. Staff decided to focus on the learning areas in which they had expertise, and plan and teach the lessons to all classes in the year level.
The school developed planning proformas that incorporate the general capabilities, the achievement standards, and the content descriptions. Through pre-assessment and analysis of data, students are grouped for the next part of their journey. Using a common post-assessment and the Australian Curriculum standards, through moderation, the team agrees on the standards for reporting. Teachers deliver the content through big ideas (e.g. ‘Power and honour’) and learning intentions come directly from the Australian Curriculum.
The Hills Christian Community School provides a broad, rigorous, engaging and challenging teaching and learning program for its students. The students receive specialist teaching in German, science, physical education, music and computing.
The school’s journey with the Australian Curriculum started in 2012, the staff devoted significant time to reviewing curriculum and further developed a more integrated approach to teaching and learning with an inquiry methodology. The Australian Curriculum has been the provocation for the professional learning life for staff
The Hills Christian Community School
Verdun SA 5245 Australia
School type
Non-government
School sector
Primary
School location
Provincial
School size
250 - 400 students
Copyright
These illustrations of personalised learning are not licensed under the creative commons license used for other material on the Australian Curriculum website. Instead, you may view, download, display, reproduce, and distribute these materials in unaltered form only for your personal, non-commercial educational purposes or for the non-commercial educational purposes of your organisation, provided that you retain this copyright notice. This means you cannot edit, modify or adapt any of these materials and you cannot sub-license any of these materials to others. Apart from any uses permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), and those explicitly granted above, all other rights are reserved by ACARA.