BAYVIEW Newsletter a
ISSUE 2 Monday 10 February 2014
www.bayview.vic.edu.au Principal’s Message As we watch the skill and dedication of the competitors at the Sochi Winter Olympics we are reminded that in order to master a skill and become an expert in something we should apply the “10,000hour rule”. Proponent s of the “10,000-hour rule” believe that this level of practice holds the secret to great success in any field. If you are a duffer at golf, say, and make the same mistakes every time you try a certain swing or putt, 10,000 hours of practicing that error will not improve your game. You’ll still be a duffer, albeit an older one. You don’t get benefits from mechanical repetition, but by adjusting your execution over and over to get closer to your goal.”
TABLE OF CONTENTS ♦
Principal's Message
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Year 7 students forge new friendships at Orientation Camp
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Developing strong family and school partnerships
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Community News
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New staff profile-Lisa Roe
IN OTHER NEWS This week’s header photo Our Year 7 students had a wonderful opportunity to forge new friendship prior to starting school. The Orientation camp was held in Dunkeld and the students completed a range of challenging activities aimed at building resilience and team work. L-R Taylah Nelson, Jaymie Falconer, Paige Luckin & Sarah Purcell Relay for Life We would like to invite the school community to join us for an evening at Relay For Life. The event takes place at Nelson Park, Cape Nelson Road. The evening begins at 5.30pm and concludes at 10.00pm.
The secret of successfully mastering a skill is deliberate practice and well-designed and planned training over months or years, and you give it your full concentration. How experts in any domain pay attention while practicing makes a crucial difference. Learning how to improve any skill requires concerted focus. When practice occurs while we are focusing elsewhere, the brain does not rewire the relevant circuitry for that particular routine. It is vital we pay attention to the task we are completing. After about 50 hours of training –whether in skiing, driving, Calculus or LOTE –people get to that “goodenough” performance level, where they can go through the motions more or less effortlessly. They no longer feel the need for concentrated practice, but are content to coast on what they’ve learned. Skill mastery is at about 50% in this case. People who gain complete mastery, in contrast, keep paying attention; they concentrate actively on those moves they have yet to perfect, on correcting what’s not working, and on refining their mental models of how to play the game. The secret to smart practice boils down to focus. Students have a lot to learn from watching world class athletes perform. Whether undertaking Year 7 Maths or Year 12 Physics we will only master the content and skills when we are fully focussed and systematically review, refine and challenge our thinking. Being a successful learner is no different to being a world class athlete, you just have to commit to the training schedule and work on your skills. “I have no special talents. I am passionately curious” Albert Einstein Dr Michelle Kearney