Fitzroy High School

Fitzroy High School was closed in 1992 and re-opened in 2004. The school aims at providing an innovative education to students from Year 7 to 12. What is special about the school is that a team structure is adopted as the basis of communication between students and teachers. Students and teachers are allocated to different teams, and students are to stay in the same team for years 7 and 8, and moves to another team in year 9. Students in years 10 to 12 will join in some post-compulsory teams as well. The team structure allows a more in-depth mutual understanding between students and teachers.

Another feature of the school is its curriculum. Fitzroy High School (FHS) bases the curriculum in three main core areas, they are Toolbox, Inquiry and Excel. Toolbox refers to essential skills and contents that students have to acquire for their studies in English, Mathematics, Science and Italian. Inquiry refers to questions and explorations that students use to expand their knowledge in topics like ‘community’ and ‘identity’. Lastly, Excel refers to the session that allows students to have opportunities to extend their learning in regard to their own targets and interests.

The class I went to was a Year 11 Business Management Class, and the topic of the lesson was the communication barriers in Business. There were 8 students in the class. All of them were not ESL students, but some of them were from Vietnam, Ireland and Italy. Despite the fact that they are native English speakers, it seems that students’ level of English is not very high. Throughout the lesson, the teacher drew the mind map as a summary of the textbook passage on the board, and students copied it onto their own papers. The teacher asked the students to read out the paragraphs and summarized them in bullet points. In general, there was not much interaction among students, and the lesson was teacher-centred. However, students were willing to answer teacher’s questions, and participate in class activities.

In my opinion, the use of mind-maps is a good and clearer way to summarize passages. However, its functions can be better utilized if the mind maps are created by students on their own because they can understand the passage better. If the task is too difficult for students to accomplish individually, students can work in groups to complete the task. By doing so, students can learn to be more responsible of their own learning and interaction among students can be enhanced.