Sacre Coeur

The third school we had been to is Sacre Coeur. Scre Coeur (SC) is a high achieving catholic girls’ school located in Victoria. It adopts a non-selective entry policy so that they are not providing education just for high achievers. It as well adopts the Individual-Special Needs Learning approach to cater to the needs of the talented and students who need remediation. SC aims at making her students aware of the importance of individuals in community and maximizing each of their talents. Through education, it is hope that students can build sisterhood and structures of support. SC hopes to nurture females of courage and commitment, and make them believe they have the transforming power.

The class I went to is a geography class of Year 7, students were giving presentations on Antarctica. Students were divided into groups before, and they had to come up to a topic related to geography of Antarctica on their own. By doing so, it was hoped that students would have greater motivation do complete their tasks because they had the ownership of the project. It was their first time to give presentations in geography lessons, but that did not affect their performance. They prepared costumes, they made PowerPoint slides, they recorded a video tape…they are all in all quite prepared for their presentations and I was very impressed! And I was quite surprised by how attentive the girls are in listening to classmates’ presentation as well.

Due to the fact that it was not a language lesson, the teacher did not focus on the discussion of grammar but more on the contents of presentations. The teacher would give feedback to each individual after the group presentations, and she would constantly praise the students, acknowledge them of their efforts and highlight the areas that had to be improved. Her positive reinforcement would motivate students to work hard on their tasks and do even better next time.

I could not really compare the approaches of language teaching of SC to that of Hong Kong, but schools in Hong Kong and Australia are so different in terms of the coming up of the presentation topics and teachers’ and students’ responses. Schools in Hong Kong would not usually allow students to choose their own topics, instead, they would assign topics to the groups and this somehow restricts students’ creativity and ability. Besides, teachers in Hong Kong are less likely to be that supportive and encouraging. Perhaps because of the Chinese culture, teachers tend to give negative reinforcement so as avoid students being too boastful. Schools and teachers in Hong Kong might have to adjust a bit foe the betterment of students.