Riverside Girls High School shares how they embed entrepreneurship and innovation through quality learning and teaching.

The journey

Riverside Girls High School is a comprehensive public girls school which is located on the banks of the Parramatta River.  We strive to enable young women to become creators who will positively shape their world by using the skills and strengths developed as active learners and as caring citizens. Our purpose is to challenge young women, so they are prepared to forge their own futures in a world that is changing dramatically yet full of opportunity for creative and critical thinkers.

Riverside Girls' High School saw that it was imperative to engage our students by requiring them to be active in the learning process. STEM was the disruptor that allowed us to embrace change. Major IT companies were employing design thinking and the international agenda was indicating jobs of the future were unknown. We needed to future proof our students and entrepreneurship offered an opportunity to build a skill set for the future and allow students to see that they can be agents of change. Our transformative leadership approach developed a common vision to change and support future learning in our ICT classroom. Assessing the impact on our students in terms of their entrepreneurial skill set, their ability to self-regulate, self-teach and have self-efficacy. Teachers are supported through targeted professional learning workshops, ongoing regular professional dialogue as well as co-teaching experiences to build capacity to deliver. Our current evaluation of the program has indicated that more professional learning around learning intentions, success criteria and building learning dispositions is required as well as how to move to a facilitation/evaluator role in the classroom.