Students
What your students get as a result of Kids as Catalysts
Life skills for a lifetime of learning including – using questions to make connections and guide action, speaking up in public spaces to adults, applying persistence in the face of obstacles, using the telephone to get a result, planning, budgeting, pitching a community action in partnership with a community charity or volunteer group; and then showcasing to the community what kids and by extension they, can do to bring local solutions to local issues.
- Active and powerful student voice and agency that lives on well beyond the program
- Increased community connections with their school community
- Increased engagement and age appropriate achievement across the domains
- Increased personal and interpersonal safety and wellbeing
- Increased purpose driven self-initiated learning
- Increased community connections for better networks, opportunities and resilience
Teachers
Teachers speak of:
- Inspiration and reinvigoration, a return to the original passion for education making a big difference in a child’s life
- The lift to classroom culture with students who are happy to be at school and keen to drive their own learning
- An exciting way to thread curriculum demands into student-centred purpose driven skill and positive mindset development
- The exhilaration of positive team teaching and achievement
- Students skipping to class and laughing with team mates outside their friendship circles
Case Workers & School Counsellors
Case workers and school counsellors speak of:
- Seeing children of vulnerable families through a strengths lens
- Celebrating the capacity rather than the deficit of the child and their family care
- Crying from seeing children ‘at the pointy end’ of need looking proud and confident and self-regulated and capable of belonging to the broader community
Achieving Excellence in Curriculum Priorities
The Department of Education Victoria’s Framework for Improving Student Outcomes is designed to improve student engagement, achievement and wellbeing.
Kids as Catalysts creates a vehicle for schools to reach a level of excellence in priority areas of Positive Climate for Learning and Community Engagement in Learning, in particular:
- Empowering students and building school pride
- Activating student voice, leadership and agency in their learning so students have positive school experiences and can act as partners in school improvement
- Building Communities
- Global Citizenship
Impact of Kids as Catalysts
Kids as Catalysts has been delivered in more than 35 Victorian schools over multiple years since 2011. It has demonstrated the significance of building links and relationships between children, schools, agencies and their community. It develops the skills of teachers and children to investigate and understand themselves and others as well as their community through a philanthropic and social action lens.
Kids as Catalysts inspires and equips children to lead change at a community level, resulting in the following benefits.
Benefits to the Child
Social and emotional skills – confidence, empathy, resilience and self esteem.
Creative learning skills – educational engagement, self-direction, literacy and numeracy gains.
Leadership skills – leadership and teamwork capabilities.
Assessment and evaluation Tools
This version is a step by step co-teaching method for your brightest teachers with a big ‘Yes’ inside them to help switch on the capacity of your students to look outside of themselves, help others, work outside of friendship groups, make broader links in their local community to increase resilience through connectedness.
Data coming back is showing consistent rises in student engagement, student voice and agency, literacy and numeracy.