Downtown: Melbourne University and University High School

Today marked a whole different type of journey from the driving I did yesterday: I ventured into the center of Melbourne for the first time. It was actually fairly painless- public transportation here is quite god, especially after you figure out which side of the street you need to stand on to get the tram you want! I only made that mistake once, but I ended up at a grocery store, so it was still productive.

This morning I went to the Graduate School of Education at Melbourne University to join Russell Tytler and his team of PhD students from Deakin on a project that they're working on related to the social aspects of learning science. They brought in a class of year 7 students who were being taught a lesson about how to classify objects and ran them through an activity dissecting flowers andcreating dichotomous  keys. That in of itself was interesting, but what was even more remarkable was what was taking place behind the scenes.

I watched the lesson with the researchers, PhD students, and AV technicians in the control room behind a 2 way mirror. The classroom was miked and there were 10 different cameras filming the action. The video will be analyzed to see how students worked together to construct a model of what they were learning. I felt very fortunate to have the chance to be included in this, and they were incredibly patient with all of my questions.  On a side note, I wanted to take pictures but couldn't have the students in any of the images (and I also didn't want to be a distraction). I meant to take some after the students were done, but never got the chance.

After the lesson the students got to check out the control room and then were sent off on a scavenger hunt of the campus. I went along with one of the groups and got the chance to see what Melbourne University is like. It was a really neat campus and remarkably secluded for being in the middle of a large city.

My next stop was University High School, which is right next to the University of Melbourne campus. Uni High, as it's called, has ~1,175 students. It's a state government school, and it's exceptional. I was treated to an exhaustive tour of the campus by Paul Cuthbert, who is one of the school's physics teachers and an active member of Vicphysics.

I saw so many things that I'm never going to be able to describe them all, so here are the highlights:

• An incredibly faculty lounge
• Separate faculty lounges and office space for each department
• Massive storage areas
• Cutting edge equipment in the Elizabeth Blackburn School of Sciences

• The unique Galileo Project where Year 9 students take a term off from classes to work as a cohort on projects that make a difference in the city
• The Gene Technology Access Centre

Most of what I saw was incredible, but I also noted a few minor downsides. Paul teaches in both the regular University High School and in the Elizabeth Blackburn School of Sciences (EBSS). His class at EBSS is 70 students in a large lecture hall. The seats are permanently fixed, so I imagine it would be hard to do a lot of small-group discussion. Also, as Paul noted, it is heavily reliant on technology. If the technology goes down, there isn't a viable alternative to continue to teach. When these 70 students have lab, it's in an amazing facility with top-notch equipment. The flip side of the coin is that only half of the students can work in the lab at a time, so they have to break into two groups, which can get tricky.