ABSTRACT
Hillside High School is a multicultural secondary school in south-western Sydney. The school also ‘offers programs to maximise the participation of parents in school life including parent workshops, collaboration in curriculum design, strategies to support learning in the home and celebrating student achievement’. The unit built an environment of discussion in which students and teachers played meaningful, reciprocal roles. Additionally, continuous opportunities for students to reflect and express ideas about the processes of their own learning manifested the further ‘insider classroom’ areas of ‘student self-assessment’ and ‘student community of reflection’. The opportunity for students to make high-level choices, such as what aspect of the case would receive attention in their play, or what pieces of evidence would be their focus, also reflected the ‘control’ and ‘voice’ areas of the engaging messages aspect of MeE.
