Senior Stories

A focus on health, innovation and critical thinking

By Michael Francis Email this article

Building thoughtful, resilient learners

Health Education – a valuable pursuit
In the previous issue of Mercy Vine, I spoke about Paul Dillon's visit as a nationally recognised voice in the area of Drug and Alcohol Education. Part of his message to students highlighted the growing prevalence of vaping in our society, with young people increasingly exposed to the risks of vapes or e-cigarettes. Since this time, there have been several media reports about this issue in our society.

At Mercedes College we continue to challenge students to respond to these issues by drawing upon the Mercy Keys. Students are aware that the using vapes and e-cigarettes breaches our Drug Education Policy, and that as a College we are committed to granting everyone access to a safe and healthy learning environment.

You can find out more, and sort vaping fact from fiction, by visiting Paul's website.

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Innovative students
Year 10 students Chloe Dowd, Violet Salvemini, Sara Elleway, and Claire Davies represented Mercedes College at a recent Future Thinkers Innovation Summit. Throughout this experience, students were challenged to develop innovative thinking skills, problem solving tools, and collaboration techniques to identify aspects of health and wellbeing that could be improved. As a result, several ideas were explored to bring to Student Representation at Mercedes College and we look forward to seeing these leaders build on these skills in the coming months.

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International Student Programme
Five of our current international students, Amin (Iran), Katrina (Hong Kong), and Ginevra, Riccardo and Benedetta (all from Italy), developed their critical thinking and research skills recently in preparation for their Research Project in Stage 2 SACE.

Intensive workshops on developing research questions, recording and evaluating research methods and determining validity in sources will help these students as they develop their project in Semester 2. Some teamwork and problem-solving activities were also part of the week, led by Year 11 Leader James Burdon.

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Enjoy your mid-year break and we look forward to seeing you for Term 3.

Michael Francis
Head of Senior School