Best+Practice

he following is based on the units of work, e-folios, students work examples and my own observations from one of the schools in the Western Sydney Region. These statements and work examples form my description of 'best practice'. To protect students' identities the group of children the case study is based on will be referred to as the 'energy savers' group.

= **Westmead Public School** = == Westmead PS were able to enrol 3 teachers in the CCES program for 2011. As a result of their having a number of staff members to work with, they were able to make their CCES project a cross curricular process. == = =

Firstly the teachers from Westmead PS took some programming time and made cross curricular links between Science and Technology and HSIE.

** Making a Case for Change: ** Investigations into energy took place, then investigations into Climate Change were made with support of Brewongle staff. Investigation of the schools energy usage took place using resources from the Sustainable schools website.

-Work sample from the 'energy savers' group

Brewongle staff (Mark Edwards and myself) were then called in for a day visit to do an electricity bills analysis, lux survey and whole school appliance survey. -electricity bills information re-analysed by the 'energy savers' group

Developing the Scope:
From here students had a picture of the main electricity consumers in their school and were able to form groups and start their e-folio.

'We did a workshop with Mark and Chris from Brewongle and investigated lux levels in our room and used the energy calculator. We asked people for ideas and searched the internet. We looked at other schools’ ideas. We worked out enviro footprint and realised we must change. We also used the energy calculator to see if our plan works and people only put on the air conditioners for half of the time- what difference would it make? We found it makes a big difference to how much CO2 our school would give off each year (half).' -work sample for Westmead's 'energy savers' group.

The student work sample above led to an investigation in air conditioner usage, other groups in the school investigated alternative means of thermal comfort and some groups investigated the use of lights in the school.

The e-folio was the assessment task set. Each team was to fill in their e-folio and work through the SAP to produce a proposal to send to the regional team.
 * Defining the Proposal: **

'Our plan is to buy a digital thermometer for every classroom and other rooms in the school such as the library, lecture theatre, hall, offices and staffroom. We will write out a set of guidelines on how to use the air conditioners efficiently and effectively for heating and cooling. This will help reduce the unnecessary use of air conditioners and save energy consumption. As a result, this will save our school money and help sustain our precious environment.' -proposal from Westmead's 'energy savers' group

This team identified air conditioners as the highest energy user in their school and targeted it, they were also able to predict a rough energy saving estimate using the appliance cost calculator and added this to their proposal.

The school was given funding for the digital thermometers and an air conditioner protocol has been made to go into classrooms. Once a substantial amount of time has passed they will be able to re-examine their electricity usage and evaluate the outcome of the project.
 * Implementing: **

**Additional Work Sample** Beyond the CCES program additional extracurricular activities have been implemented to gain exposure within the rest of the school. As well as this poster competition, regular 'news updates' were written in the schools digital news letter. -[|from Westmead newsletter]

The program written by Westmead was one of the better examples out of the Western Sydney Region. The students were given a chance to investigate energy usage in their school with the possibility of broad range of outcomes. Based on their findings students researched their own possible project. The proposals sent to the regional team had a range of options stemming from the student's own investigations.