Not only did we change our environments and pedagogy we've also been working on a new local curriculum.
Following on from extensive community consultation in 2016 we decided that a clear vision for learning at Paekākāriki School was needed. Paekākāriki is a small village and it was important to us that our school reflected the village values and philosophies. The community consultation in 2016 provided us with great information about what our community wanted for their children at our school, we began to see a clear picture of the experiences, skills, and capabilities that were valued by our community.
By the end of 2016, we had disseminated this rich information into 4 guiding principles and had established a new vision for ourselves as the Home of the Barefoot Learner. During 2017 we took the 4 guiding principles and broke them down into the key skills and capabilities for our learners – this in effect gave us our ‘graduate profile’ and has enabled us to develop our own local curriculum. These capabilities are outlined as a series of progressions in our Barefoot Learner matrix against which we measure and report on student progress. These progressions were developed with teachers and students. These capabilities have signaled a shift to students taking ownership of their learning – learner agency and responsibility are frequent conversations.
We’ve been pleased with the reaction from the community to our Home of the Barefoot Learner vision and it seems to ring true with our community and visitors to our village. It is a continuing journey for us to embed this vision and a common language across the school, in all that we do so that everyone knows and understands what learning at Paekākāriki School looks like. We are working through systems to enable us to measure and report on student progress against these capabilities to parents.
Progress against these capabilities provides broader and more holistic information than the traditional reading, writing, math achievement data and so we are still in the process of refining our systems to measure and report on these.
Informing parents of this process is also important. We have developed a curriculum where we focus on the skills and qualities they identified as being important, our next challenge is to be able to demonstrate and provide evidence of progress against these things.
Our ongoing considerations are:
- How can students assess themselves? The progressions need to be student friendly and contain language that can be accessed by all learners.
- After a period of implementation, we will need to re-evaluate. Have we covered everything that is worth covering? Are we still assessing that which we don’t value?
- We have trialed a few digital tools for the sharing of learning by students and teachers, but which ones are best?
This session is suitable for: Primary