Tuesday 3 June 2014

The Essence of Learning

The Oxford Dictionary says the essence is....



As a staff, we have been exploring the essence of learning through the NZC. 

Some questions that we asked were:

  • What the learning areas really are? 
  • What is powerful to learn within these areas? 
  • What should we teach?, and 
  • How do we capture the true essence of these learning areas to enable strong engagement with them?


So, what did we do?
First, we identified the areas within the NZC that we were passionate about. It was interesting to see the strong feelings towards some learning areas over others. We broke into small teams attached to a learning area, that those people were passionate about, and this allowed us to create a brief statement that captured feelings so as to sell it to others.

Sharing these statements allowed us to place ourselves in the shoes of the learner and imagine learning through the essence statement. This created a lot of dialogue for us, we challenged, celebrated and re-designed these statements to fully connect with our values, dispositions and thinking about learning.

The result was draft statements for all the learning areas, these statements were then used as a reflection tool for us to look at our practice and make changes to live out what we believe about learning. Great actions took place!

It has been a start for us in developing our localised curriculum to meet the needs of our learners.

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