I have recently finished reading Disciplining and drafting, or 21st century learning? by Rachel Bolstad and Jane Gilbert and found it incredibly timely as we are planning the learning design for our new school.
Some of the brief highlights of this book for me were:
- “Knowledge is innovation. Its role is to generate new knowledge, to do things.”
- The importance of developing systems level of understandings and higher order thinking skills
- A need to shift focus from skills to dispositions
All of this aligns nicely with what we have been working towards so far at Hobsonville Point Secondary School. We have created a focus on 14 dispositions called our Hobsonville Habits: Resilience, Responsiveness, Resourcefulness, Curious, Passionate, Strives for Excellence, Collaborative, Contributive, Creative, Integrity, Purposeful, Critical, Reflective, Entrepreneurial. We are also doing very well at working towards a model that will resemble their metaphor for learning of “A networked camping ground” which you can see in the image above.
Under this metaphor for learning, school is really viewed as part of it’s community. There is reciprocity between students learning and community issues and students develop portfolios to track their learning. Teachers move from being the source of knowledge to being a learning coach which will require them to know about a range of subject areas for that coaching to be available. The personalisation of learning will be based on a strong teacher student partnership.
This metaphor is exactly what Hobsonville Point Secondary School is working towards as our goal at present. Community projects figure so strongly in our vision for learning that Sarah Wakeford has been employed as the Learning Partnerships Leader to engage with the community and set up partnerships for learning. Already she is having meetings with the Hobsonville Land Group, Auckland Sustainable Business Network, Kaipatiki Project etc. etc. Our Learning Team Leaders are developing the models that will help the teacher student relationships to develop strongly within our learning hubs and Learning Coaches will be responsible for a maximum of 15 students and supporting them in their learning goals. The Specialised Learning Leaders have been hacking the New Zealand Curriculum and working out a learning process that will allow for more natural integration between the learning areas so learning can be more authentic.
The biggest challenge for us from this book is the idea of developing Prosumers: learners who are actively involved in their own learning plus develop the capacity to invent, design and co-produce themselves. They will undertake their own needs assessment and design their own programme of learning. This is where the real transformation of education occurs. It will require us to imagine new roles for teachers and the system – which we have done so far, but can we continue pushing towards this goal once the school opens for real.
Right now, we are gaining rapid momentum towards this goal. All teams are feeling the joy of progress on our particular tasks and revelling in the intense lab atmosphere.
Our challenge is now maintaining this momentum over the long haul.