Learning in the Junior School
In Year 9 are organised into hub classes. Each hub class is a learning community made up of two ako groups of students and all the teachers who teach those students working together to make learning fun, relevant, engaging and useful.
It is where teachers and students collaborate to make a more “coherent “ curriculum - or meaningful connections between all subjects.The teachers work together to explore teaching and learning and assessment practices that are built on our 4 principles of curriculum design for engaging learners.
These principles are:
- Culturally inclusive – fostering diversity, catering for diversity and preparing our learners to work with diversity.
- Blended – using digital tools to support knowledge construction, real-world problem solving and innovation and to become empowered media uses. It will allow connection with and access to the rich resources available in the community and the wider world.
- Coherent – meaningful links are made within and across subjects using common tools and approaches, using a combination of inquiry learning, project based learning and collaborative teaching approaches. The curriculum builds on students’ prior learning, passions and capabilities, and helps students to personalise their learning and assessment in ways that foster engagement and talents.
- Learning to learn - recognising both adults and students as a powerful resource for the co-creation of the design of learning and success criteria; encouraging reflection on learning and effectively using feedback and feedforward strategies to enhance student self-management of their own learning.
Students will develop the key competencies, critical 21st Century skills and the literacies needed for students to become life-long learners who are able to contribute fully to their community in a modern world that is rapidly changing.
What does this look like?
It can be varied across hub classes and from term to term. It may involve teachers using the same strategies to teach skills but in different subjects, a thematic approach to teaching subjects or across subject projects. An emphasis is on learning that is relevant to the learners, authentic and real-world and rigorous to encourage deep learning.
In Year 10, we are trialling this same approach with two classes for 2018 and all Year 9 and 10 classes will be in hubs from 2019.