Four Big Ideas

• flexibilty to put students at the centre of the planning process but at the same time clarity about what’s too important to leave to chance

• pedagogy matters- how students learn is just as important as what they learn

• students learn anywhere, anytime, from anyone- connecting

students’ lives in school with their lives at home and in the community

• hearing students’ voices- students as key contributors to curriculum design

I look behind the teachers eyes to see if they are mean or if they really care and then I know how to be with them

Put on your own oxygen mask before you attempt to help others

What do you want to achieve?

Let me tell you what might be possible

Show me what you can doShe videoed meI could see for myself what I needed to work onLet me tell you what you are doing properly

I’ll give you 2 things to work on

She taught me using several different examples She gave me time to practice

Have I got this right? Tell me what bits of your body feel different?When you’ve mastered this you’ll be …

If I don’t understand what the teacher is telling me I’d rather fail than talk to them about it. I like to stay unnoticed. It took me a while to realise that I had to actually interact with what the teacher was teaching so it would make sense.

I guess I could call myself smart because I usually get good marks. Sometimes I worry that I’m just repeating back what I’ve heard and that I don’t really know much at all.

When the teacher tells me what to do I can’t remember. Then I get scared I’ll get it wrong. I used to ask her to tell me again but she always just tells me to pay attention, so I just copy what everyone else is doing because I’m no good at remembering.

They both Stuck at it when at first they didn’t succeed

Got on with others who were different to themselves

Gave new things a go

Were not discouraged by obstacles

Linking Learning and Community

• Learning of community

• Learning with community

• Learning for community

• Learning as community

Prohibitive environments make it difficult or dangerous to express a range of independent learning attitudes or behaviours.

Affording environments allow students to express learning behaviours but don’t make it particularly attractive to do so

Inviting environments engage students but do not necessarily stretch and challenge their capacity to learn.

Potentiating environments make learning both appealing and challenging- teachers construct activities and environments that stretch students capacity to learn at the same time as they are learning new content.

…You will see and much more if you are prepared to look for it….things are concealed from our view because there is no intention of the minds eye towards them.

We do not realise how far and how widely or how near and narrowly we are able to look.

There is just as much visible to us as we are prepared to appreciate. Not a grain more.

Thoreau 1858