Our school Think Tank team pulls together some of the areas of the new curriculum and our inquiry learning. It is made up of management staff, team leaders, our cluster facilitator and myself. Our first job was looking at inquiry models and pulling it altogether to work with staff on creating and formulating an EPS model of inquiry.
The next stage in the Think Tank team is to look at the Values, Key Competencies and Principles. We had a look at a few schools examples of how they are using these and parts of them in their school community. The team has now divided off into 3 smaller teams to focus on each area. I am taking part in the Key Competencies team - we are interested in seeing how these are being brought into school around NZ and what different schools are doing.
This week I am also going to be asking students around the school what they think each of the Key Competencies mean and why they might be important for them to know about.
We are also using the NZ Curriculum Online website. If you are able to share what your school is planning, doing or working on with Key Competencies I would love to know. We will be meeting again next week to share what we have found out.
2 comments:
We have done quite a bit last year on Key Competencies as a staff - invloved a great days PD where staff had to be students for a day, engage in a range of activities in teams (sudoku, quizzes, PE challenges and so on) and reflect on the key competencies they were using and what it was like to be the learner again. Lots of the activities required teams to work together to solve problems. We also introduced the TRUMP card - how do we trump our current teaching? TRUMP of course is Thinking, Relating to others, Understanding L,S & T, Managaing self and Participating...
This was a great way to explore the competencies.
Over the last two and a half years we have taken a very close look into the Key Competencies and one of the main outcomes has been that you can not look at them in isolation. They must be interwoven throughout the entire curriculum. In order to achieve this we decided to use the Key Competencies and the Values as the Contexts around which we plan all learning and teaching in our school. For example this term we have chosen Thinking and Ecological Sustainability. With the very funky catch phrase 'Every Action there is a Reaction' our content is based around Science and Science experiments in natural phenomenon. I can share with you our Statement of Intent and Planning Policy if you like. We want our learning to be more about the 'Know Why' and 'Know How' rather than the traditional focus of 'Know What'. The benefit we have found through this form of planning is that teachers are able to follow the natural wondering of the students, thus increase student engagement (and allows for teaching creativity).
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