Tony Ryan's Visit to our School - Enner Glynn
We had the privilege of having Tony Ryan work with our leadership team here at Enner Glynn School. We had 150minutes with him and during this time he worked with us on our School's purpose, vision and learning principles (lenses). He also worked with us on our Curriculum plans and inquiry approach at School. This time was very valuable to us and allowed us to reflect on what we have done, what we are doing and what we need to clarify, change or improve.
Tony began with a classroom walkthrough with us. We worked with, and spoke to a number of our students during their learning time... which unsurprisingly, turned into our learning time. Tony collected images and ideas as we went around that were used later in our discussion.
We started talking about our purpose, vision and principles (lenses) for learning. This was great, Tony supported our ideas to make this living and we explored ways to give it a 'heart' with him... this hit the mark for us and was extremely valuable for us.
When we spoke about curriculum and inquiry, Tony's ideas from the classroom supported what we were trying to do... and our brief walkthrough audit showed a clear 'curriculum' paradigm as opposed to an 'inquiry' paradigm. This was a fair assumption, but it is also our belief that we provide instruction in reading, writing and maths - which was happening during our walkthrough - or else kids will continue to struggle with inquiry (as we know, not every learner is suited to inquiry learning - or is that being provocative? :-D).
The outcomes for us are that we will:
- consider ways to do more focussed learning model work with our learners (say a day or two day focussed 'inquiry') AND continue our term learning focus and shared approach to planning.
- continue to work on ways to give our purpose, vision and learning principles (lenses) a 'heart'. We plan to look for metaphor, stories, schema and coding to promote dialogue and ongoing growth of this approach at our school.
- link curriculum and pedagogy closely to support quality systems for learning and growth across our school, through developing a both/and approach to our learning model. We plan to develop a visual framework to look at how to teach sub skills such as questioning.
Plenty to work on, but it will be good to have Tony back to look at how we have grown in this time.
Thanks Tony!
Comments
Tony was very productive during our afternoon discussion. While Tony was critical of our integrated curriculum plan, Tony provided constructive solutions including a segway into inquiry teaching within our school.
Tony also provided suggestions for new ways to incorporate the key competencies into our integrated plan.
Picking up on your inquiry comments Isaac - have been thinking /reflecting about inquiry in NZ schools and am wondering if we need to follow a model, there are so many models out there and to my knowledge there is no evidence that any one model improves learning outcomes for kids more than any other model. It is the skills our students need, and yes, they can be presented in a model but not all models will suit all children so do we have to teach the skills and their application and then introduce children to a variety of models....... are some models better for science investigations and some more suited for a social science inquiry of a maths inquiry...... so should the focus not be on the model but on the skills of effective inquiry?
I totally agree Janice. Weare looking at developing learning processes for writing and science this year... wil be interesting to see how it goes, our goal is to make the skills transferrable. Based soemm of it on the wonderfu work of Lane Clarke that we saw last year at U-Learn.
Hi Isaac,
I'm DP in West Auckland and was really interested in your post. Our school has been on a journey of developing our curriculum based on our school vision. Within this we have been looking at how we embed effective pedagogy and priciples of learning in our curriculum. I like the term 'lens', when referring to the learning principles!
I am really interested to hear how the development of links has been going for you between the curriculum and pedagogy to support quality learning and growth across the school and how your visual framework is going to teach sub skills such as questioning.
Thanks
Sharon