Learn, Create, Share
In 2011 we developed the simple phrase
learn create share
to encapsulate the learning experience for our students ie students.
It is now simply HOW we 'do school'
Learn
Learning involves passion - first and fore-mostly on the part of the teachers. Ian Fox once said, "When a school and their community have discovered the key to learning for their community, it doesn't actually matter WHAT the method is as long as everyone embraces it wholeheartedly and drives it with passion"....
We have spent many years in the Pt England community consulting with our constituents, analysing data, trying new things, evaluating and simplifying. We have discovered many keys to our students' success along the way.
Much has been written about this in other parts of this document and in the NZ Curriculum.
The Pt England learning and teaching pedagogy has been developed through extensive professional development through TAP (our schooling improvement initiative) and working with Dr Gwyneth Philips, Jannie van Hees and Manaiakalani.
It has also been informed by a variety of other work eg Ruby Payne (The Language of Success), Prof Peter Dowrick ( Creating futures through video self-modelling ie the multitude of positive movies we make), et al
In short, we acknowledge that decades of work discovering how OUR children learn informs our digital age pedagogy and is the foundation of it.
Create
Our children are highly creative and we have discovered that a key to engaging them in the learning process is to devise (or co-construct as they get older) opportunities for them to express what they have learned in creative ways. We have also discovered over more than a decade that our children are very talented users of digital media and so we have endeavoured to give them opportunities to creatively express their learning using these tools. This short piece from Ala explains in her words how she views this.
Sir Ken Robinson- "Schools kill creativity"
Share
Post 2005, when YouTube was born, our human compulsion to share has been enabled in a way that would have been unthinkable even 10 years prior. Every person on the planet has the potential to live life as the star of their own movie - not only sharing the daily minutae, but also the commentary, the analysis of it and creating collections of feedback and feedforward.
Our students have known no other world.
We are providing opportunities for our students to share their learning, in appropriate online spaces for a number of reasons
This is who they are, so why wouldn't we?
To engage them in their learning
To ensure as teachers that we are using this opportunity to educate them about how to live successfully and appropriately as digital age citizens in this learn.create.share. world. We can be sure that if we don't teach them, no one else is!
We are committed to providing opportunities for our students to be creative with their learning and to share it appropriately via the media of their generation: television / cinema, live 'performance' and online
Our classroom literacy cycles reflect the learn.create.share.approach.
We describe how the learning is occuring in our literacy programmes for the students
We describe the creative opportunities our students are going to have (often through creating a DLO - Digital learning Object)
We describe how this is shared online and how it is interacted with
The literacy cycles can be seen elsewhere in this document and also on each class teacher's blog.
Clay Shirky - "People like to create and want to share"
Our original learn.create.share. work at Pt England School still holds true, and is still being used by a number of schools around the country. It was designed to have a broad curriculum coverage, not just literacy. It is particularly useful with the Inquiry approach to learning.
Post 2005 we updated it with a 4th circle.
