Looking Forward to Next Practice

So as a Lead Team and school we are currently rethinking our curriculum and programmes to better align with our vision of future learners. We are exploring research around how children's brains develop, what has an impact on risk factors and how we can strengthen our students as successful learners, as well as the power of the Arts as one of our key principles in the Hundred Languages.

At the weekend some of us were fortunate enough to attend a conference in Auckland around where to after National Standards. The presenters at the event are some of New Zealand's leading educators and schools. The pleasing thing for our conversations was how in line with their thinking we are at Bromley in the direction we want to take our students in. For us it was an affirmation that we now have more freedom to design learning around the whole curriculum and that this is backed up by research.

In our programmes we have this year been encouraged to have a play with how we teach across the curriculum as it opens up after the limiting National Standards focus of the last ten years. So in our place at the moment, we have teachers trialling a more Reggio Play Based approach where our young students have the power to choose their play, negotiate their own rules and conflict, explore more oral language and have a much more focussed learning time with the teachers. Reinforcing the Hundred Languages to express their thinking and how  the power of making their own choices around some of their learning, including through digital technology, is being explored more through the school. Our reflections and observations are providing a deep conversation around how this could be further explored over the next term.

Getting feedback from our students and whanau is also a key ingredient for our conversations before we make any definite decisions for next year. It is very timely however in this new era, to encourage our staff to "play" with more creativity in their classroom programmes as they broaden into other curriculum areas. Exciting times!