Yesterday was another school visit day. I was assigned to Alfriston College in an outer suburb of Auckland. The school was really fascinating. It's the first new public high school built in New Zealand in 25 years. As a result they have heaps of money and had lots of time to conceptualize how they wanted to build the place. The principal spent a good two hours talking to us about the school and how the architecture of the school and the grounds reflects their philosophy of learning. For instance, they believe that 25% of learning takes place outside of the classroom so the signage of the buildings incorporates all kinds of GPS locations, rulers, golden rectangles, etc.
Each year they are adding a new grade of students to the school and with each year they have to invent the curriculum for the new group of kids. Currently they only have year nine students (confusingly, our 8th grade). They have made a commitment to putting together integrated thematic curriculum units (similar to inter-disciplinary units). The school is staffed entirely by teachers who have been hired in the last year and who knew going into the job that they would be expected to teach in this style. They have 90 minutes a week to plan together as well as two full days during each school term. It sounded very promising when we talked to the principal, but conversation with the individual teachers suggested that they haven't really bought into the philosophy. For instance, the grade 9 English teacher we talked to said she hasn't been able to teach a novel yet this year (they are in their second of three terms) because she can't fit it in. I suspect a slight lack of creativity on her part, but even still, it looks like a challenging undertaking and we teachers are hard to convince to do things differently than we have been doing them for the last 5, 10, or 20 years.
The school grounds were beautiful and very artfully designed although the classrooms looked surprisingly like IKEA--sparse, Scandinavian inspired, and like they would last about three years. All the rooms are wired for massive amounts of technology and the computer to student ratio is 4:1 and all the teachers are given top of the line laptops. It was really fascinating to listen to the principal and hear him talk about shaping school culture from the ground up. After our meeting with him I wished that I could make a school of my own choosing from the very beginning. The issues of school culture that we deal with at Uni (and anyone in education deals with) sometimes feel so deeply entrenched that it would be a pretty unique opportunity to get to wipe the slate clean and start again. Of course, as these teachers demonstrated, old habits die hard.
Here is a photo of the meeting house (whare) at Alfriston College.
Each year they are adding a new grade of students to the school and with each year they have to invent the curriculum for the new group of kids. Currently they only have year nine students (confusingly, our 8th grade). They have made a commitment to putting together integrated thematic curriculum units (similar to inter-disciplinary units). The school is staffed entirely by teachers who have been hired in the last year and who knew going into the job that they would be expected to teach in this style. They have 90 minutes a week to plan together as well as two full days during each school term. It sounded very promising when we talked to the principal, but conversation with the individual teachers suggested that they haven't really bought into the philosophy. For instance, the grade 9 English teacher we talked to said she hasn't been able to teach a novel yet this year (they are in their second of three terms) because she can't fit it in. I suspect a slight lack of creativity on her part, but even still, it looks like a challenging undertaking and we teachers are hard to convince to do things differently than we have been doing them for the last 5, 10, or 20 years.
The school grounds were beautiful and very artfully designed although the classrooms looked surprisingly like IKEA--sparse, Scandinavian inspired, and like they would last about three years. All the rooms are wired for massive amounts of technology and the computer to student ratio is 4:1 and all the teachers are given top of the line laptops. It was really fascinating to listen to the principal and hear him talk about shaping school culture from the ground up. After our meeting with him I wished that I could make a school of my own choosing from the very beginning. The issues of school culture that we deal with at Uni (and anyone in education deals with) sometimes feel so deeply entrenched that it would be a pretty unique opportunity to get to wipe the slate clean and start again. Of course, as these teachers demonstrated, old habits die hard.
Here is a photo of the meeting house (whare) at Alfriston College.
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