STAGE 1: THINKING ABOUT IT

We are beginning to sense a kind of ‘collective epiphany’ about our core work together: learning. We’ve been paying attention to a collective professional discussion among schools about ‘defining learning’ and we are conscious that we have never developed a simple, practical definition of the learning process that actually drives our practice. 

As we look at some of the features of learning in our school compared to our genuine aspirations, as expressed in our various official ‘guiding statements’, we see some conspicuous gaps. 

For example, we aspire to offer learning that is flexible, evolving and dynamic but we feel that we are somewhat stuck in a rut with ‘content that we’ve always used’.

We want our students to be deeply and personally engaged with their own learning, but we worry that more often than not, they are simply jumping through the hoops that we hold up for them. We feel our students may be committed to their learning if they are convinced of ‘the why’ behind it and if they have opportunities to own their learning in more intentional ways, from creating their own learning goals to being given opportunities to provide evidence of their learning in more personalized ways.

We’d like to think that our practices have a powerful impact on learning but we realize that we simply don’t have the mechanisms in place to draw any substantive conclusions about this.

Finally, and maybe summatively, we want our learners to have fun with their learning and to feel that learning in our school is a joyful experience. We have our moments when that feels true, but they are not intentional or consistent enough.

We have work to do!

STAGE 2: WORKING ON IT

We feel we are making real progress in puzzling our way towards creating learning experiences that more closely match our aspirations.

We had a key breakthrough in deciding upon a simple, practical definition of the learning process that we really believe will bring more commonality and shared purpose to the processes of planning, teaching and assessing for learning.

Once we saw the power of ‘defining our terms’ we have begun to apply that learning to other elements we want to see in the learning experiences we offer.

We began by unpacking the term ‘dynamic’ and are working on a system to keep our curriculum alive and evolving without resorting to review cycles that have little to do with the actual relative state of various disciplines. We are also considering more inquiry-based methodologies including trialling some ‘open inquiry’ models where students create and manage their own inquiries.

This in turn promises to make learning more engaging for our students. We’ve interpreted ‘engaged’ much as in human relationships, where ‘getting engaged’ means ‘making a commitment’. We feel our students may be committed to their learning if they are convinced of ‘the why’ behind it and if they have opportunities to own their learning in more intentional ways, from creating their own learning goals to being given opportunities to provide evidence of their learning in more personalized ways.

We had a possible breakthrough in considering that we should define what it means for learning to be ‘impactful’ and that we should then use any new clarity to guide decision-making. We are now exploring where this might lead us.

Our hope is that, if we work on all these things, the compounded impact will be to make learning more ‘joyful’. We are interpreting this not so much as ‘Yay, let’s all have fun’, but, more productively as, ‘When learning is rich, relevant and more self-directed, there is more joy to be had from feeling you are engaged with important work’.

We’re feeling encouraged by these emerging perspectives and motivated to push forward.

STAGE 3: LIVING IT

We feel that we’ve arrived at a good place. Our school feels ‘different’ with a shared and purposeful learning culture.
Our learning definition has had a major, observable positive impact on our learning culture and our shift towards student ownership of learning equally so.
To keep our learning systems dynamic we now regularly hold conversations with teachers and students framed by questions like, ‘What would you fight to teach?’, ‘What would you fight to learn?’. We feel that these shared inquiries are doing more for us than formulaic ‘curriculum cycles’ in ensuring we teach and learn ‘stuff that matters’.

The introduction of more rich, relevant learning contexts in the form of connected learning modules, our focus on shared learning purpose, and on students’ ownership of their own learning are keeping our students far more engaged. The results of our new Learner Engagement Survey bear out this impression.

As a result of our ‘defining’ work, we are now able to make a clear distinction between impacts (the change we want to see), outputs (the processes or products that we may need to achieve our impacts) and inputs (the things we’ll do create our outputs and achieve our impacts. These distinctions are having a major impact on our goal-setting, planning and implementation.

Our clearly defined focus on learning impact has made a big difference to the ways in which we prioritize professional goals. We ask ourselves, ‘If we could only do one thing, what would have the greatest, positive learning impact on the most students?

This has given us the confidence to make a ‘stop-doing’ list of professional activities that drain our energy and other resources for little learning impact.

Doing a lot less, but making everything purposeful and impactful, has reduced stress and created a shared sense of relief among learners and learning professionals. Deeper conversations with parents have seemed to spread this sense of a purposeful new beginning. That has definitely increased ‘the joy factor’ throughout the school community and inspired us to wonder just how far we can go with this re-imagining of learning.

Where next?

STAGE 4: TRANSFORMING IT

Having come this far, what if…?