I attended Lester Flockton's session in Cromwell on Friday on the implementation of the new curriculum. It certainly challenged some of my thinking, but also confirmed a lot of it. When talking about the Key Competencies need to be integrated, holistic and are complex. These KCs are capabilities to live and learn and help children develop the skills to contribute actively in the community. They are critical to sustained learning and effective particularly for successful life in society. Teachers are only able to assess KCs in the school context and need to be embedded into the micro-climate of the classroom. It is important t o remember that 70% of what children learn and know comes from the home and 30% from the school. Two of the KCs are intellectual ( about learning and thinking) - Understanding Signs, Symbols and Texts and Thinking; while the other three are relational (Managing Self, Relating to Others and Participating and Communicating) .
After thinking about the Habits of Mind, I have been reflecting on how we are going to integrate these into the KCs. Lester mentioned that if we go down this track it may be a lot for teachers and children to remember. He said that these HofM fit into 3 main areas:
Critical Thinking
CreativeThinking
Reflective Thinking
Maybe this is a better way?
Thinking routines were also talked about. As teachers we need to guide support and scaffold these until they become 'habits of mind'. There are different kinds of routines children need to learn - housekeeping, management, learning and talking routines.
The management team will be taking some of our findings to the staff to encourage discussion and reflection. The Curriculum Plan is developing well but we need to make sure we get it right for our school. Everything we do needs to be developed and owned by the whole staff. Lester said 2 things that are important for all schools to remember ...
'Time taken for THIS
is
Time taken for THAT'
and...
"Keep going back to the child. It's all about the child."
Important thinking in the development of the curriculum!
1 comment:
I've also been thinking about the challenges posed by Lester from last week's course. I loved discussing ideas about critical and creative thinking, questioning, whole school curriculum developments and about the vision, principles, values and key competencies. I agree with Lester that these competencies do not need to be assessed but infused into daily programmes of learning just as are the values of our school embedded into learning to learn and learning for living.
Lester's analogy of the MP3 player is a good one. The 3 mind processes - critical/analytical, creative, and metacognitive thinking need to be part of our daily routine of learning.
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