Wednesday morning as a staff we focused on what the learning will look like at Hobsonville Point Secondary School.

I shared a blog post by Grant Wiggins entitled Beyond teacher egocentrism: design thinking which is absolutely brilliant and provokes teachers to think of themselves as just one element that influences learning. This had really struck a chord for me and so I was rapt to see the rest of our staff enjoying the reading as well.

There are lots of good points in this blog but one line that sticks out for me and was mentioned by others in our discussions was:

we are in the business of designing and causing learning instead of merely in the business of teaching

Our activity focused on what Grant sees as the conditions necessary for optimal engagement and active learning to occur. Staff were broken into pairs or 3s to think about what that condition will look like for our specific context of HPSS. Below are the conditions and what we believe they look like for us: Continue reading →