You are here:
Prospect School – Designing our own approach
Prospect School is a multi-cultural, year 1 to 6 primary school in West Auckland with a roll of around 350. This story describes how the school has created their own literacy and numeracy school-based progressions.
Emerging issues for school review
There are emerging issues that we need to address that have come more to the fore more now that the rest of the curriculum is more easily visible behind literacy and numeracy. For example:
- How do we develop assessment capability for teachers new to the school?
- What needs to change in our induction processes?
- How do we sustain the urgency of teaching and learning without the pressure that National Standards provided?
- What do we do to address our current reality of under-achievement?
- How do we balance the need for the basics/guided pedagogies with the integration of 21st-century skills?
- How do we assess all of this?
Possible solutions that we are working through:
- Our learning progressions + the New Zealand Curriculum = backbone of expected curriculum content.
- Solid grounding in the basics for those who need it, i.e. Juniors, special needs, ESOL, etc.
- Key competencies/21st-century skills become the focus of the learning – content knowledge is the vehicle to teach essential skills.
- Create even more progressions (weird as it might seem) – unpack each skill group to detail the steps learners need to master. We have made good progress with this and it still makes sense because the advantages in helping everyone be clear about what to learn and how to recognise progress is huge.
-
Select the image to view at full size.
For example, this is how far we have gotten with a progression for whanaungatanga.
- The progressions are based on:
- Key competencies – relating to others
- PB4L behaviour expectations
- Graduate Profile
- Independent learner progressions.
For wider school review and reporting on school patterns of achievement (Board of Trustees, Kāhui Ako, Ministry of Education):
- We still need to know, for ourselves and our community, how well our children as a whole are progressing. For a start, we want to know if they are learning the basics to a sufficient level.
- We will do this by attempting to keep the simplicity that was inherent in the National Standards reporting, possibly changing the terminology to "at expected curriculum level".
- As to our progressions for monitoring learning with the rest of the curriculum, we intend to keep developing our progression rubrics, assessing against those and seeing what sort of school profile they deliver and then make instructional and information sharing decisions from there.
Return to top
