Our staff have continued the work in co-constructing the next iteration of our Pedagogical Framework. One component of this work has been based around Inquiry as a Pedagogy.
As one of our Signature Pedagogies, there are signature practices that we are working to embed within our teaching and learning environments.
In this week’s staff session, we heard about student success in the recent Young ICT Explorer competition and and in the OptiMinds competition. We discussed whether there were elements in this project based work that were important for us to consider in our STEAM work and whether any of our emerging Signature Practices for Inquiry were visible in these group challenges.
Staff also heard from Hattie, discussing Inquiry based learning and we discussed our approach to inquiry as a school and the models and structures that we use to support our approach in such a way that we are avoiding the possible pitfalls discussed by Hattie.
Staff then were invited to identify which of our Pedagogical Practices were sitting most comfortably with them and then, later, to identify which of those might become a higher priority in terms of next steps for staff learning.
So, what were our top priorities for our staff in terms of their own learning?
- Explicit teaching of critical and creative thinking
- Provision of student driven learning
- Use of digital portfolios to make learning visible