Claire Amos

Source Over the course of Semester One, all teaching staff at Hobsonville Point Secondary School have undertaken a personal Teaching as Inquiry project, which enables teachers to focus on the specific needs of their learners but also provides a focus for the teacher's personalised professional learning plan. I taught one Small Learning Module this semester, which was co-taught with Sarah Wakeford (our Learning Partnership Leader and Social Scientist extraordinaire). Our module was called Freedom Writers to Freedom Fighters - an English and Social Science integrated module looking at human rights and the literature that surrounds it, with a particular focus on black civil rights in Term One and the Treaty of Waitangi in Term Two. Our class was made up of 60 Year 10 students who range from curriculum level three to beyond curriculum level six plus. To add to the complexity there was the fact that I was often away with the NZTC so needed to ensure that any resources I created ...

Click here to view the clip Dealing with media is an interesting exercise, simply because you don't know how they are going to portray you. After four hours of filming in the school it was hard to grasp which direction they might take it - would it be blindly celebratory (unlikely) or would it be all about perpetuating the myth that 'we are going to hell in a handbasket' due to the use of technology in schools (more likely). Luckily it was neither, it was (I thought) a balanced piece that began as many of our colleagues and community do, questioning whether the direction we are going is a wise idea and ending with the conviction that it was indeed a necessary change for the better...even if that message was undone a little by Mike Hosking's final throw away lines. But lets be honest, that was to be expected.

I believe self-direction and developing student agency and efficacy is the fundamental shift all educators need to make to become more futur-focused in their practice. In a sense we want step away from our 'caged' classrooms to develop increasingly 'free range learners'.

Realising the Future of Education from Claire Amos On Saturday I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at The Festival of Education as a supposed 'mover and shaker'. Here is an overview of my presentation on 'Realising the Future of Education' which endeavored to look at why, how, what, when we need to change education and what the government could do (IMHO) to support it. Okay, so not so humble...more righteous really. Why must we change education? As Ludwig Lachman stated, "the future is unknowable, but not unimaginable" and whilst we can't see into the future, we can look to a strong body of research to try and divine our present and future learners' needs. Put simply, we need to change education, because the world is changing...and changing rapidly. In the Western world we have moved through the 'Agrarian Age' where the land and agriculture were central to existence. We then moved into the 'Industrial Age', it ...

It is interesting to reflect on what has stuck with you a week or so after traveling. There was definitely a huge amount to learn from the Canadian Coalition of Self-Directed Learning, with each school visited providing a slightly different iteration of the same vision for learning. So what did I learn? 1) Teacher Advisors are the key In each of the schools Teacher Advisors or TA, to a greater or lesser extent, played a central role in the lives of students, providing a single person that the student connected with throughout their high school career. In the schools where the TA worked best they had regular contact time with students - in Mary Ward students checked in with their TA three times a day and sat down for a formal learning progress interview once every two weeks. This meeting was recorded on a school SMS and sent home to parents as a pre-formatted email. At Bishop Carrol the relationship was similarly formal, but with students determining how regularly they met one to o...

Thomas Haney was the last school visit on our US/Canada whistle stop tour. It was also the last of the four Canadian schools we have visited that are part of the Canadian Coalition of Self-Directed Learning. Whilst the previous three schools represented a kind of progression along the continuum from self-paced to increasing self-paced and self-directed, Thomas Haney represented a bit of a detour, as a school who had revised the self-paced model to suit the needs of their learners. Thomas Haney is a co-educational public school in Vancouver, Canada. It is 21 years old, having been founded in 1992 and designed and built to meet the demands of a self-directed school. This means it has a number of large open learning commons, referred to as the "great halls", each housing a different learning area. Around these are a number of more traditional classrooms. For many years I believe the school followed a similar model to that of Westmount, Mary Ward and Bishop Carroll, where by st...

We arrived in Calgary to -1 weather, spending our first evening taking a jaunt though the -5 degree snow laden streets. Bishop Carroll is the third of four "self-directed" schools and the second Catholic school we are visiting on our US-Canada edutour. Calgary is cold, the people are not. Like the two self-directed schools before them, Bishop Carroll welcomed us with open arms and after a brief unfortunate incident (we were introduced as Australians over the loud-speaker.... ;) we spent a fabulous day learning and sharing with the Principal Daniel Danis and his students. The school has been self-directed for 40 years in a building created for purpose in 1971. They are now in the third year of a one to one laptop programme, running a lease to own programme and like the other Canadian schools we have visited they used D2L (Desire to Learn) as the LMS (Learning Management System). Bishop Carroll is considered a "magnet" school, taking students from all over Calga...

Mary Ward is the second of four self-directed schools we are visiting on our journey, and in a sense also represents a shift along the continuum from self-paced to a more genuinely self-directed style of learning. Like Westmount, the staff and students of Mary Ward greeted us with warmth and openness, keen to share and to also learn from us. The weather, whilst still icy, was a little more kind and we managed to arrive in time to experience a full school day. On arrival we were greeted by Derek Chen (one of the Vice-Principals) who welcomed us to the school and took us through to the library to be introduced to Mary Ward life by a lovely group of students, giving us all a snapshot of what a day at Mary Ward entailed. Unlike Westmount which is a traditional school that has adopted self-directed learning, Mary Ward is a school built for the purpose. This means the design and layout can in a sense more effectively support the model, with each Learning Area having a large Learning Common...

Canada greeted us with most unfriendly weather, zero degrees and snow on the ground. This however could not have been further from the warmth and generosity we were greeted with on arrival at Wesmount. Westmount is the first of four Canadian schools that we are visiting, all of whom are part of the Canadian Coalition of Self-directed Schools. These schools range from Catholic to secular, old to new, high decile to low decile, large to relatively small, all however are defined by their desire to deliver self-paced and increasingly self-directed learning programmes for students. This means students, by and large, are free to design each school day, choosing where and when they complete their school work through a system of daily or weekly planning under the watchful eye of a learning advisor and then work through units of work at their own pace in the space that best suits them. Having seen two of the four we are visiting, I suspect each school sits in a slightly different place on the...

One of the most exciting things about being on this establishment senior leadership team is the opportunities we have to travel and to visit key schools in person. In April this year, we are lucky enough to be traveling to Providence, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver to explore Big Picture Learning and the Canadian Self-Directed Schools movement. The aim of our first tour is to visit schools that exemplify one or more of our values and have succeeded at a delivering an education that genuinely goes beyond the four walls of the classroom, that stretches and challenges our notion of powerful partnerships and demonstrates how genuine self-directed learning can be realised. Big Picture Learning - The Met School Our first stop is Providence, Rhode Island to visit the founding Big Picture School, Dennis Littky's Met School. The Big Picture schools describe there mission as: "Big Picture Learning’s mission is to lead vital changes in education, both in the United States ...