Wooranna Park Reflection

What did I see? (No Judgement)

I saw...

• Groups of students working with teachers
• Portfolios of work
• Shapes like space ships, castles, buses, inside classrooms
• Lots of animals
• Lots of very young teachers
• Students passionate about their learning 
• Students understanding criteria abou ttheir learning
• A video of very independent and self directed learners

What did I feel?

As I was going through I thought that it was very complicated and difficult to understand. I thought that I didn't quite understand the full picture of their learning from a teachers' lens. I felt sad that I had missed out on doing individualised, passion based learning over the last two years.

Top three good things:

• Students could follow their passions
• The top students were given lots of agency
• The long length of projects (year long) meant deep learning

Something I would question:

• Does the systems need to be so complicated?
• Do the bottom students have as much agency as the top? 

Kōrepo top two things:

• Good depth and breadth of Enigma projects
• Autonomy of students

Kōrepo top 1 question:

• Does everyone have the same amount of agency or is it just the cream of the crop?

Conclusions and Implications:

There's some cool stuff we can take away around passion projects and technology. We'd like to know more about other parts of the programme. 

What did I conclude for me, today?

Planning a project for an entire year is difficult and there needs to be a robust process of developing and investigating questions. We will need to develop some sort of system for Haeata that teachers know very well. My questions now are around freedom of choice. If we are truly giving students choice, should they have the choice to opt out of school?