North East Valley Normal School – Our curriculum planning day

The staff, Board of Trustees, and parents were invited to attend an after school Hui at the end of term 1 2008. Traditionally we have been able to consult easily and comfortably with our school community. We used this time to specifically focus on developing our vision and values.

We began with Lester Flockton speaking to us about curriculum revision and aligning our charter with the new curriculum. Lester spent time speaking about why the curriculum change has come about, and he provided an overview of the layout of the new curriculum to give the parents some background.

We focussed on the principles of the new document and looked at how our current curriculum reflects the principles of the new curriculum. Our first focus was vision. We deliberately did not look at our current charter model at this point. Each group shared their ideas for the school vision in a limited amount of time. Each group’s ideas were passed onto the next group. Ideas could be added or deleted at this stage. In the final swap between groups, ideas were ranked in order from 1-4.

We then came back together as a whole group to share our ideas. We followed the same process for values. These ranked ideas were taken away for collation and will be shared with staff, Board of Trustees, and community.

This technique was very effective as we were able to take a fresh look at our vision and values before we actually pulled out our current charter and tried to re-craft it. It empowered participants to come up with their own thoughts and they could then see the cross over with the current vision and values of the school. It also reinforced that we shouldn’t lose sight of what we already have, as many of the new ideas were reflected in the current charter.

Written by Karen Sintmaartensdijk

Tags:

primary

principles

values

vision

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