Contact: Alison Cook - principal@bluff.school.nz
First of all we sent home a questionnaire which explained the vision and values from the draft curriculum. We gave parents a list of values from the curriculum and asked them to rank them. As a staff we took time reading the curriculum document and supporting readings, as well as looking at material from other schools, such as the digital stories on NZ Curriculum Online to give us as much background information as possible, and to give us ideas for our own vision. Parents were asked to respond to the question " What do we want our students leaving school knowing, feeling, and being?" There was a 90% return of these questionnaire forms which was fantastic.
During our staff curriculum development day staff ranked the values themselves, then collated the parent responses and put them alongside the staff responses.
It was interesting that both staff and parents responses were almost exactly the same. The order of the first three was respect, integrity, excellence. Our senior students also ranked the values.
In the October 2006 Newsletter the values ranked in order were reported back to the community and feedback was requested. The values were ranked as: respect, integrity, excellence, innovation, inquiry, curiosity, equity, diversity, community participation, care for the environment. We then began discussions about designing a model student with a "brain box" who would represent everything the school community wanted in a student from Bluff Community School. The school community felt it was important that the model student's brain box would contain all the skills, understandings and knowledge, while the Yellow Brick Road shows attributes we want our students to have.
We wanted to describe all the things students would need in their heads to start and continue on the journey along the students' own yellow brick road, where they would meet new challenges, and need to develop new concepts.” The important thing was that everyone in the school community needed to identify with the Bluff Brain Box and needed to see that the skills and knowledge they were learning and thinking about at school would go into their own Brain Box.
The community decided to call the student BoBB and it was decided that the student would be Māori to reflect the 60% Māori roll. During the last term of 2006 the whole school community discussed the words that would go on the Yellow Brick Road. The words came from all the material that had been gathered during the year- questionnaires, feedback from parents, and discussions from staff and students.
We then needed to design the student and the road. We knew we wanted a road because it was so much part of the local community. Because of where Bluff is situated it’s easy to think of roads in and out of the region as being part of a journey. We wanted our students to think about starting their own journey and that this would be their starting point, a stepping off point, and the brain box would be full of the concepts and ideals they had learnt along the way at school, and would help them in their journey through life.
Once we had a draft of the student on the road we displayed the model so that everyone who was interested could comment and add or make changes. As this process occurred we made sure we were all discussing the progress of the draft; in class, newsletters and in the staff room.
As a staff we discussed the words that people wanted on the road and how this would impact on our teaching and learning programme. We made links with the draft curriculum and tried to clarify each concept into something meaningful for both teachers and students. We read material to support our discussions, and each time we made a decision we would rework the draft and add the changes. We wanted the “new kid” to arrive at the beginning of 2007. We planned to have a launching party.
During the 2006/07 Christmas holidays Alison worked with a design group from Invercargill to draw up a model of the Bluff Brain Box. When the first draft came back she consulted a group of students to make sure the designers were on the right track. 2007 marked the launch of BoBB, the Bluff Brain Box.
We had a party at school, with balloons, food and the media. We had posters ready depicting the boy on the Yellow Brick Road, with the words on each brick. We put the posters up throughout the school and talked about them everywhere. We tried to integrate BoBB into our school culture and spoke about him as if he was there; What would BoBB do about this? What would go in your brain box now that you’ve completed this task? Go and look at the Yellow Brick Road and match or find the words that match what we’re doing. This is what will go in your Brain Box. We also integrated the words on the Yellow Brick Road into our inquiries, in that the inquiries were centered around links to vision.
The next stage for us is to develop a consistency of approach to the way we are teaching the concepts on the Yellow Brick Road, and to strengthen the pathways to the curriculum and the key competencies.
Published on: 13 Oct 2008
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