What is the purpose of Learning Agreement?
The Learning Agreement or L.A. sessions have several functions for student learning.
· To allow students to develop their personal and interpersonal learning
· To create opportunities for teachers to assess prior knowledge in key curriculum areas mostly through open ended activities that provide us with understandings as to existing knowledge and where the next growth point is for individual students.
· To allow investigation by students around the inquiry topic using a variety of learning styles in which students get to choose the medium.
· To target specific learning that students require that has been demonstrated through learning in workshops, data provided through assessment and general observation.
The Learning Agreement or L.A. sessions have several functions for student learning.
· To allow students to develop their personal and interpersonal learning
· To create opportunities for teachers to assess prior knowledge in key curriculum areas mostly through open ended activities that provide us with understandings as to existing knowledge and where the next growth point is for individual students.
· To allow investigation by students around the inquiry topic using a variety of learning styles in which students get to choose the medium.
· To target specific learning that students require that has been demonstrated through learning in workshops, data provided through assessment and general observation.
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What is a Learning Agreement Document?
Every Monday, the students will receive a new copy of their Learning Agreement Document. This document presents to the students their learning during the Learning Agreement Sessions and their timetable for the week. The document is put in place to help students organize the week during their Learning Agreement sessions.
The four distinct sections within the document is explained below.
Learning Intensions
Each week, the neighbourhood will have shared learning intentions focusing on literacy and numeracy. Goals may include specific activities, routines and understandings of concepts.
Non-Negotiable Activities (Must-dos)
The ‘Non-negotiable’ section of the Learning Agreement document is mostly focused on finding out what students know and understand about a given concept especially in the areas of numeracy, reading and writing. The information collected from these activities will allows us to plan differentiated workshops and target learning sessions. This section also has activities that allow students to practice the skills they have acquired through workshops.
Although students are expected to complete as many tasks as they are able in this section by the end of the week, for many students who are new to our neighbourhood, their main challenge will be to manage their learning time during LA sessions so that some of the boxes are ticked off.
Learning Possibilities
The ‘Learning Possibilities’ section focuses on wider disciplines within the curriculum, containing activities that explore the inquiry topics from a variety of angles using a diverse range of methods.
Signatures and comments
During the Learning Agreement sessions, teachers will conference with individual students on their progress of their work and their achievements. A signature by the teacher demonstrates that this conference has been completed. Parents are also asked to add their signature after they have viewed the completed document during the weekend and discussed the learning with their child.
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What are workshops?
Workshops serve two main functions
To introduce concepts
These relate to the inquiry learning and skill based learning. They take the form of discussions, group activities and collective information gathering.
To model structures and specific skill based learning
This is the teaching of specific skills and concepts based around the acquisition of skills. This might be a numeracy workshop based on a number concept. However there will be three workshops running based on where the child sits on that knowledge continuum. Explicit teacher modeling and practice of that skill concept occur in these workshops. Some of the workshops presently running include number, problem solving strategies, reading strategies, persuasive writing structure, using Excel to make charts and graphs, PowerPoint animation, spelling strategies, performing arts as a means of exploring spoken persuasion, and using a microscope to draw and label diagrams.
The groups are devised based on need. If all children are to be introduced to a concept it could involve the whole neighbourhood or home groups. Where there is differentiation in need the groups are organized into skill-based groups. It is important to note that children have a range of skills and these groups change based on their need not on a generic streaming model.
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What are the specialist programs?
The students have an hour each of Physical education, Visual Art and Italian. These happen simultaneously across the neighbourhood in home groups.
As mandated by the department children are to be involved in 2 ½ hours of physical fitness each week. To achieve this requirement we run team sports on a Friday (which a normal team of students organize) as well as dance for approximately 5 minutes three times a week, running on the new running track which links in to their use of excel through the recording of their times and a 20 minute pilates session once a week. Our philosophy is ‘healthy bodies, healthy minds’.
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Do we have home learning?
Due to the range of opinions regarding home learning amongst the community of parents at Princes Hill Primary School, it has been decided that home learning is not obligatory for the students in our neighbourhood. We encourage students to read a range of texts on a regular basis while at home. Students can also choose from the variety of negotiated activities on the Learning Agreement as a part of their home learning.