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Productive Pedagogies
Effective teachers use a range of teaching strategies to suit the context of their classrooms, students and materials.
Bunker’s Hill State School is committed to encouraging a range of teaching strategies that develop inclusive, flexible, intellectually challenging and innovative learning experiences. The appropriate use of information technology is also an important factor in design.
Teaching Philosophy
Every child is an individual who arrives at school with some knowledge and skills. Each child has different knowledge and skills, and different needs. Children learn and develop through immersion in a stimulating environment. They use a wide variety of learning strategies. Role models present expectations of the child, positive feedback, and the level of interest, security and stimulation to the child. Children learn what is important or significant to them.
Play is a natural activity for children through which they make meaning of the world around them. Play is very important to children and their learning. It helps them develop social skills and understandings, provides a safe environment for experimentation, and helps development of language and understandings about the world.
Adult guidance can enhance play but is not always necessary. All children need structured learning situations at different times, depending on age, prior experience, interests and the material being learnt. All play needs defined boundaries.
Every teacher is an individual who brings different experiences, likes and dislikes, attitudes and values to their teaching. All teachers must value education. Teachers must be aware of their own biases, and respect backgrounds which differ from their own. Tolerance and respect are important, and teachers must both teach and model these. Teachers cannot teach all social and cultural beliefs. They must be impartial to a degree, without compromising their own or others’ beliefs.
Teachers must be facilitators of learning. They must be positive role models, and extend, encourage, motivate, inform and support children in their learning. They must be positive and professional, and communicate effectively with children, staff and parents.
The learning environment plays a very important role in learning. It provides structure, stimulation, security and boundaries. Children should feel pride and ownership in their learning environment.
The school and home are joint partners in a child’s learning. Children must see and hear that parents or carers, value and respect their schooling and their attempts at learning. Communication between the school and the home must be open and honest, and a level of trust between the two must be established and maintained if effective learning is to occur. Confidential treatment of communication is vital to the maintenance of trust. Any parental involvement that is meaningful to both the parent and the teacher is worthwhile.
Bunker’s Hill State School has many unique and positive features. Although convenient to Toowoomba, the school has a very rural flavour, with a strong connection to the local area. It enjoys a supportive parent network and a strong school spirit.
Teachers strive to have this philosophy underpin all their teaching practice at the school.
The staff recognise that Productive Pedagogies provide a framework with which to address a reflection of the broad range of teaching strategies.
Intellectual Quality
The use of culminating tasks across the KLA’s provides opportunities for students to engage in intellectually demanding, substantive problems and issues founded in real world contexts.
Supportive Classroom Environment
The tasks often involve enabling work where students are encouraged to plan and work both independently and cooperatively. Students should experience some control of the pathways they choose to demonstrate selected outcomes. Clear and explicit guidelines for tasks enable students to feel confident in their expectations placed upon them.
Recognition of Difference
Teachers are able to choose the context of studies to reflect diverse backgrounds of students and the local community. Students with special needs are catered for by alternate pathways appropriate to their needs. Non dominant cultures are valued and students encouraged to engage in active citizenship.
Connectedness
The cross curricula nature of the organisers gives students a realistic view of the complementarity of knowledge strands. Culminating tasks often are expressed as real world problems giving students opportunity to integrate knowledge and processes across Key Learning Areas to solve problems.
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