How our neighbourhood works
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.
Learning Agreement Document Explained.
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 Goals
Each week, the neighbourhood will have shared learning goals 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.
Negotiable Activities
The ‘Negotiable’ 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.
Negotiated Project
Negotiated projects are often an extension to the provocations students encounter during their study of their inquiry topic. A student, or a group of students, may approach their neighbourhood teachers with a proposal to a project and together they would work out a timeframe and a weekly goal. A negotiated project may run for a few weeks or a whole term, depending on their depth and complexity.
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.
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.
