This week we share feedback on our Junior Curriculum.

Whaia te iti kahurangi, ki te tuoho koe me he maunga teitei

Seek the treasure that you value most dearly, if you bow your head, let it be to a lofty mountain

As you will be aware we introduced our new junior curriculum at the start of 2021, and have been evaluating how well it is going. 

This work followed on from a number of year's work exploring and researching the purpose of secondary education is and how learning should be designed to prepare students for their futures. We wanted to shift our school and learning programmes from streaming students and focus on a standardised approach, to one which is student centred, personalised and builds students' capabilities and confidence to learn. 

A key research document on the Nature of Learning can be accessed here. 

We established our new vision for learning which is captured in the diagram below.

Our new junior curriculum was developed to put our vision for learning into practice. We have been reviewing how well our junior curriculum is supporting students' learning and progress. Thank you to everyone who completed our survey and contributed to small group discussions. Your feedback and that of students and staff has been invaluable. As with all change, there are things that are going well and things that we need to improve. A few of the key points from respondents are below.

Strengths

• Students love having more choice
• Wide variety of content and courses available 
• Students enjoy being in classes with different students and different year levels
  
• Courses are motivating and engaging
• Collaboration and inquiry is helping students to think outside the box
• The new courses enable connection and engagement with our wider community

Areas to improve

• Need to meet the learning needs of all students
• Some students are bored and need more challenge or extension
• Course descriptions and what is learnt needs to align better in some courses
• Having lots of teacher changes this year has been hard
• Concerns around being prepared for NCEA
• Large classes can feel too big and it's hard for teachers and students to get to know each other well.
• Choosing courses is quite tricky and confusing.

We are committed to refining and improving our junior learning programmes for Terms 3 and 4 and next year. We will also be introducing some new courses for 2023 and really appreciate all the feedback, both encouraging and constructive. Based on this feedback we will also be looking to introduce some new courses for 2023. We are continuing to ensure that Te Ao Māori and opportunities for students to explore and share their identity and culture are part of all courses. Our staff continue to work on introducing Aotearoa NZ Histories curriculum as well. 

A huge thank you to our talented staff, Curriculum Leaders and Deputy Principals who have been leading and implementing this significant change to education at MGC. We know it's not perfect yet, but are all committed to ensuring that everyone learns at MGC.

Ngā mihi nui, nā Mary-Jeanne Lynch