From the Director of Teaching & Learning

Responsibility for learning is a shared concern

This term, I have taken many opportunities to explore our St Greg’s Agile Graduate model with students, staff and parents.  This model expresses our aspirations for our young people, and it focuses on their holistic development.  We aspire to send our young people out into a fast-changing world equipped to respond to the unexpected with agility.  Through this model, we are asserting that the best way to foster that capability is through the cultivation of learner attributes or qualities (our 5R’s), concurrent with high-quality teaching pedagogies.

Everyone has the capacity to keep on learning, throughout their life.  However, very early on most of us start to build images of ourselves as being ‘good’ at one thing and ‘awful’ at another.  In schools, it is not uncommon to hear students, teachers and parents saying things like, “I’m just not good at English”. 

In fact, the best learners understand what learning is: it is something they do in order to build knowledge and skill in any given area.  It is not something they just absorb because the brain God gave them is more spongey than everyone else’s. 

Good learners, quite simply, know how to learn.

Once you’ve got that bit right, the sky’s the limit!

Through our Agile Graduate model, we identify five key qualities that good learners have.  Good learners are:

• Resilient
• Relational
• Reflective
• Resourceful
• Responsible

These qualities are resources that effective learners carry in their ‘backpack’ as they journey through the learning landscape.  No one else can carry another’s backpack for the entire journey (students leave school and no longer have teachers to call on, for instance), so the cultivation of these qualities is important for every learner to undertake themselves, with increasing independence.

But we adults have our part to play in equipping our young people for their trek.  Unfortunately, we can’t just ‘gift’ them with responsibility or resourcefulness.  If it were that easy, they’d be washing the dishes every night by now.  The 5R’s must be nurtured, practiced and valued – at school and at home.  Here’s how we can make it happen at home:

• Teach them that Struggling and Failing are not dirty words.  Learning is growth.  Learning doesn’t happen when you cut the climb short at the exact point of your current expertise.  You can’t learn the next hard thing if you don’t take the step up.  And you’re not learning if you’ve stopped climbing simply because you’re satisfied that you’ve beaten everyone else and that’ll do.
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• Speak positively about learning.  Yes my son!  Learning IS challenging!  How boring if it were easy!  How exciting to know that once you learn this, you can be proud of all the work you put in to get there!
• Focus on the process of learning, not the outcome – rather than You need to score a ‘B’, try How can you improve on what you did last time? Let’s look at some strategies for learning this.
• Express a Growth Mindset – Sure, this is a difficult Maths problem, but you just haven’t got there YET.
• Talk about the tools in the backpack – I can see you’re struggling with this work – what RESOURCES do you have to help you learn it?  Okay, that didn’t work this time, so pick yourself up, take a good breath in and out, and show some RESILIENCE by trying again.  You really REFLECTED on what worked for you last time, and I think that’s why you did well in this task.

If we all work together on this enormous task of helping our young people know how to learn, for success now and in the future, I believe we will have done our part.

Louise Millar

Director of Teaching and Learning