LOP

LOP Report

How easy would it be, to fall into the trap of enveloping end of term tiredness, the dimming of our past and more recent 2019 achievements, the forgetting of all that we have tried and succeeded at this year? Well, now is not the time to allow such a misleadingly skewed perspective cloud our 2019 learning journey. No...most definitely not... 

Now, is the time to celebrate! As a learning community we are embracing contemporary learning and driving to be leaders in this space. We are proactively engaging with the challenges of rapidity in the twenty-first century and seeking to embed learning opportunities and a future forward way of thinking about teaching and learning that will see us well into the twenty-second century.

We have come together with our parents, students and teachers through student-led conferences. We have seen our students develop an awareness of their learning that sees them question the how, the why, and the what, of their learning. We have seen them develop their confidence in seeking feedback from their teachers, and other teachers around them, in regards to what they can do to move their learning forward. We have seen our students proactively raising their voices, so that they are not only heard but are being listened to…

And all of this has occurred through the collaborative ethos of our learning community where we believe that everyone can learn, not always at the same time or in the same way...but everyone can learn. As the year draws to a close, I challenge you to reflect on the following: What is the purpose of education? What is the purpose of being a learner, of being a teacher? Consider for a moment, this quote from Sir Richard Livingstone. Penned in 1941, his words have relevancy that reaches far beyond his time, into ours and further into the future: 

"The test of a successful education is not the amount of knowledge that a pupil takes away from school, but [his/her] appetite to know and [his/her] capacity to learn. If the school sends out children with a desire for knowledge and some idea of how to acquire and use it, it will have done its work. Too many leave school with the appetite killed and the mind loaded with undigested lumps of information"

Our learning at O’Connor seeks to foster an insatiable appetite to know about our world, to question, to inquire, to investigate, to hypothesise, to contest, to test, to negotiate, to navigate, to find solutions, to challenge assumptions, to seek the best of a situation, to find goodness in the bleak and to live with faith in our hearts. 2019 has been a year of change, of challenge, of opportunity and community. As a result, I look with eager anticipation, as to what we can and will achieve in our learning in 2020!

Eli Simpson