It's secondary school but not as you know it!   21 Nov 2016

MEDIA RELEASE | 21 November 2016

It’s secondary school, but not as you know it!

Equipping students for the ‘tests of life’ not a life of tests

The changing face of the modern learning environment: Rangitikei College students will be working in project-based groups for a day-a-week during term-time next year.

For the past year, teachers and staff at Rangitikei College have been ‘going back to school’ themselves, working on a complete revamp of what will be taught, and how, in 2017.

Principal Tony Booker has spearheaded the change. “We’re not doing this because it’s the latest thing to be foisted upon us,” he says. “But because we know that the way we organise schooling just isn’t cutting it anymore. We’ve done the research, we’ve spoken to employers, other schools and education providers, and of course parents - and the story they all tell us is pretty consistent.”

The story is that what goes on in the world of school is very different to what goes on in the world outside school. As Booker is quick to point out, schools are still teaching for a world that increasingly doesn’t exist; one that places too much emphasis on test results and not enough on the 21st century ‘soft skills’ needed to fit into a workplace. Skills like reliability, problem-solving and the ability to communicate in a variety of ways.

“We’re running an antiquated one-size-fits-all model where one teacher teaches one subject to one class of one age group through one topic and at one pace in one classroom for one hour. We don’t see this culture of ‘one’ anywhere else in life.”

The challenge facing schools today is how to equip students with the skill sets they will need to take on challenges and opportunities that today’s adults can't even begin to imagine.

Rangitikei College’s curriculum revamp is aimed at better equipping College students for that challenge. During 2016 the school has been upping the focus on a host of initiatives like the pilot Aspire programme (which helps students connect with their career passions), Young Enterprise and Community Impact Week.

When school starts back in 2017, all students will experience a day-a-week of project-based learning. Every Friday for the whole year, students will work on real-world projects or activities that they have developed themselves.

“There really are no limits to what they could be working on,” says Booker. “It could be building a robot or developing an app, creating a piece of public art or organising a community event. The bottom line is that real learning has to be involved in the project, and we will find standards to reflect and quantify that learning. We’ve worked hard as a school to get our NCEA results up, so we are not going to sacrifice that.”

Well-known UK educationalist Sir Ken Robinson sums it up well says Booker: "Education doesn't need to be reformed...it needs to be transformed. The key to transformation is not to standardise education, but to personalise it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.”

Certainly for some students in the Rangitikei next year, their teachers are working hard to make sure that the annual routine of ‘going back to school’ just got a whole lot more inspiring and rewarding.

ENDS

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