The school’s behaviour curriculum allows students to learn in an environment that is conducive to academic engagement. Having a well-defined set of student expectations allows students and teachers to focus on the teaching and learning programmes.
Pedagogy that is warm and demanding, combined with high expectations for all learners, creates classroom environments where our students’ potential can be realised.
The knowledge-rich curriculum is dynamic, challenging and exciting, enabling students to expand their vision and define their own personal ambitions for the future.
In a knowledge-rich curriculum, the specifics of what students learn matters and subject traditions are respected. Acquiring powerful knowledge is seen as an end itself as there is a belief that we are all empowered through knowing things.
A good knowledge-rich curriculum embraces ideas from cognitive science about memory, forgetting and the power of retrieval practice.
The curriculum is not simply a set of encounters from which students form adhoc memories; it is designed to be remembered in detail so therefore it must be carefully planned, giving thought to the optimum knowledge sequence for building a secure schema. At Rangitoto College we believe these knowledge-rich principles create a curriculum that is rich and empowering.
To ensure the delivery of the knowledge-rich curriculum, Rangitoto College has again looked to the strongest educational research to find best-practice.
Five teaching principles have been identified to bring the curriculum to life in the classroom. Embedding subject specific language, explain and question explicitly, utilise retrieval practice, provide effective feedback and consider cognitive load are the principles that every teacher employs to engage students and to increase students’ ability to learn deeply and lastingly.
These fundamentals in teaching and learning here at Rangitoto College, combine to allow our students to deeply understand knowledge that is essential, enabling them to problem-solve, synthesise, analyse and apply higher-order thinking skills increasingly effectively and independently.
We are confident that this educational approach will support our students in school to reach their academic potential, succeed highly in IB, NCEA and scholarship and set them up to flourish in their future endeavours at university, in a trade and the world of work.