Traits Of A Great Learner - What Do We Think?

We often speak about the characteristics of great learners. Especially as we evaluate and reflect on each week, recording our weekly highlights and challenges, as well as determining how well we managed our learning on a self-management scale. But what are we working towards? Do we really know the skills and attitudes we require to be great learners? This activity gave us a clearer perspective on the traits we collectively value.

First, we had a think-pair-share about the positive traits we believe great learners have. After sharing our ideas, we looked back on our blog to see what Room 14's class of 2013 said in a similar activity. Then we each wrote down 3 of the traits that we thought were most valuable to a learner and put our lists in a box.

Here is a word cloud showing the results. Traits appear larger the more times they were written in the box...

This graphic will be on display in our classroom and will help with our weekly goal setting and evaluations.

Steps To Success - Term One

Each term, we will be identifying one skill and one attitude that we will be looking to master in order to make some big steps to success as learners.

These are different to our weekly goals, which are more 'baby steps' you could say, as they have a short-term focus and can be evaluated every Friday. The goals we came up with today are more significant. We had time to think carefully and then discuss ideas with our peers, making sure that our goals are appropriate and challenging.

Here are some of the goals we have come up with this morning...

Exploring Learning Environments

This morning we have been exploring great learning environments, leading into the vision we are creating this week for our own classroom.

We have been sharing stories about positive and negative learning experiences we have had in the past. This year we have at least one child from each of the senior syndicate classes last year, so we can listen to lots of experiences.

We imagined a classroom where lots of great learning is taking place. What would we see? What would we hear? What would the teacher be doing?

With these questions in mind, we worked in groups to come up with ideas. Many ideas were later shared with the whole group, some of which were peacefully debated. The noise level was one of these. Should a classroom be a very quiet place, or does discussion help us in our learning?

A great session sharing opinions and experiences…

City Development Inquiry

Beauty, Fun, Play and Adventure is our theme for this term.

After completing some personal interest projects, the whole class undertook a new inquiry about making Christchurch beautiful. Following the Canterbury earthquakes, the Christchurch City Council has a number of significant projects they are currently working on. We researched modern buildings, created our own designs and then built 3D models of real buildings that people are working on in our city. 

Today we are proud to have our work on display in our school art exhibition. We left a comment box and have received some great feedback from visitors. 

Check out some photos we took along the way…