Learning in 2023

From the Principal:

"I thought it would be a great time to share about what is taking place next year at TBCS. We have some exciting new developments to share with you.

The first one is around our teaching and learning for 2023. For semester one (term 1 and 2), we are looking at the themes of Overcoming Setbacks and Seeking Justice. We’re looking forward to unpacking how organisations like World Vision have brought freedom to children living in poverty and slavery over the world, and how they’ve brought support to families in bringing freedom in terms of access to education and resources. The 40 Hour Famine will be something to look forward to next year! The history of our own country is important as well, and we’re looking forward to unpacking our NZ Histories curriculum in a way that honours God and our beautiful nation.

Later in the year, we’re looking at love as a wider themes Celebrating Life and Unwrapping Gifts - how we’re created God's image and what that means for us in terms of expressing our gifts and talents. We know that our God IS love and we’re going to be exploring that in terms of our relationships with one another, and how God’s love interacts with the dynamics and relationships in every aspect of our universe.

Our values of Taking Action, Being Servant-Hearted, Chasing Wisdom and Showing Character continue to permeate into every aspect of our learning. We’ve chosen to focus on four key words associated with our values 2023. These are Aroha, Service, Accountability and Empathy.

Aroha reflects how we care and respect one another’s mana in our school. Service is where our school’s heart lies and what we can offer each other and our community. Accountability is ensuring that we are answerable to our whānau and each other in how we conduct ourselves and our standards of our work. Empathy is around ensuring we understand that our actions can impact the feelings of others.

Whānau voice collected from our community shows that more parents are keen to be part of their child’s learning next year. We’re looking forward to having regular sharing time and conferencing as we’ve had previously, but we’re looking forward to introducing two initiatives with you for next year.

As mentioned previously, accountability is one of our key foci for next year. Our desire as a teaching team is for our students to know that their work is relevant and will be seen by a wider audience and developing their “student agency”. Students have a sense of "agency" when they feel in control of things that happen around them; when they feel they can influence events. This is an important sense for learners to develop. They need to be active participants in their learning.

As part of our development of “student agency”, we’re encouraging students in our senior class next year to bring their own device to school (BYOD). This is a Chrome or laptop that is owned by you, but brought to school for their own use. There’s been information about this sent to whānau of students at this level this week. However, we do maintain minimal use of IT technology for younger years students at TBCS.

Next year, we will be unlocking more of Hero, our student management system, to include examples of learning directly to you. Our students will be reflecting on how they have gone about a piece of work, and you’ll be seeing more examples of work and assessment that students will be sharing with you. We’re looking forward to integrating this into our teaching and learning next year. We know this as “real-time reporting”, and we’ll be supporting our community in delivering meaningful reporting about student achievement and progress as an alternative to our current reports which tend to be static and stand alone.

We’re grateful for our community for committing their children to schooling at TBCS. We’re dedicated to you all to ensure we provide a high quality education that places our special character - our faith in Jesus - as the central point to all we do."