Enhance the relevance of new learning

Begin from the what, why, and how

Students learn most effectively when they understand what they are learning, why they are learning it, and how they will be able to use their new learning.

The New Zealand Curriculum

How might I do this?

• Set learning goals and success criteria so that your students can measure their progress
• Provide overviews of content and processes, and explain their significance, for example: 'We need to know how to modify soils in order to increase the quality/quantity of feed and thereby increase the quality/quantity of milk production'.

Plan a programme that engages, challenges, and stimulates

Effective teachers stimulate the curiosity of their students, require them to search for relevant information and ideas, and challenge them to use or apply what they discover in new contexts or in new ways.

How might I do this?

Plan programmes that:

• build on students’ interests
• take account of students’ needs
• include a variety of learning experiences (for example, using different media, investigations, practical activities, field trials, field trips, speakers, group and individual activities)
• invite student voice
• develop learning processes
• encourage students to share existing knowledge
• provide appropriate levels of challenge
• require students to explain their thinking
• support students to connect concepts and applications
• encourage students to resolve dissonance through debate rather than assertion
• provide real-life problems from contexts that students recognise as relevant
• allow students to ask and answer their own questions.

What this might look like

Students learn how to relate the context under study to nature of science ideas.

Students relate long-term production data to factors that are currently impacting on primary production in New Zealand and will continue to do so in the future.

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Last updated December 5, 2011

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