A Thinking Curriculum

The school has as its statement of purpose “Asquith Girls High School aims to develop young women as independent and responsible learners and leaders for cooperative citizenship”.
It is our belief that if students are to be developed in this way, the school needs to have a curriculum that encourages these skills and habits.

Aim
The program aims to
• increase students’ awareness of themselves as learners, and to
• increase teachers’ capacity to be creative designers of learning
by introducing a course which explicitly teaches students how to learn and at the same time, embeds some of these processes in teaching and learning across the curriculum.

Through this program, we can give students a language to use in beginning to manage their own learning and we can establish a whole school language for understanding and describing learning processes. We can build a framework for school wide consistency in using this language to clearly articulate to ourselves and to our community how we enact our statement of purpose.

Objectives
Through the study of this curriculum, students will develop:
• information and research skills
• cooperative skills
• capacity for metacognition, or reflection and self-assessment
• a repertoire of problem solving strategies and skills
• study skills including the use of graphic organizers
• an understanding of how the brain learns, learning styles and multiple intelligences
• technology skills in using applications, using the network and tools
• personal attributes and habits of mind which assist engagement in and positive attitude towards learning.

Course Structure
For years 7, 8 and 9, the course consists of:
• a strand in which the course is taught explicitly through one 64 minute lesson per fortnightly cycle taught in addition to the regular allocation of lessons for the subject. The subject has been taught by different faculties each year, for example in 2005 Yr 7 by Mathematics, Yr 8 by TAS, Yr 9 by HSIE.
• integration of skills and concepts from this explicit strand into other subjects so that learning is maximized through transfer and application to other disciplines.

For years 10, 11 and 12, these concepts and skills will be reinforced and extended through a more flexible program of seminars, counselling and the student/staff buddy system.