Freemans Bay School students, teachers and parents are thrilled with their brand new school.
The school was designed by the team at RTA Studios led by Executive Director Richard Naish, in collaboration with school principal Sandra Jenkins and other education experts. Jenkins travelled the world looking at innovative shared- space designs.
“An effective learner-led curriculum strategy can be fully supported using imaginative architecture,” Sandra Jenkins told me.
Freemans Bay vision is ‘engage, enrich, empower’. Freemans Bay deputy principals, Helen Armstrong and Sinead Heckett, gave me a VIP tour of the school, and I came away very impressed with the set up. As an ex-teacher, I was certainly struck by how much the modern learning spaces are being built to make best use of the way students learn. No more industrial-style rows of desks, with a teacher lecturing from the front and writing on a blackboard.
The thinking behind the strong vision of the links between pedagogy and space is the relationship between play, physical movement and learning. The school believes that students are using the spaces with increased motivation, engagement, creativity and collaboration around their learning.
I asked Helen and Sinead if the physical attributes were a distraction from learning. “Quite the opposite,” I was told. Children are inspired by the lovely spaces and love coming to school to work in them. The flexibility the spaces create is an advantage of the layout. Students can work together in groups as large as 90, in small groups in breakout rooms, or individually in small spaces. Using teacher strengths is
a feature of the collaborative approach of the open-plan learning.
With the mantra ‘learning to learn’ at the heart of Freemans Bay education, I asked the DPs if content learning suffered. “No,” they both echoed. The curriculum is carefully adhered to, with the three ‘R’s’ given proper place.
Principal Sandra Jenkins puts it this way. “Learning to learn is at the heart of our school culture. We have an expectation that at Freemans Bay priority is given to developing the capacity to learn as well as mastering content. We believe in creating learning environments that inspire and support our students to develop positive dispositions towards learning.”
Certainly, the built environment of Freemans Bay School lends itself easily to creating the atmosphere for the learning Sandra Jenkins and her staff desire. As soon as you walk through the gates you are struck by the warmth and the friendly environment that greets you.
This is a genuine multi-cultural school with a mixture of Pakeha, Maori, Pacifica, Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, Saudi, Russian and Filipino helping to make up the 500 or so student roll.
Sandra Jenkins and her staff deserve praise for the ‘tone’ of the school – a vibrant community of learning. (JOHN ELLIOTT) www.freemansbay.school.nz
#iloveponsonby #ponsonbynews #ponsonby #Greylynn #hernebay #freemansbayschool #freemansbay