Abstract
MacKillop Catholic College was founded in 2016 with an emerging vision for contemporary education. This vision was developed by the College’s leaders through site visits and conversations with educators at other schools in Australia and New Zealand who shared an interest in creating student-centred pedagogic environments. The applied research conducted through the Plans to Pedagogy (P2P) project supported the college to further explore the intersections between students’ agency, pedagogies, and the physical environment. The research tracked the development of a desired culture of collective efficacy and mutuality between teachers and students and sought to identify spatialised pedagogic routines that could be shared and employed across the school. Supported by conversations about affordance theory and self-determination theory, teachers were encouraged to use recently constructed learning spaces as pedagogic tools to develop a variety of learning settings to better meet the needs of their students. A small group of teachers were able to work with colleagues to manipulate operable walls, furniture, and other interior elements to develop a variety of purposeful learning settings and generate associated pedagogic routines that became well understood by students, aiding their agency in learning. Yet, after an encouraging initial period of development, localised pedagogic and spatial practice innovations within the school were not widely adopted by other teachers, nor readily transferred to other parts of the school, suggesting that the adoption of innovative pedagogies and spatial practices within a school requires more than access to novel ideas and exemplar models—especially in a school with rapidly growing enrolments, a regular influx of new teachers, and an almost continuous building programme, as required to develop the school into a Preparatory to Year 12 college over its initial decade of operation.
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Notes
- 1.
According to Hattie (2015), ‘collective teacher efficacy’ is the collective belief of teachers in their ability to positively affect students and is strongly correlated with student achievement.
- 2.
8 Aboriginal Ways of Learning (NSW DoE, 2022):
Story sharing: approaching learning through narrative; learning maps: explicitly mapping/visualising processes; non-verbal: applying intra-personal and kinaesthetic skills to thinking and learning; symbols and images: using images and metaphors to understand concepts and content; land links: place-based learning, linking content to local land and place; nonlinear: producing innovations and understanding by thinking laterally or combining systems; deconstruct/reconstruct: modelling and scaffolding, working from whole to parts (watch then do); community links: centring local viewpoints, applying learning for community benefit.
- 3.
Learning environments in both primary and secondary schools should offer the following:
(1) A dynamic social and physical environment; (2) Variety and choice, with respect to both settings and activities; (3) The capacity to differentiate and personalise learning experiences; (4) Ready access to multiple learning settings; (5) Engaging and meaningful teaching and learning experiences; (6) Options to socially organise students in varied ways; (7) Good acoustics, especially in more open spaces; (8) Good sightlines, to enable the consistent observation and monitoring of students’ activities; (9) A design that recognises the physical, organisational, temporal, and cultural histories of the school/sector and allows for pedagogical development over time, without alienating teachers from their past experiences.
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County, S., Cleveland, B. (2023). Developing Pedagogic Routines in Innovative Learning Environments: A Journey of Discovery at MacKillop Catholic College. In: Morris, J.E., Imms, W. (eds) Teachers as Researchers in Innovative Learning Environments. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7367-5_3
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