Thursday 22 May 2008

Learning Centres - what does a good one look like?

inglewood_carving Part of my time in schools is spent following up on the learning support for our elearning students. In every school i go to, the structure for this looks slightly different and i don't believe any of our schools are doing it exceptionally well and all have room for improvement.

I have talked several times about the Roxborough model as something to aspire to, and had Principals look at this and discuss this with a view to improving their own practise. Yet how do you push this along in our schools? How can you constructively criticize without some guidelines to show you what is best practise in this area. Time to work with our principals to set some criteria for this to help us move forward.

Inglewood has a learning centre but this is mainly only used by Spec (here they call it Link) students. Distance Learning students, VC & some correspondence, are scheduled to study in the library & their attendance is monitored by the Librarian. They do have Lorraine to oversee them & liaise with their provider schools but they don't get the learning support that could be provided by the expert staff in the Learning Centre (if they had the space & if they had the time).
After visiting the Opunake Learning Centre & seeing how much is going into the Spec programme I wonder if Spec isn't draining our learning support resources (quality teacher time) into one programme at the expense of others. Has anyone else noticed a change in Learning Support Centres since Spec arrived on the scene?

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