Hunter Sports High School's Big Picture Academy believes that education is everyone's business. Learning opportunities are everywhere, not just inside classrooms. Research tells us that we learn best when we are personally motivated. Where we have passion for what we are doing, knowledge unfolds and evolves naturally.
Big Picture Education programs are defined by their commitment to educate "one student at a time" in a community of learners. Underpinning this approach is the belief that each student has a unique set of interests, needs and capabilities around which personalised learning plans are designed. Big Picture schools create students who are life-long learners.
Big Picture Learning design is a dynamic approach to learning, doing and thinking. The program is based on three foundational principles:
- first, that learning must be based on the interests and goals of each student;
- secondly, a student’s curriculum must be relevant to people and places that exist in the real world;
- finally, that a student’s abilities must be authentically measured by the quality of her or his work.
Teaching in the Big Picture Program is founded on flexible and negotiated curriculum. The cycle of learning forms the shell of unit content with different deliverables under each heading as the student progresses through the course. This is largely a reflection of the student’s increased ability to focus on transition from school to outside learning and from their internship placement to building their individual focus in classes back at school. In other words, the subject is the student.
This course supports the students who enrol in the Big Picture Academy. It is fundamental to the work conducted in Advisory, a central concept in Big Picture Education around the world.