Relationship-Based Learning

At Birchwood School we believe that developing positive 'family like' relationships with everyone in our community, is fundamental to promoting learning and well-being and these are at the heart of what we do.

All of our staff are focused on the Relationship Based Learning (RBL) profile. Part 1 of the profile encourages us to create our family like context by:

• rejecting deficit thinking;

we do not look to blame when there are learning difficulties, we encourage our learners to succeed, we see mistakes as opportunities to learn and we believe that learners' culture, heritage and language are assets to their learning.

• caring for and nurturing our learners;

we create culturally responsive learning contexts, we encourage learners to bring their cultural experiences into their learning, we use learners prior knowledge and build on it.

• voicing and sharing high expectations for our learners;

we care about our learners achievement, we have high expectations of learning and behaviour, we design learning to be challenging, we work with learners to set short and long term goals that they can achieve, we share our expectations with our learners.

• creating a well managed learning environment to support learning;

we design learning opportunities that are interactive, we encourage working together in groups, we have organised routines in our classrooms, we manage our environments in caring ways, we use restorative approaches to solve problems.

• knowing what our learners need to learn;

we know what our students need to learn and we build their knowledge over time, we provide models and examples to help our learners know what success looks like, our learning programmes are designed to be engaging so students are active in their learning process.

If you have a questions or would like to find out more please get in touch with Anna Fitchett: anna.fitchett@birchwood.school.nz