BLP (Building Learning Power)
Equipping Your Son for a Lifetime of Learning
No doubt every corner of our Wyvern community – parents, staff and the boys themselves, would agree that one of the essential roles of quality education is to prepare students for the future. The role of education should be to help young people develop capacities to thrive throughout their lives. To provide them with the confidence to tackle future challenges, the capability to think resourcefully when solving problems and to have an appetite for lifelong learning. In short, to equip students with 21st century minds. This is no mean feat, given that the traditional model of ‘train a student for a lifetime profession’ for education no longer represents a comfortable fit.
Reflect for a moment on how society may look in the year 2028, when our current Kindergarten boys become young men. I think we’d all agree that the world in which we now live is evolving constantly and rapidly. For example, consider the role that technology plays in our daily lives and the change it has made over the past 5 years. It’s enough to make one’s head spin, just thinking about it! Given these exciting but uncertain future changes, as educators we can no longer apply traditional education models, especially if we consider that the jobs some our current Kindergarten boys may undertake don’t exist yet! Modern education must take on the mantle of equipping students with lifelong learning dispositions in order to thrive in an uncertain and complex future.
Here at Wyvern we have a Building Learning Power (BLP) framework. It’s something we’re extremely proud of because it champions the cause of teaching our boys to be more resilient, more resourceful, to reflect on their learning and to learn in a reciprocal and social environment. As educators it provides us with direction and heart.
Our BLP Learning Framework allows us equip your sons with essential lifelong learning skills by actively helping him to learn as well as actively strengthening his capacity to learn. We balance the task of teaching curriculum content with teaching skills of resourcefulness, resilience, reflectiveness and reciprocity. In doing so, we hope to engender a passion for learning that will stay with him forever.
Throughout the year my Wyvern BLP articles will aim to inform and equip you as a parent of a 21st century learner. I will also run parenting workshops each term to help shed more light on this interesting aspect of modern education. Our first workshop BLP at Wyvern is on Thursday 5th March at 8.30am in the Library.
This session will introduce you to how BLP works in our school and classrooms as a learning framework. I’ll also have suggestions for further reading and will touch on aspects of BLP that you can use at home. I’d like to extend a warm welcome to all Wyvern community members.
I shall also be presenting at the P&F at 7pm on this same date.
The next Wyvern BLP article will focus on the importance of teaching empathy and how you can encourage empathic behaviours at home.
Cate Fryda
BLP Learning Framework Leader
cfryda@newington.nsw.edu.au
