We know what we want and need ‘cause we live it everyday”: Involving students in designing their learning

Saunders, Rachel University of Waikato

“We know what we want and need ‘because we live it every day”: Involving students in designing their learning experiences in Health and Physical Education.

Rachel spoke about her experience of being involved in leadership programmes with students. She described how the first leadership programme which she designed and taught was not particularly successful. The experience of this lead her to be involved in developing a programme in which she handed over the designing of the programme to the students. She discussed the importance of using student voice, creating adult-student partnerships and building learning communities.

The presentation was advertised to propose an alternative model for designing Health and PE curriculum. A model to illustrate how teachers and students can work together to share knowledge in order to design learning experiences that are relevant to young people today. However for me the presentation did not move past a discussion of how it is important for students to be involved in designing their own learning programmes and did not move into the how this can be done. This may have been due to the 30 minute time slot available for this presentation. It was interesting to hear about Rachel’s experiences and I would like to find out more about the model she has developed.