What if the water and wishes appear? (Bob Mould)

I've spent a lot of the last week thinking about our senior English courses for next year.

It became time to finally move from the theoretical to the practical and actually design the courses with my colleagues.

We ended up introducing a potential student inquiry/thematic aspect to the year's programme (and deliberately separated internal NCEA standards and external standards so that all the internally assessed work is done early in the first half of the year).

I like our aim for these courses: 

This course aims to cater to student diversity, creativity, collaboration, and to foster and reward student curiosity. A student driven inquiry in Terms 1 and 2 may be used to include the internal standards.  

With that in mind I have now turned my attention to creating a framework to help students engage their creativity and curiosity. I found this cool diagram via Twitter:

It's that first column- posing real questions, that I'll be working on next week at school using, as a starting point, a powerpoint that a colleague is designing to help students understand the possibilities on offer. 

My excitement and own creative juices are flowing!