Pine Community School

Mission Statement

Pine Community School is committed to providing a caring, harmonious environment where the academic, physical, social, emotional and creative development of each individual student is attained to their maximum potential.

This is achieved through small, multi-age settings where parents, teachers and the community work together to nurture positive self-esteem and encourage all students to become responsible and motivated.

Aims of the School

To provide an ungraded situation in which students may learn and progress at their own pace.
Learning is centred around students’ interests, using the Curricula from the Queensland Education Department as a guideline.
To encourage co-operation rather than competition and extend each child’s abilities in a warm, friendly, supportive environment.
To endeavour to eliminate all forms of prejudice including economic, social, sex, race and creed.
To develop a healthy self-image and positive social skills.
To encourage creativity in many forms as an integral part of the learning programme as well as constructively using one’s own time.
To maintain discipline through mutual trust and respect and through modelling and practice of good conflict resolution skills rather than coercion.
To have a high adult/child ratio.
To develop in students an awareness of and sensitivity to the environment and society.
To actively encourage parents and other community members to become involved in the school life of the student.

A parent's understanding of Pine's philosophy

by Julie, a parent at Pine

Pine's motto is "Happy Children Learn", and everything in our philosophy and approach stems from that. It starts with the well researched idea that children learn best when they are happy and relaxed and engaged - when they are actually interested in what they are doing.

So how do we make this happen? What does it mean to be happy? How do we help our children be happy, and thus learn well? For a start, Pine allows children to "have a childhood" - allowing lots of time for play, allowing them to take risks and understand consequences, not enforcing needless structure and control. We allow children to have "down time", when they're not interested in learning, and we maximise the "up time" when they're keen and excited and engaged.

Pine teachers are amazingly good at capitalizing on children's ever-changing interests. One of the many examples of this was in late 2007, when a few of the students became very interested in writing their own comic books. This was allowed and encouraged, and the interest spread, and a number of students set up their own "comic book shop" in the school's library room, spending most of each day there for a number of weeks. They defined roles for themselves (the boss, bodyguard(!), artists, writers etc), and produced comics for all the other kids to read. In this process, kids who normally hated writing were writing like crazy; kids who weren't good readers were loving reading the comics, and all the kids involved learned a lot about negotiation and teamwork.

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

As people grow up, there are 3 main areas in which they grow - physically, socially and academically. Mainstream schooling can focus very much on the academic growth. At Pine, we feel that people only succeed in life if they have the appropriate social and personal skills. Thus, much of our time is spend around these areas - assisting the students in conflict resolution, learning to play well together …

That said, we believe that once their basic needs are met, for being heard, having good self-esteem and good relationships with all kinds of people (peers, younger and older children, adults, etc), that children naturally learn the things they need to learn. For example, a child can learn to read in a very short time if they are motivated and excited about doing so. The same applies to maths, SOSE, all areas of learning.

LEARNING

Do you remember being a child? Do you remember being excited about something you were learning, only to have that excitement squashed in any number of ways: being taught the subject badly, not liking the teacher, getting a bad grade on an assignment, being made to move on and focus on a different subject before you'd finished with your area of interest, not being allowed to pursue the subject, or being forced to pursue the subject in a way that didn't make sense to you? All these things stop children learning. We believe (and research supports the idea) that learning happens as a natural result of children's creativity and curiosity. At Pine, we're very aware of this process, and do everything we can to encourage current interests and maximise the learning that happens in that process (see the Comic Book Shop story, above).

CREATIVE LEARNING

We need to teach kids to think for themselves in a world where we can't even imagine what kind of jobs there will be 10 years from now.

"Traditional learning" is becoming less and less relevant in a world where almost all information is at your fingertips - it's no longer about having the information in your head, it's about knowing how to find it when you need it. The kinds of skills that will get our children through in this "brave new world" are more creativity, self-confidence, flexibility and a love of learning.

Relevant Quotes

Learning is at once deeply person and inherently social; it connects us not just to knowledge in the abstract, but to each other. Peter Senge, "Schools That Learn" (2000)

Learning is dynamic and involves a lot of interaction and sharing. It also needs to be supported by the whole community. Whole communities create whole beings. - unknown

In an open school there is no real differentiation between the teacher, children and parents. Each individual as part of a social group (community) has something to give to another and in this way we are all involved in the learning process and environment. Sue Barrett (past Pine teacher), 1984

All learning begins when comfortable ideas are found to be inadequate. John Dewey (1959-1952)

The diversity of ideas that comes with a diversity of people is one of the best ways to create this necessary condition of learning. Peter Senge, "Schools That Learn", 2000

The will to learn becomes a 'problem' only under specialized circumstances like those at school, where a curriculum is set, students confined and a path fixed. The problem exists not so much in learning itself, but in fact what the school imposes often fails to enlist the natural energies that sustain spontaneous learning - curiousity, a desire for competance, aspiration to emulate a model, and a deep-sensed commitment to the web of social reciprocity, the need to response to others and to operate jointly with them. J.S.Bruner, "Toward a Theory of Instruction" (1966)

The basic assumptions about learning are that children learn by doing, when they are happy i.e. when they feel stimulated and positive in the various aspects of their lives, and that they need to understand, give personal meaning to information rather than memorise. Intellectual and emotional development go hand in hand and are interdependent. Education must meet the childrens' needs and treat each child as an individual. Sue Barrett (past Pine teacher), 1984

It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety, indeed it cuts you off from your own part and future, scaling you to a continuous present much the same way television does. John Taylor Gatto, 1990, speech made accepting the New York Teacher of the Year Award

My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness-curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insightsimply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.
John Taylor Gatto, "Against School"