Approach to Learning
Danebank Approach to Learning
Developing the dispositions to learn well within an enriched culture for learning.
The Danebank Approach to Learning is the framework that underpins all teaching and learning at Danebank. It provides a common language and core foundation of what both excellent teaching and learning look like in action.
Our approach to learning is marked by our goal to develop each girl as a confident and capable learner.
“ready, willing and able to choose, design, research, pursue and troubleshoot, and to evaluate learning for herself, alone and with others, in school and out, for grades and for her life” (Guy Claxton).
It reflects our deep commitment to continuous improvement, to ensure the provision of meaningful and challenging learning for all students, in order to give them an exceptional advantage for life in a rapidly changing world.
Two questions were key:
1.
What might our girls and young women need to be, what might they need to know and be capable of doing in order to thrive in the modern world; and
How can we ensure that our teaching and learning empowers and assists our young women for these possibilities?
Developed through a collaborative process with our whole community, the Danebank Approach to Learning is a bespoke model, designed for Danebank’s context and culture. It is a merging of best-practice research in learning sciences, wellbeing and character development. The approach is not ‘learning plus wellbeing’ or vice versa, rather it is a holistic framework.
2.
Danebank chose to implement a bespoke approach to learning in order to best meet the diverse needs, interests, and abilities of our students. This approach is designed to enhance engagement and motivation by building learning dispositions that will support our students to grow as learners.
The Danebank Approach to Learning supports the development of critical skills such as collaboration, reasoning and making links by encouraging students to apply knowledge in meaningful, real-world contexts. It also promotes student wellbeing by helping learners feel valued and supported as whole learners, fostering a stronger sense of belonging to the learning culture within the school community. This approach creates our most effective, inclusive and supportive educational environment and is designed to help every student reach her full potential.
We intentionally cultivate metacognitive skills so students develop awareness of how they learn best. This foundation enables them to adapt and thrive across disciplines and throughout life.
There are four dimensions to our approach to learning:
1. Learning culture:
We cultivate a vibrant, curious and safe learning culture across our school that promotes good learning.
2. High quality teaching:
3. MetaLearning: that is learning how to learn.
Alongside the mastery of content and pursuit of deep understanding, through high quality teaching, we explicitly teach dispositions or habits of mind required for confident, capable and powerful learning.
4. Learner dispositions:
that is, knowing what learning habit or action to use, when to use it, and then using it appropriately to enable good learning.
Culture of Learning
Learning How to Learn: Meta-Learning
Student Learner Dispositions
High Quality Teaching
Culture of learning
A strong learning culture is the foundation upon which educational excellence is built. By cultivating an environment where learning extends beyond curriculum delivery to encompass holistic development of skills, mindsets and dispositions, Danebank’s Approach to Learning prepares students for success in an increasingly complex world.
Academic Risk-Taking
Danebank’s rich learning culture also promotes courageous optimism. We have fostered an environment where student intellectual risk taking is encouraged. When students feel safe to propose unconventional ideas and solutions, respond to challenging questions even when uncertain, share partial understanding without embarrassment and learn visibly from mistakes rather than concealing them, they develop resilience, creativity, and growth mindset attributes essential for innovation and perseverance.
Growth Focused
Feedback at Danebank is a powerful driver of learning. At Danebank, ongoing, formative assessment empowers students to identify next steps, reflect meaningfully and develop ownership over their improvement journey. Our students are encouraged to be active participants in shaping their educational path. Through rich tasks and reflective practices, they grow in agency and take meaningful ownership of their learning.
At Danebank, effective forms of assessment are central to this growth-focused culture. It provides detailed, explicit quality criteria and communicates high expectations, and presents students with a productive challenge. Assessment is grounded in deep knowledge and understanding of key concepts or ideas and requires the use of higher order thinking. We aim for learning and assessment to have personal meaning and significance to the student. Most importantly, our assessments offer timely, constructive feedback that tells students where they are in their learning, reveals what comes next and guides them on how to progress.
New Mindset for a New World
An effective learning culture recognises that students’ perceptions of themselves as learners profoundly impact their engagement with ideas. Rather than allowing limiting self-conceptions to develop, Danebank teachers cultivate the understanding that learning identities are multifaceted and fluid. In today’s rapidly evolving environment, the capacity to approach unfamiliar challenges with confidence—”I don’t necessarily know how to do that yet, but I can figure it out”—represents precisely what universities and employers seek: flexible, adaptive minds ready to engage and develop new skills.
By systematically fostering the knowledge and belief that learning itself is learnable, Danebank produces graduates who possess more than subject content knowledge. We develop students who understand collaboration, critical thinking and the reflective processes that enable continued growth throughout life. This approach transcends academic achievement to encompass the holistic development of the learner and that their approach to learning will ultimately matter most throughout their lives.
Learning at Danebank increasingly embraces project-based approaches where students collaborate, problem-solve, and communicate effectively. These experiences build transferable skills essential for life beyond school, such as resilience, initiative and teamwork.
High quality teaching and learning
The Future of Learning
Contemporary understanding of effective learning transcends the passive model of knowledge transmission. Rather, learning at Danebank is an active process where students formulate meaningful questions, assimilate new ideas, engage with problems and relate new experiences to existing understanding. Truly transformative learning enables students to apply their knowledge to unfamiliar situations in innovative ways. Each learner brings her unique context to the educational environment and our goal is to integrate this context with learning experiences so engagement with ideas becomes an intrinsic part of her life.
Embracing cutting-edge technologies is vital for preparing students for the digital futures they will encounter. Danebank integrates purposeful digital tools to enhance collaboration, feedback, creativity, and adaptive learning across the curriculum. Danebank integrates purposeful digital tools to enhance collaboration, feedback, creativity and adaptive learning across the curriculum.
Teachers That Prioritise Learning Not Marks
Teachers play a pivotal role in establishing learning culture by modelling continuous learning through their own professional development, utilising classroom resources aligned with learning priorities, creating supportive structures that foster collaborative learning, recognising and celebrating learning achievements at all levels. Our teachers embody the dispositions and the learning culture they wish to develop in our students, creating authentic learning communities where growth is valued and practised collectively. At the heart of growth is care and our teachers prioritise nurturing academic wellbeing by attending to the whole learner, creating a culture where high expectations are matched with high levels of support and encouragement.
Teachers exemplify a mindset of continuous learning, modelling what it means to be intellectually engaged and open to growth. They demonstrate that learning extends far beyond the classroom and into every facet of life. We recognise and explicitly teach the distinction between performing (showing what is known) and learning (actively acquiring and growing). Our culture prioritises effortful learning over performance-driven behaviours.
Pedagogical Excellence
In our vibrant learning culture, pedagogical knowledge and understanding serve as critical foundations for effective teaching practice. Teachers deliberately craft learning experiences around clear learning intentions and success criteria, ensuring students understand both the destination and pathways for their learning journey.
Teachers and students engage in continuous feedback loops that inform both teaching and learning. Teachers skilfully employ modelled and scaffolded practices that gradually release responsibility, allowing students to develop independence while receiving appropriate support. Differentiation addresses the genuine learning needs of diverse students, while adaptive and responsive teaching practices ensure real-time adjustments based on emerging evidence of student understanding. High Potential and Gifted learners are supported through targeted programs and expertise, ensuring excellence is inclusive of all students.
True excellence in teaching is inseparable from student growth. We define pedagogical excellence not only by outcomes but by the visible progression in thinking, skill and confidence over time. Our educators model curiosity, adaptability and a commitment to their own growth, cultivating excellence through a visible love of learning. Excellence also emerges through collaboration. Teachers work in high-trust, professional teams to codesign learning, moderate assessments and refine practice through open dialogue.
Staff are part of dynamic learning communities where best practice is shared, critically examined and refined. Engagement with research, action learning and collective inquiry drives continual improvement. Pedagogical excellence is not isolated within individual classrooms but driven through a whole-school alignment in philosophy, language and practice, enabling deep coherence in students’ experience.
Learning Designed with Purpose and Precision
Danebank’s Approach to Learning is characterised by thoughtful design of learning experiences that balance rigour with accessibility. Quality differentiated learning activities are deliberately crafted to build the requisite skills, knowledge and understanding for successful achievement. This design process explicitly considers intellectual quality (promoting deep understanding rather than superficial coverage), the learning environment (creating conditions conducive to engagement and risk-taking) and the significance of learning (connecting content to meaningful contexts).
Learning experiences and teaching strategies are informed by robust evidence. Our processes for curriculum design, intervention and improvement are grounded in educational research and responsive to emerging insights.
Early Learning
From early learning to Year 12, the Danebank learning culture is intentionally and progressively developed. Through subject-specific Roadmaps for Learning and cohesive planning across year levels, students benefit from a consistent and deepening experience. Our K–12 structure allows us to leverage this continuity for powerful, cumulative impact.
Learning how to learn: meta-learning
Understanding learning and oneself as a learner represents perhaps the most transformative element in developing autonomous, resilient students. When students develop metacognitive awareness of their learning processes, they gain control over their educational journeys in profound ways. Rather than simply absorbing content, students who engage in meta-learning understand why particular strategies work for specific tasks, recognise when their comprehension falters and possess the tools to adjust their approach at the appropriate moment. This strategic approach to learning transcends mere technique, it represents a fundamental shift from passive consumption to active orchestration of one’s cognitive processes.
Students who regularly pause to evaluate their learning progress can identify precisely where understanding breaks down and implement targeted interventions rather than ineffectively repeating unsuccessful approaches. This reflective cycle—planning, monitoring, evaluating and adjusting—transforms learning from a series of disconnected activities into a coherent, self-regulated process under the learner’s control.
The value of meta-learning extends well beyond the academic context. In a world characterised by rapid change and evolving knowledge requirements, the ability to learn efficiently in new domains represents perhaps the most valuable skill we can cultivate. Students who understand how to decode unfamiliar learning environments, select appropriate strategies, monitor their progress and adapt their approach as needed possess an invaluable advantage that serves them throughout their educational journey and beyond.
By deliberately making learning processes visible and developing students’ capacity to articulate and refine these processes, Danebank cultivates not just effective learning but fundamentally more capable learners.
Dispositions for Learning
Interdependence, Empathy/listening, Collaboration, Imitation
Courageous optimism, Compassionate service, Respectful relationships, Creative collaboration, Taking responsibility, Personal excellence, Loving kindness
Meta learning, Planning, Revising, Distilling
Curiosity/wonder, Questioning, Making links, Capitalising, Reasoning
Strengths, Emotional Management, Attention and Awareness, Relationships, Coping, Habits and Goals
Reflective Learning
Developing students’ capacity for reflection transforms them from passive recipients of information to active architects of their learning journey. When students engage in planning, revising, distilling and meta-learning, they develop skills for strategically approaching complex problems and understand themselves as learners with unique strengths and needs.
Relational Learning
Schools with strong learning cultures recognise that learning is inherently social. By cultivating interdependence, collaboration, empathy/listening and imitation, Danebank prepares students for successful participation in collaborative workplaces. Danebank’s Approach to Learning helps students balance autonomous thinking with collective engagement, communicate effectively with diverse peers, understand multiple perspectives even when challenging personal viewpoints and absorb effective thinking patterns and work habits from skilled peers and mentors.
Resourceful Learning
A learning culture equips students with the critical dispositions of questioning, making links, reasoning, capitalising on resources and maintaining curiosity/wonder. These dispositions enable students to navigate uncertainty and complexity by formulating meaningful questions that drive deeper understanding, connecting new information to existing knowledge frameworks, applying logical analysis to evaluate claims and evidence, leveraging available tools and resources strategically, and approaching the unknown with fascination rather than fear.
Wellbeing for Learning
The integration of wellbeing with academic excellence is essential for nurturing healthy, balanced individuals. When students feel supported, safe and inspired, they are more likely to embrace learning challenges and persist through difficulties. This synergy between emotional wellbeing and intellectual growth not only promotes positive mental health but also fuels academic performance. Motivated and engaged learners demonstrate higher levels of cognitive investment and achievement, while students who are emotionally supported build the resilience necessary for long-term success. By uniting care with challenge and compassion with rigour, Danebank supports students to flourish as whole learners, developing the confidence, capability and character to thrive in their futures.
Nurturing Character, Faith and Identity
A vibrant learning culture acknowledges that our responsibility extends far beyond immediate academic outcomes to prepare students for their futures. Danebank prioritises making sure students feel safe, supported, and surrounded by strong values and faith. By placing students genuinely at the centre of educational endeavours, we prepare them for a constantly changing future by building their capacity to learn independently, bravely and with curiosity.
The most effective learning cultures recognise that nurturing character, faith, sense of wellbeing and identity creates the foundation that allows students to thrive long after they leave school. By helping students discover their strengths and fostering their will to pursue passions and interests, we create the conditions where “sparks become flames.” These essential qualities should never be left to chance but deliberately cultivated through thoughtful educational design.
Final Note
Danebank’s commitment to our learning culture represents a long-term, multi-layered change process that begins in the student’s earliest years but may not fully reveal its value until students have completed formal education and entered professional life.
By partnering with families to reinforce the importance of learning growth, Danebank creates an educational legacy that extends far beyond graduation. In an era of unprecedented change and complexity, this learning culture becomes not a luxury but an essential foundation for student success and institutional excellence.
The investment in building such a culture pays dividends not only in immediate academic performance but in developing the lifelong learners our future demands.
