At St Hilda’s we want to prepare our girls to be knowledge makers.
Learning at St Hilda’s Collegiate focuses on building future focused students with the necessary skills to thrive in a modern world. As Tony Wagner says, “increasingly what you know is far less important than what you can do with what you know.”
The interest in and ability to create new knowledge and solve new problems is the single most important skill that girls can master today. While content knowledge is an important factor in girls’ success, it is only part of the equation.
Our aim is to ensure girls leave with a sufficient breadth and depth of knowledge. This includes a mix of strategies and mindsets necessary to problem solve, think strategically, learn independently, and interact with the world in a variety of contexts, and the attitudes and dispositions to stick at a task, to be optimistic and care for others and their world.
At St Hilda’s we want to prepare our girls to be knowledge makers, we want to ensure they have resilience to fail and try again and we want to make sure they have a sense of who they are and their place in the world.
Learning Programmes
We are designing our learning programmes to balance knowledge acquisition with the values, skills and dispositions that will ensure girls leave with the ability to use and apply knowledge in new ways.
At St Hilda’s students regularly exceed national achievement levels and all students are encouraged to achieve at merit and excellence levels.
As a school we believe that assessment should occur within the taught courses to ensure authentic learning. This also allows for equity in access to credits and helps to create a focus on learning as opposed to accumulating credits. This aligns with our St Hilda’s Graduate work around the attributes and dispositions which favour depth and quality rather than surface and quantity. This also fits with the NZQA guidelines on the link between teaching/learning and assessment.
Each course at St Hilda’s aims to have between 18 and 24 credits. Academic Blues are awarded to celebrate excellence in achievement at all levels in NCEA.
NZQA states "Credits are the currency of the NCEA qualification. Generally speaking one credit represents ten hours of learning and assessment. This includes teaching time, self directed learning out of class and assessment time."
A standard course will generate between 18 and 24 credits – allowing students to achieve up to 120 credits over five subjects. This approach ensures that senior students, aiming for future tertiary study, gain ample credits to meet the entry score requirements for general admission to tertiary courses.