Approaches to learning

At The Riverina Anglican College our focus and passion is teaching and learning. As such, we have the Learning Outcomes at the core of all we do in each subject area. Our approaches to  learning focus on how children learn. It refers to the skills, routines and practices that children use to engage in learning.

Our approaches to learning incorporate social, emotional, behavioural, and cognitive self-regulation to inform our pedagogical practices to support the development of these core skills. This domain also includes initiative, curiosity, and creativity. Supporting our student’s skills in this domain helps them acquire knowledge, learn new skills and set and achieve goals. They learn to successfully navigate and conquer learning experiences that are challenging, frustrating, or simply take time to accomplish. 

How students at The Riverina Anglican College engage in learning influences their development in all areas and directly contributes to success in all aspects of school life. 

An essential aspect of becoming a successful learner in all subject areas is developing the ability to self-regulate in a wide range of situations. Students draw on emotional and behavioural self-regulation skills in many ways. They develop different coping strategies to manage feelings when engaging with their peers and when following classroom and learning expectations. This emerging and evolving ability for students to manage emotions and behaviour facilitates more positive engagement in learning activities.

Our students develop cognitive self-regulation skills. These skills include sustained attention, impulse control and agility in thinking. A related skill at this stage of our student’s development is working memory - the ability to hold information and manipulate it to perform increasingly complex tasks. Executive functioning skills are present as our students draw upon their curiosity, persistence, and creativity to gather information and solve problems. The broader list of skills that will be assessed each reporting period is listed below. Issues that have been previously addressed in the Personal Profile will be part of the teacher comment for each subject.