Rich Opportunities for Learning Guidance

Opportunities for ākonga to practice can boost their capabilities and learning. Use the Rich Opportunities for Learning Tool to capture a learning opportunity and share it with your learning community.

Three main steps to create a rich learning opportunity

All three steps are important. Complete steps 1 and 2 before entering a learning opportunity into the tool. This ensures that a learning opportunity is confirmed, fully developed, and supported by leadership and teachers.

The three steps are:

1. Answer key questions and set up your project.
2. Review your learning opportunity’s elements and the examples.
3. Enter the learning opportunity into the Rich Opportunities for Learning tool.

This page gives an overview of these steps. For detailed guidance, download this document:

Guidance on Rich Opportunities for Learning. [PDF, 1238 KB]

Answer key questions and set up your project

Your leadership team may wish to consider key questions about a learning opportunity before confirming it.

To guide this discussion, work through the Key Questions section of the PDF.

Discuss resourcing, leadership, participation. Confirm how the team will work together around this opportunity. Ask how your team will communicate that an opportunity is available. Discuss your review process and related evidence to support learning from the opportunity. Consider how an opportunity would support your teaching practices and community collaboration.

Review your learning opportunity’s elements and the examples

Each element of a learning opportunity needs to support your vision, your plan, and benefits for ākonga. Identify and classify your opportunity’s elements this section of the PDF:

• Initial thinking about how each element might support planning

This section gives you a framework for developing a learning opportunity curriculum. It has ten elements: four strategic components for leaders and teachers, and six development components for teachers.

The Guidance contains two detailed examples of learning opportunities. Each example supports teachers differently. See these examples in the PDF:

• Rich Opportunities for Learning: Example 1 - This example recommends particular tools and ways of working across a learning community.
• Rich Opportunities for Learning: Example 2 - This example leaves the tool open for teachers to choose how to use the framework to come up with rich learning.

For big-picture support on developing a learning opportunity, also read the following Appendices in the PDF:

• Appendix: Weaving the coherent curriculum: how the idea of ‘capabilities’ can help
• Appendix: Aspects of critical inquiry summarised from a range of frameworks

Enter the learning opportunity into the Rich Learning Opportunities tool

After the leadership team approves the learning opportunity, add it to the Rich Learning Opportunities tool.

The leadership team assembles the learning opportunity’s information and enters it. This includes:

• Vision, introduction, and owner
• Related learning areas
• Important community questions
• What ākonga will contribute
• Relationships: people and community organisations.

When this is shared, teachers then use this to design and enter:

• Student profiles around what ākonga bring to the plan
• Practicing Teacher Criteria around what teachers bring to the plan
• Capabilities
• Activities, rich content, and rich materials.