I was delighted to receive an email last week advising that I
had been nominated and have won, a SLANZA Principal’s Award 2019. The recipient
of the SLANZA Principals’ Award is for a Principal who has enabled the
successful development of their school library to support student learning and
who has promoted the importance of excellent school libraries to the wider
community. I have received this award for the advancement and improvement of
the library at Freemans Bay School, and also for continued support of SLANZA
Auckland.
Libraries have always had a key role in building,
researching and sharing knowledge at a local, regional and international level. Like classroom
environments they also have had to change. Some educators are rethinking if
they are relevant in schools today.
It is my belief that the roles of libraries in our schools and
local communities has to be redefined. However, I still am of the opinion that
the library should be a central resource hub in a school. It still has a role
to play in education facilities and our modern world.
Books are important. They are wonderful to explore and useful
for developing critical thinking. Libraries provide a place where learners can
collaborate around books, explore them and discuss with others. I believe that
libraries as learning spaces are needed more than ever. The school library as a
resource hub is an essential part of the school environment where our learners
can be engaged, enriched and empowered with another place to make virtual and
real connections with learning.
This week the Board property committee and senior leadership
team met with Ministry of Education
officials here in Auckland to start on the procurement of the next building stage. This is
exciting news and will help us to ensure that we have learning spaces for
future roll growth.
We continue to cater to a lot of visitors to
see our amazing learning spaces and how we teach and learn at Freemans Bay
School. We have been published in a new book now available on Amazon called Planning Learning Spaces. Its a great resource for anyone designing new learning spaces.
Over the year we have visits from educators from New Zealand, Australia, Korea and
Japan, UK, Scandinavia, Malaysia, India, Bali and USA. We are very happy to share our expertise with others to inspire and
innovate more relevant future focused learning environments to engage, empower and enrich learners. To book a visit - just go through the visitors tab on the website here.
