Mount View's beliefs about learning

In 2008 Mount View began its journey as a Candidate International Baccalaureate (IB) School and we are currently introducing the Primary Years Programme (PYP) into our learning and teaching practice. At the heart of the programme's philosophy is a commitment to structured, purposeful inquiry as the leading vehicle for learning.

The IB is motivated by a mission to create a better world through education. It promotes intercultural understanding and respect, not as an alternative to a sense of cultural and national identity, but as an essential part of life in the 21st century.

The Primary Years Programme is designed for students between the ages of 3 and 12 years. It is an international, transdisciplinary programme designed to foster the development of the whole child, not just in the classroom but also through other means of learning. The PYP focuses on the total growth of the developing child, touching hearts as well as minds and encompassing social, physical, emotional and cultural needs in addition to academic welfare. The PYP combines the best research and practice from a range of national systems with a wealth of knowledge and experience from international schools to create a relevant and engaging educational framework for all children.

The PYP:

• enables teachers to make connections between learners' existing knowledge and their individual styles of learning, in the context of new experiences, by providing opportunities for children to build meaning and refine understanding, principally through structured inquiry.
• believes that teachers' structuring of new experiences, and support of children's ideas of new experiences, is fundamental to the process of incremental growth of knowledge and formation of concepts.
• emphasises that children's learning, and their attempts to make the world around them understandable, are essentially social acts of communication and collaboration.
• emphasises the importance of children making connections between their experience and the incremental pieces of new information they encounter.
• supports the child's struggle to gain understanding of the world and to learn to function comfortably within it, to move from not knowing to knowing, to identifying what is real and what is not real, to acknowledging what is appropriate and what is not appropriate.

To do this the child must integrate a great deal of information and apply this accumulation of knowledge in a cohesive and effective way. This can mean:

• exploring, wondering and questioning
• experimenting and playing with possibilities
• researching and seeking information
• collecting data and reporting findings
• clarifying existing ideas and reappraising events
• deepening understanding through the application of a concept or rule
• making and testing theories
• making predictions and acting purposefully to see what happens
• elaborating on solutions to problems.

The School is also committed to upholding legislation and regulations that govern personnel practices and business activities.