Northern Territory – news – 24/08/09

In semester one 2009, twelve Northern Territory schools began their involvement in a pilot project implementing the Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory program (ELLI) – a project designed to develop the capacity of learners with skills and understandings for lifelong learning.

ELLI has been developed by Dr Ruth Deakin Crick (a keynote speaker at both the 2008 Values Education Forum and 2009 National Values Education Conference) through extensive research in conjunction with the University of Bristol, UK.

The program is based on the seven ‘dimensions of learning power’, identified as the effective qualities for Lifelong Learning: Changing and Learning, Meaning Making, Curiosity, Creativity, Learning Relationships, Resilience, and Strategic Awareness.

Students work on discovering their strengths and weaknesses as learners, and implement strategies that enable them to take responsibility for their own learning.

The project provides a context-specific language for learning, owned and shared across a whole school community, developed through the use of metaphor and story.

The NT Department of Education and Training, through the Values Education Program, has hosted several two-day seminars, presented by researchers Dr Ruth Deakin Crick and associate Tim Small. Visitors from NSW DET and South Australian Catholic schools joined in the latest training with a vision of establishing a national ELLI learning community.

NT schools involved in training and implementation of ELLI range across sectors from urban, remote and very remote contexts. An online wiki learning community has been developed as a space for knowledge creation, sharing and storage. Data on the impact of ELLI on students and teachers will be collated in November 2009 using stories generated by the Most Significant Change technique, student work samples, ELLI spider graphs and attendance records.