Overview and Approach to education at ASHS

Specialist Subjects

At ASHS, we build partnerships where we actively co-design opportunities for deep learning.

Teaching and learning is deep, visible, inclusive and culturally responsive.

Specialist Subjects provide our students the opportunity to become experts in specific learning domains. They learn the skills, knowledge and dispositions required to function as ‘an historian, a physicist, a statistician…’ and so on, at a depth appropriate to a Senior School.Our students study five subjects only, since we place emphasis on learning and the gaining of quality credits rather than gaining large numbers of credits. Students take NCEA levels appropriate to them, there are no prerequisites and no streaming. Teachers are expected to plan responsively to meet student learning needs and students can multi-level.

The ASHS Deep Learning model supports our curriculum delivery and teachers’ planning. Students engage in grammar (building knowledge), dialectic (expanding knowledge) and rhetoric (showing what you know) to be able to be critical thinkers and subject experts they ought to be.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL): Meeting the needs of ALL students

At ASHS, we believe that each student is capable of academic success and that each student is unique in the way they learn. Students learn at different paces, they are engaged in different ways and show their learning in a variety of modes. Therefore, our curriculum delivery is informed and planned through a ULD lens, where students are at the centre of all decision-making. The UDL framework guides the development of positive learning experiences for all students and acknowledges individual learning differences.