Having worked at Pt England since 1991 and wound up the year "in this chair" in 1993, I do celebrate the work and effort, wins and needs to win, of each year! This has been a good one. We certainly have some stuff to work on, but we also have some stuff to celebrate. The embedded screen record below is my "partnership meeting" with our Pt England whanau where we talk about what has gone on during the year and how we might approach things in the New Year. Thanks SO much for supporting us in 2017! We need all of you to make this the village we would all like it to be.
Monday, 4 December 2017
December, and I really feel like putting the seesaw graphic in there again. -I won't because I'm sure you're all really bored with that one already! Our emerging end of year data shows the need to:
focus on language acquisition
focus on mathematics
focus on learner and staff wellbeing
focus on the environment
Any one of these would normally be at least year's work. As I commented in an earlier post this year, I think the only way ahead is integration.
So.....we have to find a really smart way of putting all these things together so that teachers don't feel as though there are more and more "bolt ons" that nobody can do justice to.
We're fortunate to have scored 600 hrs of centrally funded PLD, which we can use to apply to the Manaiakalani and Language challenges and equally fortunate to have been offered the opportunity to participate in DMC Mathematics PLD.
So we have the money, ...but do we have the time and capability?
Fortunately Jannie Van Hees has some exciting ideas about how we could use environmental themes to carry the language development and develop maths and science at the same time.
We now have the culmination of our Welcome To School Research along with the combo of in and across schools Teacher Inquiries.
The Manaiakalani Hui is always an annual watershed of class observational data from WFRC and the Inquiries of our own gifted and dedicated teaching staff. Hard on the heels of this event comes the Manaiakalani Wananga where we get to hear back from the Manaiakalani Outreach clusters in the North, Auckland, Christchurch and the West Coast.
This produces a compelling collection of information which has prompted my thinking beyond the last past back in June.
As is frequent for me, I've collected the ideas together into a presentation which I've discussed with staff, providers, Trustees and other audiences.
This only serves to strengthen the determination to make Language Acquisition, Development, Sustaining and Transfer the main focus for Inquiry in 2018
At thistime of year, its always important to learn from one's staff. That's actually really important all the time, but at mid-year in a New Zealand Primary School the best data is formative data that comes from the people working directly with the learners. The source of information for me, along with kids' blogs are the Inquiry Blogs of Pt England teachers and those of the Manaiakalani Kahui Ako. The blogs create a really rich tapestry of threads that are beginning to show some really strong and colourful themes. The theme that I am finding the most urgent and that is commanding my attention more than any other, is that of the acquisition of language of our learners. Its abundantly clear from Teacher Inquiries across schools, levels and subjects that this single but large and complex factor is most significant impactor on whether our learners are doing well or not. The problem with "noticing and knowing" in education is that it immediately produces a moral imperative. -"So what are we going to do about it?" What I'm going to do about it, is starting talking, asking and inquiring myself into:
who could help us with this problem
understanding the problem more fully
how we would design a strategy to deal with it (this will take all of the 2nd semester)
As I've pursued and had repeatedly brought to my attention, this need for balance and a nationally expressed concern for teacher workload, I've been reading and teasing some ideas out for myself. When you're working with the nation's more fragile families, it's not OK to stop questing for improvement. Equally, if quality, high performing staff are "the goose that lays the golden egg" we don't want to kill the goose by our continual quest for improvement or the improvement certainly will not happen. I notice that in lots of the conversation about these and related challenges the issues or elements rapidly become dichotomous, i.e. this or that; -or this versus that. I kept wondering if our teachers and team leaders as first researchers, were looking for the affordances of "this with that" and how we would balance, plan for and resource that, what that combo might look like and how achievable it might be.
So I began the year, thinking about how to do what we do really well and have it sustainable. What we are discussing here, emerges as a key sustainability issue and brought about a sharpening focus, from looking into the affordances and balance of digital learning and teaching, to how we might integrate well to enhance the balance and reduce the tension in the system. I also continue to think about what we can safely get rid of in the environment of an ever expanding curriculum.
We had a tremendously positive end to 2016. I've been asked by many people, "what are you going to do next? -What's the next big thing?" My answer to all of them is the same. "We've done an enormous thing, -now we need to learn to do it as well as we can" Doing it as well as we can includes these sorts of challenges:
how do we balance creativity and joy with the need to push for improvement in the "3R's"
how do we balance time and teacher work load with improvement in outcomes
how do we manage high quality teaching as inquiry without overloading high quality teachers?
It seems entirely appropriate to me that as we continue to inquire into "the affordances of digital learning and teaching, that we focus on consolidating what we have and learning to do it really well.
Obviously we will not get the best bang for buck out of all this investment, if "teachers as first researchers" are not able to tease these questions out and be the frontline of discovery for how Learn, Create, Share works.
Below is my usual "start of the year summary" and "big ideas for 2017". Sadly this time there is no dog barking in the background, as at the time this was made our faithful friend (who added song in dog speak to many of my voice-overs), was buried in our back garden.
