2016 is a significant year for my school; Aranui Primary in Christchurch is in its closing year. With the construction of a new community cluster school, our learners will most probably go to Haeata Community College in 2017 .
As a staff, we ended 2015, some with a Post Grad certificate in Transforming Education; eager to give our learners and our Whanau success at Haeata. Our final four weeks of the term we moved our library to create a hub and through student voice and a coffee meeting with Whanau we redesigned our classes to become 3 learning groups; Rito (new entrant), Harakeke (year one to three) and Paharakeke (year four to eight).
As Team leader of Paharakeke and Assistant Principal, I reflect on 'my' term:
'Evolving' was the most widely used word for our team in our initial stages to describe what we were doing . We had great plans over the holiday break to have a staff retreat and design our learning groups and timetable but ironically couldn't timetable this time. In retrospect this was actually a blessing in disguise. Our week before school was about our first week, long term plan, learning groups and learning spaces. Reflecting on it now I was so glad we hadn't overdone the planning and initially looked at it week by week (sometimes day by day)- because in our initial weeks we grew from 109 learners to 120 learners (through loss and gain) , renamed our spaces and dumped our initial idea of timetabling. We sought to know our learners better and place our learners in learning groups that met their needs not just their end-of-year assessment. We wanted this to be about strong teaching. We grew into a strong, honest team who had a laugh, played 'tag' team (with behaviour) supported each other and strengthened our collaboration (rather than just cooperated.)
My role as leader became problem-solver. The BIG picture became more evident as it felt like running a syndicate event everyday rather than a single cell and my catch phrase that became our catchphrase was 'what do we with the others? No longer could a class have free-time or a practical activity because of the scale of the number that this involved. The word exhausting began to fluctuate for me personally- I finished most days 'exhausted' and slept soundly . As a teacher and learner there was no down-time as such. We spent afternoons doing passion projects and instead of scaffolding all our learners we conferenced our learners with their project ensuring on task and completion. Again this seemed at a bigger scale.
It was important for me as a leader and a strong advocate for MLE and modern learning pedagogies to also listen to my team; whether to push or pull back, my problem-solving became its strongest. To compromise for team democracy yet problem-solve to keep the idea of "taking away the box" and transform the status-quo teacher practice to become more modern.
'Student-voice' was the focus I aligned for term one; I wanted our learners to use their voice and us to listen. We blogged a lot, used questionnaires (google form) and community time to literally voice our learning. I wanted learners voice to drive the makeup of Paharakeke as much as staff voice.
Early on in the term, a Friday afternoon - the big picture being a group had gone to touch- what were the other learners to do? Student-led workshops grew out of a conversation around a year 8's independent artwork. The next week two year 8s led a group of learners in a space around recreating that artwork without any teacher intervention. Another example of the evolving nature of our term. Following weeks more learners responded and initiated their own workshops. This nurtured our tuakana-teina approach and allowed us to work with smaller groups during these times. The big picture was about voice and collaboration.
As we evolved my team saw the place and need for personalised learning and student-owned pathways and the workshops evolved into our learning areas (maths initially). I was extremely proud of a team member who stepped out of her comfort zone and 'took away the box' by responding to my comment "to let the learners do it......don't tell them let them tell you" and that the learners design their learning pathway following their asttle maths test.
Learning pathway is our focus for term two now as we look to redesign our learning conferences to become truly student-led and grow an idea into all our learning areas.
I finish PROUD- of my learners, my whanau and my team; their response to change, their optimism and perseverence. I'm really proud of me too!
Celebrating our term:
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