Term 3 Week 6 Spotlight @MatuaNgaru

We were excited to receive our banner flags this week as this has allowed us to become more visible at Huapai District School and has communicated to people and families meeting with us how to find us straight away. Thank you to Kirstin for researching and organising the flags, they look great!

 Di and Wendy have met with 8 families this week as part of family enrolment interviews. We have enjoyed learning about our learners, their families and establishing positive relationships with our school community. What talented and diverse learners Matua Ngaru is going to have with a fabulous group of interested and involved whānau to support and enrich our programmes and approaches!

Di and Amanda met with Spotless, who are our Property Management Company, they found out some useful things about our school buildings and how things will run once we open in February 2019.

Kirstin, Diana and Wendy are practicing daily, opening and closing Karakia, our Matua Ngaru waiata and a creative, scripted kōrerorero (conversation) which is our next Te Reo assessment in two weeks time and will be conducted in front of the rest of the class!

Diana, Kirstin and Michael were curious to find out more about minecraft and how the minecraft programme could enhance our learning and teaching at MNS. Crispin Lockwood led them trough some of the applications and features of the minecraft programme. The team are excited to find out more about the potential of this creative programme.

Michael and Kirstin have been ideating around options and ideas for using digital badging to induct our Learning Coaches in Term 4. We are all eager to see, hear and participate in their creative ideas around this project and achieve our badges in Term 4!

Wendy  had a wonderful time this week connecting with local kindy's and Early Childhood Centres in our community. At our Community Consultation night, 12 different ECE providers were identified as centres our newist Matua Ngaru learners will come from, so it is very important that we collaborate with ECE's and share knowledge and information so our tamariki get the best possible start at MNS. Wendy has been approached to be available for a Q & A session at Kereru Kindy, Huapai for prospective families. Emily the Head Teacher and Wendy have the planning for this underway.

Kirstin, Diana, Amanda and Wendy had the privilege this week of connecting with our colleagues and education partners at Arohanui Special School. We were made to feel very welcome and were lucky enough to visit two offsite Arohanui classrooms. One was at Te Atatu Intermediate and the other at Hobsonville Point Secondary School. It was fascinating learning to see a little of what these dedicated, passionate professionals do for a morning. We look forward to our continued close association and the opening of an Arohanui Classroom Unit and Outreach Centre at Matua Ngaru.

Diana, Kirstin and Wendy have been collaborating on our curriculum design and assessment approaches. We are enjoying the robust discussions and the opportunities to dive into research to back up our beliefs. This week we have focused on finding and making links between the New Zealand Curriculum and Te Whāriki - the Early Childhood Curriculum, both world class documents.

Wendy had an opportunity to further collaborate with Maggie Reid from Flanshaw Primary around how they use learning maps. Learning maps at Flanshaw are an integral part of what they do to report to family and whānau and maintain learner and whānau engagement, something Wendy and Di are exploring to become part of the Matua Ngaru approach.

Diana, Kirstin and Wendy all sat their first written Te Reo exam, as part of their ongoing AUT course on Conversational Maori, on Wednesday and are very curious to find out their results.

Kirstin and Diana attended a new product launch for Microsoft called Surface Go, they were curious about how the Surface Go could be used educationally.



Michael and Kirstin were able to visit the Flexible Learning Space at Huapai District School. They enjoy the visit in particular seeing how others have approached teaching and learning in a Flexible Learning Space.
Kirstin has met with a possible swimming programme provider, we are all curious to see the possible programme they could provide for our learners in the warmer months.

Our Senior Leadership Team PLG this week focused on John Hattie's latest article,WHAT WORKS BEST IN EDUCATION:THE POLITICS OF COLLABORATIVE EXPERTISE 2015. The article explored the idea of shifting to a collaborative expertise environment and had useful strategies to achieve this, as collaborative expertise is the best way to overcome within school variability and ensure our learners gain at least a year of learning for a years' input.

Term 3, Week 5 Spotlight @MatuaNgaru

Tena kotou katua!

The site is looking very busy with lots of progress being made.

    

 

He waka eke noa - we are in this together!  One of our school whakatauki optitimises our Week 5 which embodied teamwork has left us with a feeling of accomplishment and a sense of anticipation for what has yet to come. Here are the highlights.

Diana and Wendy began to discuss the Mutukaroa program (originally developed at Sylvia Park School) which aims to accelerate learning in the early years while fostering fully engaged whanau who are assessment literate.  A great conversation emerged as they pondered what this might look like and/or morph into for our school.   As a result, we are looking forward to delving deeper into how we might use Learning Maps in association with our Linc-Ed Ubiquitous Learning Portfolios. Coupling these with assessment workshops for our parents to ensure that everyone is on the same page regarding our language of learning, assessment tools/practices and how we can accelerate progress while increasing engagement in learning is our ultimate goal.  Wendy represented our SLT on Wednesday and attended a 'just in time' WAPA (West Auckland Principal's Association) meeting to learn about potential approaches for streamlining communication about learners across schools.  There are some exciting prospects on the horizon.  We also had our Establishment Board of Trustees meeting on Wednesday.  It was fantastic for Di to be able to share our progress in alignment with the Project Action Plan.  Di has also drafted our Maori Consultation Plan for 2018-2019 which she will share with the Board at the next meeting.


It was wonderful to have Michael Davidson, one of our Lead Learning Coaches in for the day on Monday.  We were able to look at some creative ways to use the strengths of our leadership team and we spent time refining our role descriptions to gain clarity on our portfolios of responsibility.  We are able to use Michael as a coach for the team as he is a Google Certified Innovator and a Google Certified Trainer.  Exploration and ideation is also underway to digitise aspects of our induction process for our appointed learning coaches in Term 4.  Kirstin and Micheal will be leading this piece of work.

Wendy lead the team in a discussion around our future focused library aspirations.  This began with challenging our current name selection 'Whare Pukapuka'.  Since we want our library to act as an inspirational space for our community, as well as our learners, we decided to call it 'Whare Hapori' to signal this.  Wendy is working on an Action Plan to set up our amazing space.

Di was able to meet with the folks from Horton's Signs and CPB Con to discuss the branding and signing of our school.  We are very excited that each of our kāianga will have a lovely external sign of the animal design, Arohanui Special School and Matua Ngaru School will have some beautiful directional signage around the site and on the building, including our logos and the waka design (designed by Graham Tipene) and the safety glass will be a repeated pattern of our four learning values in Te Reo Maori, English and the 1/4 design from the logo.  In addition, there will be some vinyl overlays of our learning model and the kāinga animals in the tari area.  We were also proud to share the interactive map that Kirstin created of our kura.

Our 'mahitahi' efforts this week have seen progress made with our resourcing as Wendy and Kirstin make our lists as they meet with possible providers to discuss our foundation year needs.  Di has been networking with some educational leaders to support our induction and we are looking forward to having Andrew Cowie and Sue Smith come to work with our team around Digital Citizenship, Restorative Practices and Culturally Responsive Approaches.  This amazing duo come from Upper Harbour Primary- one of our favourite Auckland schools to visit. 

          

Kirstin is also liaising with Luke Sumich from OJC to coordinate some PL around the Hermman Brain Dominance Instrument and Whole Brain Thinking as part of our induction to aid our team in developing a greater understanding for how we can fully leverage our own preferences, while taking advantage of the preferences of each other to optimise our collaborative approach and increase our performance as individuals and collectively. 

Our first six fact sheets around the terminology often used when describing Innovative Learning Environments or as we like to call them 'Flexible Learning Spaces' are now complete.  These fact sheets explain our interpretation of each term with links to some research & articles.  It is our hope to add to the series, selecting terms that are potentially confusing, misleading or that we want to ensure are clear to our community.  The first 6 topics are: Self Directed Learning, Innovative Practice, Learning Through Play, Inclusive Learning, Collaborative Learning and Collaborative Practice.

This week, Kirstin and Wendy were able to spend a morning observing the collaborative practice in the Huapai District School Innovative Learning Environments.  They were inspired by the strategies and approaches that were observed and described by the educators and learners.  We feel so fortunate to have such a wonderful school hosting us.  It is our aspiration, together with John and his team, to work in partnership to serve our community.

For our weekly PLG we read the EdBookNZ 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 editions (accessible here).  These digital books were the brainchild of Sonja Vanschaijik from Newmarket Primary School.  AND we listened to the Point of Learning podcast featuring Sonja as well, all about how teachers need to be visible in their practice.  Both of these have left Kirstin, Wendy and Di with a number of wonderings and exciting ideas.  Watch this space!

What's coming up?

• Future Ready - Microsoft Event
• Whanau Interviews begin
• Arohanui Special School site visit
• Operations Meeting with Spotless
• Minecraft training
• Te Reo @ AUT - Exam #1

Term 3, Week 4 @MatuaNgaru Spotlight

Tena kotou katoa!

Week four has come and gone and it was certainly a fantastic week of learning and designing.  Here are some of our highlights.

Monday and Tuesday this week saw Kirstin meeting with the Deputy Principals of both Kaipara College and Massey High School to familiarise herself with both schools and what they have to offer; to explore opportunities for reciprocal partnerships and to  discuss the process involved in transitioning our future Year 8 learners on to secondary school.

On Tuesday morning, Diana and Amanda attended training with Leading Edge, a company who provides financial services including support and professional development - this week the focus was on Xero.

During the week, the team also met with more before & after school care providers and we will be making a decision soon as to which provider we will be using at Matua Ngaru School. We also spent some time finalising the Staff Handbook (soon to have a fantastic and creative name!?) which we have been working on. This A-Z of Matua Ngaru document will support our learning coaches as part of their induction programme in Term 4.  It will also be an ongoing reference source in the future and will change and evolve over time as required.

A big focus for Wendy this week has been the development of our school 'library' (what will we call this magical space?) including: systems we will use, resources, learning opportunities the library will provide, etc.  On Monday she met with Esther Casey, the librarian at Sylvia Park School to look at the innovative ways in which their school library was meeting the needs of learners. Esther was deliberate at providing us with provocations around the nature of 'libraries' and challenged us to not call it 'Whare Pukapuka' as a future focused 'library' should be so much more than a book repository!  Then, on Friday, she met with Sandi from the National Library of New Zealand. Sandi was able to share lots of ideas and suggestions for developing our library, as well as making us aware of professional development opportunities and networks available to us.

Wendy was also lucky enough to have the opportunity to attend the matinee performance of Huapai District School's production of Aladdin. She was absolutely blown away by the talented performances of the young cast.

We have also be beavering away at creating some "fact sheets" around some of the terminology that is often associated with MLEs, ILEs, FLSs... whatever you want to call them.  Our topics include:  Collaborative Practice, Innovative Practice, Collaborative Learning, Play Based Learning and Inclusive Learning.  We look forward to sharing these in the near future.

This week our team read Core Education's 2018 10 Trends document selected by Kirstin and "Making Connections" (Dahlberg, 2004) a reading Wendy and Heike were given after their REANZ evening for our mostly weekly PLG (Professional Learning Group). Both readings gave us a lot to discuss and think about as we continue to explore and design the Matua Ngaru curriculum particularly around what is influencing future focused education in the 5 categories:   Technology- the cloud and blockchain, Structural- Kahui Ako and Virtual Learning, Process- collaboration and data science, Economic- automation and STEM and Cultural- AI and learner agency.  We are challenged in our thinking around designing a relational space that prioritises the making of connections through the senses and process of making/creating.  How do we avoid the constraints of the dreaded timetable?!
On Wednesday, Diana drove through the wind and rain to Taupo to attend the APPA Conference.  It was a wonderful opportunity to connect with other educational leaders and to be inspired.  A time to fill the learning tank!  Martin Sneddon, who's a bit of a Kiwi legend, enthralled us with his tale of leading the design of the 2011 Rugby World Cup here in New Zealand.  The ingredients for success include: a compelling story, developing strong relationships (he'll take EQ or IQ anyday!) and coherent decision making. 

Debbie Mayo-Smith provided us with a plethora of tips for learning to exploit technology to save us valuable time (presentation here). 

Roger Moses shared his learning from leading with us and reminded us to focus on the urgent,  get the right people on the bus and THEN decide where to go, that there is no harm in hoping for the best as long as you are prepared for the worst, be a servant leader, be available, open the door of opportunity and equip your team to be able to walk through them, don't accept every new idea as truth, practice the power of praise and identify your young guns and give them the ammunition they need to succeed.  What a man! 

The highlight of the conference for me was the few hours we were able to spend with Joan Baker who challenged us to focus on what she calls 'killer questions'.  Some examples include: How do we enable (not disable) change in our schools?  How are we making things better for our people/organisation?  How can I expand my impact?  How does our work have meaning for us? What values did I use to make decisions today?  What's currently harder than it should be? What must we preserve? Give up?  Are we proving or improving?  What am I learning?unlearning? and my personal favourite "why would anyone want to be led by me/us?" If people are afraid of blame not failure, what can I do to make our place safe to take risks?  There is certainly a lot to think on and put into place.

Amanda spent Thursday at a conference for Office Administrators. She was able to attend a variety of different workshops relating to different aspects of the administrator role and hone in on the different skills and understandings needed in each area. She said it was a fantastic day and has come back full of ideas and new learning that she can't wait to put into practice.

As Matua Ngaru will not have a swimming pool, Kirstin has been making contact with different swimming lesson providers in order to explore options for our aquatics programme. We will be able to provide more details later on once we have looked at what is on offer and determined which will best meet the needs of our learners and community.

Looking Ahead to What is Coming Up:

• Michael Davidson is joining us on Mondays for the rest of the term
• Meetings with reps from different educational resource providers
• Te Reo Session 6
• eBoT Meeting
• Decision around after school care providers
• Continuing work on curriculum development

Term 3 - Week 3 @MatuaNgaru Spotlight

Tena koutou katoa
We are now a third of the way through the term and feel settled into Room 6, at Huapai District School. John and the team at Huapai have made us all feel welcome and it is great being in the same community as our school, Matua Ngaru.

Communicative
Diana, Kirstin and Wendy have been meeting with After Hours School Care providers this week. Having a quality before and after school care programme was something our prospective families clearly communicated they wanted at our Community Consultation night. We have chosen to meet with 3 providers who provide the same services at other local schools. We will make a decision in the next week or two.

On Wednesday this week Diana, Kirstin and Wendy all took part in their first Te Reo oral assessment at AUT (Mahi-Korero 1). The good news is, of course, we all passed with flying colours! Our weekly attendance at the Te Reo course is part of our commitment to interweaving Te Reo and Tikanga through everything we do at Matua Ngaru in acknowledgement and celebration of New Zealand's bi-cultural partnership and heritage.

Wednesday afternoon saw Diana and Wendy meeting with Mandy from Argyle , our uniform providers, to finalise uniform design and colour. Mandy will return to us in the next few weeks with a final colour and design.

Some of you will be aware that Amanda, our office administrator extraordinaire, has been contacting families who have filled in the pre-enrolment form to arrange a family enrolment meeting time and to inform them of the next steps in the process for formal enrolment. We have been working hard on developing  the family interview questionnaire and creating a transition to school programme. We want to learn as much as we can about our tamariki, their passions, interests, needs and strengths before we teach them. It is all about building relationships and knowing our learners, the family interviews are an important  first step!

Collaborative
On Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons Kirstin returned to Oteha Valley School to participate in two staff meetings to update her First Aid Certificate. Wendy updated hers at the beginning of Term 2. Amanda also recently completed her full first aid certificate, we are feeling well covered and supported should a medical event occur!

As a result of our collaborative meetings with our community around our school uniform a preferred colour poll was put on Facebook and the results are in! Steel Blue was the clear winner and as mentioned previously we have met with Mandy from Argyle and are ready to move into the next stage of developing the Matua Ngaru School uniform.

Curious
On a wet and wild Wednesday evening Heike and Wendy attended a REANZ (Reggio Emilia Aotearoa New Zealand) Conversation evening. They were both very curious to find out more about the Reggio Emilia philosophy. The evening was about considering the agentic force of things and the material environment on learning . We discussed the term Intra active, which refers to the generative and interdependent relationship between living organisms and the material environment such as everyday objects, spaces and places. The discussion was underpinned by the book written by Hillevi Lenz Taguchi, called Going beyond theory/practice divide in early childhood. Introducing an intra-active pedagogy. The big take away of the evening was it's promotion of having a flexible and open mindset, while being in the moment and thinking ahead to what might emerge, whilst in the moment. Letting the child lead rather than the educator. Heike and Wendy attend a follow evening early in September which will focus on how things and the material environment may be affecting the learner's actions and meaning making

Our last scheduled meeting for the week was to meet with Michael and Heike to update them on what has been happening, to continue to ideate around curriculum and daily design and connect with them about how their term is going in their respective educator roles.

Creative
Kirstin has been working hard to transpose our school song from audio to written notation so we can create an instrumental track to accompany our singing. Diana, Amanda and Wendy have been doing their best to learn the words and practise the melody. This song has been gifted to us from a member of our eBoT and the local iwi, Te Rongopai Morehu.

Term 3, Week 2 @MatuaNgaru Spotlight

#UbiquitousLearning

We can't believe how fast the year is going!  It has been another jam packed week of making, doing and ubiquitous learning for the team.



On Tuesday, the wonderful Mandy Bishop from Argyle joined us for 2 afternoon uniform discussions with our community.  It was great to meet some our of our tamariki and their mums (plus one dad!).  Here are the highlights Kirstin has already shared on our Facebook page:

The key points raised by families included:

• A preference for a bright colour, but one that is still dark enough to hide marks and stains
• A colour that differs from those of our neighbouring schools
• A future option of a jacket that could be worn either as well as, or instead of a polar fleece
• The preferred fabric choice was cotton backed polyester

To begin with we will be offering a polo shirt, a fleece and a sunhat. Bottoms, shoes, etc are your choice. We also shared that staff will encourage the children to wear their uniforms with pride, however, they will not be enforcing uniform.  We are looking at adding a PE uniform at some point, however, we'd like the learners to design this, so are not including one at this stage.  From our discussions on Tuesday, we have narrowed the colour choices down to two possibilities. A poll has been posted on Facebook for you to select your preferred colour option out of 'Steel Blue' and 'Turquoise Blue' and with 89 votes- steel blue has the lead! 

Amanda, Wendy and Di also spent some time with LincEd in a Google Hangout learning more about how to capitalise on the affordances of using the our online enrolment form.  This was valuable and timely learning for us as we begin to make contact with our whanau next week to schedule family interviews.


Wendy has been refining our Enrolment processes this week- updating our Enrolment Information booklet and ensuring all of our processes are connected and clear for our whanau.  Kirstin, Wendy and Di also attended their third three hour Te Reo lesson at AUT on Wednesday morning.  We are learning a lot about how to introduce ourselves, our families and ask about others.  The opportunities to practice having conversations with our classmates has been useful and we are having our first 'mahi korero' next next.  I'm glad our kaiako has the motto "Na mai te hapai" ~ we welcome mistakes! We were also delighted to dine with the wonderful teams from Ararira Springs who were visiting schools in Auckland, along with our mates from Te Uho O Te Nikau on Wednesday evening.  Claire Howison, Mel Bland and Di had time to have an informative first time principals chat where they shared our progress to date.  


Our team spent some time this week designing our induction for whanau.  We are also in the process of collating our learning around the research and hype about Innovative Learning Environments...Modern Learning Environments... Flexible Learning Spaces... into some Fact Sheets that will help connect our interpretation to the research and hopefully provide some clarity around our vision for what teaching and learning will look like @MatuaNgaru.  
Watch this space....


Amanda and Di were graced with some time with the amazing Kerry from Leading Edge who is facilitating our learning as we set up and refine our processes around finance.  Both are thrilled to be learning with such an expert!  Di had the privilege of spending Thursday at a Professional Learning workshop by Evaluation Associates about Appraisal.  Dr Wendy Moore took the room of curious educative leaders on a learning roller coaster!  It was absolutely fantastic to have time to ideate with other principals and consolidate some embryonic ideas around our appraisal process.  Appraisal is about learning and achievement of learners and teachers and requires: open to learning conversations, evaluative capacity, responsibility and performance management with the ultimate focus on 'what we are trying to do as a school'.  Our areas of priority for designing our appraisal processes are: coherence, alignment with both the strategic direction of the School and key documentation (eg.NEGs/NAGs, NZC, Ka Hikitia, PEP and BES), keeping the Code & Standards from the Education Council and Tataiako at the heart, ensuring it is evidence based, grows capacity and is robust. An appraisal conversation, in our view, is about an educator sharing their story about their growth. Di is very interested in exploring teacher led appraisal and including educator 'passion projects' so the focus is on the teacher (read Learning Coach!) as a learner and not on compliance.

Perhaps this week we were most curious about our prospective Learning Coaches as we visited our applicants in their schools.  We are so grateful to their gracious principals for enabling us to do so and we really enjoyed seeing their schools.  Our candidates all presented to us on "As part of a collaborative team, how might you include our 4 Cs- curious, collaborative, creative and communicative, in learning design?" and we were blown away by the quality and creativity that unfolded before our eyes.  This made our choice very difficult as all were excellent candidates.  Designing the #dreamteam is our ultimate goal and we look forward to announcing soon.

#WaveofChange - Coming Up...

• An Evening of Reggio
• Uniform decisions with Mandy
• Announcing our newest additions to the #dreamteam
• More Te Reo on Wednesday
• Arranging a visit for our team @Arohanui Special School - our @MatuaNgaru flatmates!