Term 3 Week 9 @MatuaNgaru Spotlight

Tēnā kotou katoa!

Week 9 has been another busy week full of new learning, networking and getting stuff done. We are all so excited that our Learning Coaches are soon to be on board with us full time!


Communicative....


The Monday morning Admin meeting was a little different this week. Amanda, Michael, Diana, Kirstin and Wendy all completed activities reflecting on our journey so far. We shared what we love about our job, we then filled each others compliment buckets with lots of warm, genuine fuzzies, we ended the reflection exercise by being courageous and sharing our frustrations and pressure points, a great Team Building exercise!

Bright and early on Wednesday morning, Diana, Kirstin and Wendy headed off to AUT Northern Campus to attend our Te Reo course. We were experiencing mixed feelings as this was our first session after our mid semester break and we needed to perform our second oral assessment (Mahi Korero 2) in front of our classmates. We had been practicing consistently, even in Melbourne! The good news is we all passed and we received the results back from the Mid-Semester Test (Mātaitanga), again we all passed, Kirstin with full marks! Ka pai Kirstin!

Whanau (family) enrollment interviews have continued this week with Diana and Wendy, it is a real privilege getting to know our prospective learners and their families and we now have another 7 families pre-enrolled.

On Friday afternoon Diana met with Michael Hand from Torque-IP to discuss, plan and update our digital infrastructure.





Creative....

Friday morning saw Kirstin and Wendy heading off to Learning Network in West Auckland to attend a Makerspace Workshop led by Mark Osbourne. We found out about a little of the history of the Makerspace movement and how in our time of shrink wrapped technology people don't know how to fix things, the Makerspace philosophy is about building and making things not always about the technology. This is the link to Mark's presentation http://bit.ly/2RKHdak

We got to spend most of the session using and exploring the materials in Mark's Makerspace suitcase such as littlebits, polymorph plastic, conductive tape and thresd, Edison and Mbot robots, makey makeys, scratch cards, a bridge making challenge with string and popsicle sticks, and Wendy's favourite the 3D printer!

Wendy was fascinated by watching the 3D printer create a business card sized bicycle with panniers in a flat pack style. The components are then popped from the card and a miniature 3D bike is constructed, very cool!


For Friday afternoon Diana, Kirstin, Amanda, Michael and Wendy got creative with the itinerary for our first full team meet and greet. We started off the afternoon with a presentation from Otako Kaufusi who works at Microsoft.

Otako showed us the wonders of the Surface Pro and Surface Go and some of the practical applications of the interactive pen, the inking tool and touch screen features. This was to help the team decide on their TELA device so we can have it all ready for them at the beginning of Term 4. After some refreshments we moved onto a presentation from Diana about building the Dream Team. Diana also set us a challenge of  matching a Te Reo word or phrase to someone in the team based on their Bio or what we had learned that afternoon, we weren't allowed to go home until the challenge was solved!

A game of Human Bingo followed which gave us the chance to mix and mingle and find out a little more about each other. It was a great networking, connecting and relationship building afternoon!




Collaborative...


Kirstin and Michael on Monday were continuing to work on the Digi-badging induction programme for our Learning Coaches in Term 4. We are very excited about this innovative way to induct our new staff.
Thursday saw Diana, Kirstin and Wendy travelling across Auckland out to Flat Bush to take part in the New School's PLD at Ormiston Junior College. The day was hosted by the Te Uho o Te Nikau team of Mel, Bev and Leanne, who all did a great job of keeping us fed and on track.
The DPs of the four new schools had as their guest speaker Viv Mallabar who is the foundation DP at Ormiston Junior College. Viv generously shared her knowledge and experiences from OJC's establishment and foundation years. Viv emphasised the importance of turning values and vision to principles and practices and using this as a foundation of turning "I believe" into "We believe", developing a common language and group norms is the key to successful collaboration. Viv also talked about some of the challenges that can occur such as rapid roll growth, staff turnover and the rapid induction of new staff. A very thought provoking session.

The Principals of the four new schools had Luke Sumich, the foundation principal of OJC as their guest speaker, Luke was very informative and strategic as he took the principals through his start up journey at OJC. Luke was also the foundation principal for another new school so had a wealth of knowledge and expertise to impart.
This was the last scheduled PLG for the four new schools and we have all found the learning, sharing and networking from these PLG's invaluable as we all work towards our common goal of opening our schools in February 2019.

Curious

As part of the New Schools meet up and PLG, Diana, Kirstin and Wendy met up with the others Wednesday evening for a meal at Daikoku Restaurant in Botany Downs Shopping Centre. 

This was an informal occasion where we were all curious to hear about each others' journeys since the last time we had met. We were also curious to see what the Daikoku dining experience was about and we certainly weren't disappointed with a display of BBQ tool tossing, flaming hot plates and sparking onion ring volcanoes! 

A fantastic evening with fabulous company.

What's coming up?

• Whanau (family) Enrollment Interviews
• EBoT Meeting
• Parent Q & A session at Kereru Kindy
• MNS site visit

Term 3 Week 8 @MatuaNgaru Spotlight

Tena kotou katoa!

It has been yet another busy week for the Matua Ngaru team with lots of discussion, planning, exploring and new learning taking place. It's hard to believe that we are only a few weeks away from the end of Term 3, our opening date of 7 February 2019 is getting closer and closer and our school buildings are beginning to look more like the concept drawings we shared with you all at our community consultation meetings.


Communicative....


This week, we have continued to meet with families for pre-enrolment interviews, and it has been fabulous getting to know each of our future learners, their parents and even some of their grandparents. If you have been watching the counter on the first page of our school website, you will have noticed that the number of pre-enrolled foundation learners is beginning to grow.

Tuesday afternoon and early evening saw Diana at the Auckland Primary Principals' Association Beginning Teacher expo. Diana spent the afternoon meeting with soon to graduate teacher trainees and sharing with them what makes Matua Ngaru School special.

As you all know, this last week was Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori (Māori Language Week) and the team have been practising our school waiata (song) every day, as well as beginning and ending our meetings each day with non-religious karakia (blessings). Wendy, Kirstin and Diana have also been busy practising our dialogue for our AUT assessment next week, where we have to hold a conversation about how we are feeling, where we are from, share a little bit about our parents, our children and/or pets and ask and answer a couple of questions about everyday classroom objects.  This has been a really big learning curve for the 3 of us and we have definitely spent time in the learning pit as we make mistakes and try and try again. 


Earlier in the week we shared the following video on our Facebook page, and it is definitely a message worth sharing again. This video made something very clear to us as a school that will nurture and grow Kiwi kids representing an array of cultures. Janelle Riki-Waaka from Core Education shares her clear, powerful and absolute 'why' for honouring Te Reo and Tikanga Maori in our schools in Aotearoa.   This is powerful. This is our responsibility. 

Giving mana to Tiriti o Waitangi in our schools from EDtalks on Vimeo.

If you would like to start exploring a bit of Te Reo (language) and Tikanga (way of doing things) with your family, then this beautiful website called Pepeha has just been released. On this site you are guided through building and creating your own pepeha (personal introduction) and it helps you with learning some basic phrases and pronunciation along the way. You can even download a copy of your pepeha once you have finished.

Creative.... 

We were very excited on Monday afternoon, when Mandy from Argyle (our uniform provider) arrived with our colour dipped fabric sample for final approval. The shade of blue we will be using for our uniform is a new colour, and at this stage there are no other schools in New Zealand with this particular shade. Because of this, the company has named the new colour Matua Blue, which we think is pretty awesome! We also got to look at some of the initial prototypes for our polo and fleece - they are looking very smart.

Wendy and Heike attended their second evening session exploring Reggio Emilia on Wednesday where they had the opportunity to think creatively about how children are connected to their environment as they play and explore the world around them.

Collaborative...


Diana, Wendy and Kirstin started timetabling the various tasks and events that will take place next term, this will help us with planning and organising the term ahead.

On Thursday, Diana met with the company who are working on the signage for our school buildings.

Wendy and Kirstin have continued to meet with various resource providers, and on Friday, Wendy had an opportunity to meet  with representatives from Auckland Transport to discuss what is involved in our becoming a Travelwise school.

Curious...

On Monday morning, Diana, Kirstin, Wendy and Michael visited Morgan McKeen and her class at Parnell District School. Morgan is using Microsoft tools and software with her Year 5/6 class in innovative ways, and we were keen to learn more about what she is doing and see the tools and pedagogy in action.

We are sure you are all curious to find out who our Learning Coaches (teachers) will be. We are delighted to welcome Amy Robertshaw, Anoushka Carnie, Kate Davison, Kelly Gaston and Yasmin Mohamed to the Matua Ngaru Team. 

What's Coming Up?

• More family interviews
• New schools' PLG meet up
• Kirstin and Wendy attending Maker Space PD
• Learning Coach meet up

Term 3, Week 7 - @MatuaNgaru Spotlight

Tena kotou katua! Greetings everyone!

Week 7 was a wonderful week.  The @MatuaNgaru team have been engaging in a lot of ideating around curriculum design and induction for our growing team in Term 4.  Here are the highlights.

Communicative....Whakaaro
On Monday, Amanda, Di, Wendy, Kirstin and Michael participated in administration professional learning with Linc-Ed to develop our understanding of the potential and usability of our Learning Management System.  We are enthusiastic about how this tool will amplify our home-school partnership, demystify the ongoing assessment as learning processes in our school and foster collaboration in learning between our tamariki (children) and kaiako (educators).  There is also Linc-Ed app which will enable ubiquitous access to each child's learning pathway.  We are planning for all learners in our community to use Linc-Ed to house their ubiquitous learning portfolio which will serve as a launchpad for making the learning visible to parents, educators and of course our learners.

Creative....Auaha
Wendy and Kirstin continue to meet with providers of teaching and learning resources to heighten our collective knowledge of what is available, what is most relevant for our learning approach as educators and most importantly, what our kids will connect with most to enable ubiquitous learning pathways.  We are employing a 'less is more' philosophy to procurement to ensure we are collating and purchasing the most appropriate learning resources for our foundation year and stretching our finances to get the best we can offer.  We challenge ourselves with 'habit versus requirement' to ensure we procure what we actually need and provide our learners with the most useful, intuitive, innovative and engaging resources.

Collaborative... Mahi tahi  AND Curious... Māhirahira
Our SLT is very grateful to our Board of Trustees for providing us with the opportunity to visit some remarkable schools in Melbourne, Australia.  Heike and Michael were able to join Kirstin, Wendy and Di on visits to some of the most wonderful, warm and hospitable schools.  Click on the school names to see a slideshow of our visits.

• Mont Albert

Jason Walker and his team were so welcoming and warm.  They took us on a personalised tour to show and explain their pedagogical approaches and the learning journey they are on as a leadership team.  We were blown away by their heritage building and clever use of spaces.  Our key takeaways were: deliberate use of Maths Mindsets for problem solving in mixed ability groups including con-constructed shared language across the school, a thriving Book Club that is based on learner selected books, their Challenge Based Learning inquiry model, exceptional use of graphic organisers by and with learners and their 'tracking my thinking' notebooks that are used for reflection/just in time learning for the kids and for assessment as learning plus feedback mechanism by the educators.  They provided us with the most wonderful lunch and we really appreciated their hospitality and open to learning conversations.  Learn more on their website.

• Camberwell High School

Jill Laughlin is an amazing educational leader (and business manager!).  Her school is a large one that has undergone some extraordinary developments over the last decade.  Their CHS Learning Model which is largely influenced by the Hermann's Brain Dominance Indicator and facilitation with Dr Julia Atkin is outstanding and at the core of their learning work providing their 'why' for deliberate learning space design as they remodel and build new learning environments.  The school reports to parents on the dispositions as well as the curriculum areas.  The school has revamped their approach to teaching and learning and created curriculum team to deprivatize practice and promote collaborative pedagogical approaches.  Learning driven projects like the 'Connexhibition' and 'Melbourne Empathy Project' have developed a strong sense of  ownership and external perspectives. The CHS Learning Model has evolved into their graduate profile and involved parents, learners and the educators.   Other highlights included their amazing design technology and arts curriculum, co-construction of writing progressions with the primary school and the creation of 'home' spaces for each year level to call their own.  Learn more on their website.

• Preshil School

Marilin Smith leads the wholistic learning approach at Preshil School.  She generously invited us for a cup of coffee and delicious biscuit in the welcoming front room of the original building where if we closed our eyes we could envisage this first cohort of 5 learners with 'Mug' - the founder of Preshil - Margaret Lyttle.  A place that exhibits all of the amazing components of the Reggio Emelia philosophy and where the environment is clearly the third teacher here!  The school is situated on a historical site designed by Kevin Bourland, working with kids in rambling gardens that were once the home of Margaret Lyttle and where she first began the school. All rooms ‘deliberately promote experimentation and imagination, deliberately provoking the five senses. The Preshil teachers engage in shared imaginary role play, and explicit teaching, to deepen the children’s learning around concepts, both social/emotional and scientific. Our key takeaways include their flexible, learner centric approach grounded in strong relationships, daily provision of uninterrupted play (including child built structures, sand/water play, animal care and loose parts), infusion of music (both the teaching of and playing of during learning time), democratizing the learning space, the embracing of technologies discriminately (is it collaborative? is it creative?) and of course the invitational environment. We wanted to stay and play all day! Preshil is a private school that offers a place where playing, making believe, acting, experimenting, tinkering, improvising, provide the pathways to new connections, generative mistakes, unintentioned outcomes and life changing inventions. Our visit was too short. Learn more on their website.

• Brunswick East

Dr Janet Di Pilla is an extraordinary woman, thought leader and advocate for children.  We were so inspired by her vision for learning at Brunswick East Primary School.  With an exceptionally diverse learning community the approach to teaching and learning is differentiated with the child at the core.  While their New Entrants are in a separate learning space, the Year 1-3s and Year 4-6s worked in vertical groups of 60 learners with 3 educators who work collaboratively to ensure that the focus is on the learning process, not the product.  The outdoor learning environment provides  the backyard opportunities to play and explore that many of the 'city kids' are not exposed to at home and she employs a 'garden teacher' who works with all the kids once a week.  This is deliberate and infused into everyday play and learning.  She works hard to provide 'cuiosita time' where the teams design learning together for over 3 hours per week, clearly valuing this.  The learning environments were varied, from a converted staff room in the original building to a sleek new buildings of flexible learning spaces. The backwards by design approach to teaching and learning empowers their vision and the deliberate 'deconstruction' of the library into 'mini libraries' in every hub has lead to more reading. They have a notion that any place can be a learning space and Dr Janet demands that all educators know all the learners in their hub. A focus on growing literate, numerate and curious learners involves a curriculum that teaches philosophy, ethics and empathy so they learn to think deeply and quite abstractly. The learning is personalised as the learners are given a fertile question and then encouraged to explore in their own direction, taking time to define what words mean. The learning was visible, dripping off the walls in inviting spaces that were clearly being used by learners and educators alike. Learn more about this world class school here.

• Silverton

As a school amidst a large scale renovation we were grateful that the team at Silverton could host us. Big thanks to Samantha and Karen.  We were provided with a pre-brief of their approach to collaborative practice in their large flexible learning spaces and the school wide pedagogy.  The naming of the learning spaces in each hub are learner created each year, as are the norms.  These were visible everywhere and clearly owned by the learners.  A full range of teaching styles were observed from deliberate acts of teaching with both smaller and larger groups, 1:1 coaching/conferencing, learner lead workshops, parallel teaching and highly engaged self directed learning at all year levels.  Their school culture was visible and was interactively displayed on the walls, as was their learning model for Discovery Time.  Their 'Reality Groups' are a recent addition to enhance the Discovery Time and often involve members from the community.  Their goal for these are that they be authentic, involve student choice, student led, involve additional Specialist teachers, volunteers and parents helpers (depending on the activity) and are aimed to develop skills based on student interests.  A range of staff were engaged in the teaching of ability groups for reading and maths and weekly maths investigations were a clear strength demonstrating their rich task, no worksheet philosophy. A high staff turnover has required a close reimagining of their induction and coaching processes and their response is the Silverton Passport which guides those new to the school in the 'why' of their pedagogy.   Learn more about this thriving school here.

• Woodleigh

Woodleigh Munimbah was an inspirational delight.  The campus is magnificent and the learning spaces were intelligently designed, well used spaces with amazing indoor/outdoor flow. The learning was displayed in a manner that managed to reflect the learning clearly, be interactive and contribute to the design of the spaces without blocking the natural light.  Another school where we observed the environment acting as the is 3rd educator with 'deinstitutionalized' spaces. A school for adventurous minds where learning is a shared experience. Goal setting uses SMART protocols and everyday has deliberate play and opportunities for just in time learning.  They believe that when a child asks a question they don't give the answer, just a question back. The school values outdoor learning with all children spending one day a week, rain or shine, at the local creek - they use 'puddle suits' when needed and also participate in the Stephanie Alexander kitchen garden program. They are a 'Mindful School'→ which involves community, curriculum, environment and practices and they teach the habits of mind. The teachers educated in outdoor learning ( how to teach outdoors) and they do a lot of shared professional development to talk about what they're doing -allowing teachers to explore and bring back. They do classroom and peer observations, work as teams, and keep each other accountable. The educators use pre-mapped WALTs but personalised and bring in multiple areas of the Victorian curriculum. They use the Round Square program and resilience projects and encourage 'narrative' projects to tap into educator strengths. Each new learner contributes a stick to their nest paying homage to the indigenous culture. Learn more about this school on their website.

• St John's Footscray

A highlight for us was the visit to St John's Footscray with their wonderful principal Gemma Goodyear.  So much of their approach resonated with our design for learning and approach to facilitating the NZC.  Gemma was honest, articulate and very generous with her sharing of time, ideas and resources.  So what did we love about this school? A learner driven inquiry with 4 options for entry: make / act/ do/ know, the relaunching of students wonderings from day before → “remember yesterday you said….”, the use of provocation for younger years and spark for older year groups, the different inquiry design models used and deliberately taught (scientific inquiry, arts & design process & problem solving process & field study &  research question), the community garden, the way they 'group by age & teach by stage', the absolute visible learning and learning progressions on the walls, the focused use of a guardian group “Promoting safety, well-being and inclusion of all children.”, the third teacher environment to enable children for self directed learning, projects that enter through the story to create authenticity, their curriculum mapping tool, valuing teachers as designers and empowering the educators to 'set their own agenda', visible thinking routines, the relentless focus on stretching learning, a backwards by design approach that uses learning progressions proactively and retrospectively and using the children's own language to challenge the narrative. What is not to love? There are certainly lucky teachers and kids at this school! Read more about this innovative school here. 

Di also took the team on an Escape Room challenge where we had to solve a series of clues to 'break out' of the rooms.  This was a fantastic opportunity to practice working collaboratively towards a common goal.  The room had a 1 in 5 success rate and we escaped after 27 minutes.  Our #DreamTeam definitely had to put our 4 C learning values into action! 
We also enjoyed a quick visit to the Queen Victoria Markets, Botanical Gardens and St Kilda Beach before we flew home.  While we had time travelling across Melbourne in the car to debrief about our school visits we had invaluable opportunities to discuss, ideate and re-imagine our key takeaways from these wonderful schools.  We are so enthusiastic to put the many moving pieces together in our #waveofchange jigsaw of #ubiquitouslearning!

What's coming up:

• A visit to Parnell District School to learn and observe the affordances of Office 365 with a particular focus on Teams, OneNote and collaborative learning
• A uniforms meeting - we get to see our unique colour on our polo shirt fabric with Mandy from Argyle
• We're growing - pre-enroling 8 more learners, bringing our official pre-enrolled number to 16!
• Financial manual creation with Leading Edge
• APPA Beginning Teacher's Expo
• Meeting with Norton's Signs to finalise our internal and external branding
• Collaboration with our Before and After School Care provider
• Wendy meets with Travelwise 
• Wendy and Heike engage in the second part of the professional learning series 'Reggio Conversation' coordinated by REANZ