Term 4 - Week 2 Spotlight @MatuaNgaru

Tena koutou katoa!

Week 2, a four day week after we all got treated to a sunny and relaxing long weekend with last Monday being Labour Day. Great that we had that time to catch our breath as well as letting the amazement and magic sink in of the terrific journey that lies ahead of us. We returned on Tuesday with anticipation to continue our #ubiquitouslearning on a wave of change.

Communicative....

More time was dedicated towards unpacking our school vision and values by deliberating about the implication and significance of these. What do these mean to us and what principles and practices will we incorporate in our learning space? The level of engagement, the thoughtful questions and the quality of the responses were an encouraging sign that all of us are owning the stake we have in this. Time is always sparse, still we must ensure that we get this right.

Wednesday we engaged with our Mana Whenua. We greeted Te Rongopai, Dawn and Te Kahui-iti Morehu by singing our school waiata “Ko Matua Ngaru Te Tira Waka” and they responded by singing the waiata “Te Aroha”. Te Kahui-iti Morehu shared her knowledge and gifted us insight into her historic recollection. We learnt about the whakapapa of the school location and the wider area by listening to interesting anecdotes told in a charismatic style. What an absolute privilege it is for us to work with these wonderful wāhine - members of the Ngati Whatua iwi.

We are looking forward to connecting with our Whanau Focus Group on Wednesday afternoon and consult with them as we cultivate their ideas of how they envision Mataua Ngaru School connecting with the community. Wendy and Di have continued to engage with and meet our wonderful learners as part of our enrolment procedures.  Our whanau interviews have been a wonderful face to face way to begin a strong home-school partnership and we now have 50 learners officially pre-enrolled!

Creative....

The team has kept the momentum of engaging into the innovative Digital Induction Badging programme which has been so brilliantly designed by Kirstin and Michael. What a great podium for our Learning Coaches to exhibit and share their professional learning as well as to cooperate and collaborate. Gauging the wide variety of talent as well as the eagerness the team brings along to engage in self directed learning, reflecting and connecting the learning from week 1, the learning coaches collaboratively created mind maps that really display the vast amount of information and learning and perhaps more importantly, how all the concepts are interlinked with each other.  

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Again, the team engaged in Tinker Time exploring and playing with a variety of e tools creating outcomes that will surely find their use in our learning space.Wendy organised this week’s team building challenge #dreamteam by tasking us to create an original advertisement for two or our upcoming community events. However, the project scope expanded and we will complete this task next week.

Mark Osbourne joined us for a “Ponder” conversation discussing and playing around with ideas what our Makerspace could look like, what resources we want to engage with and what learning will happen in it. Kirstin and Wendy were busy taking notes for the resource wish list. Obviously, this will all depend on the learners we are going to have in our school, though it was brilliant to have this expert input and someone to challenge our thinking!

Collaborative...

Further co-constructing and conceptualising our behaviour management approach was a major focus throughout this week. Jenny Barker from MoE helped us to dig deeper into understanding restorative practice and the PB4L framework. Through voting we decided that we are going to be a PB4L School. Sue Smith and Andrew Cowie shared with us the Upper Harbour School way of implementing restorative practice, cultural responsiveness and digital citizenship. Some valuable thinking prompts sparked productive conversation within the team such as being aware of making assumptions, digging deeper and understanding culture beyond ethnicity as well as going beyond greetings and food when making cultural connections.

Luke Sumich presented the Hermann's Whole Brain Model and revealed our profiles. While there may be pros and cons about this framework, the leadership team thinks it will be practical to recognise the unique way each of us processes information and then, use this information to accommodate the way we communicate accordingly. Amazingly, our team has a reasonable spread across all four quadrants, but there is a tendency towards yellow, the experimental and innovative quadrant. Innovative ideas are beneficial when involved in founding a new school and shifting the paradigm, however, we need to make sure we hold ourselves accountable on this ubiquitous learning journey. For that reason, the blue, green and red quadrants are equally important. In particular, fruitful will be implementing the common language that this thinking tool offers which we will engage in throughout the coming weeks.

Michael also engaged us in a presentation about designing rituals and routines to foster a culture of innovation.  We are looking forward to our next steps with this.Diana, Kirstin and Wendy worked with the Establishment Board of Trustees to begin the process of ideating towards our 2019 Strategic Plan. They began by unpacking the NZSTA Strategic Planning document and the brainstormed ideas for goals around what we want for our learners, interrogating these along the way.  The Strategic Leadership Team will continue to evolve these ideas into a draft plan to be shared with our stakeholders for feedback. Diana also attended a workshop run by the Ministry of Education, facilitated by Rebecca Cook, on school finance.  Dianne Cook from our board attended with her.In addition, gauging the talent and strengths our learning coaches bring along, Michael engaged us in a strengthsfinder session. This information will support us in delegating & co-constructing responsibilities and forming project teams as well as getting all involved in the planning of #ubiquitouslearning.

Curious

An important part of our induction programme will be visiting schools and see innovative practice implemented. On Tuesday the team visited Hobsonville Point Primary School. Before inquisitively wandering throughout the school, Daniel Birch, the foundation principal, shared his experience and reflections about 5 years of Hobsonville Point Primary School. While it is difficult to pinpoint the most valuable piece of information, being prepared to unlearn and relearn as well as ruthlessly engaging in critical reflection is definitely ranking very high. Whenever we engaged with the HPPS children, we were impressed with their ability to articulate their learning and the process they were involved in. Kate, who was the lucky recipient of our free conference registration, shared her key takeaways and insights from this year’s ULearn conference 2018.

 

To finish, we wonder if you are all curious to learn more about our school?  We have a fantastic Community Consultation Evening planned for November 22 at 7pm in the hall at Huapai District School.  We will share our progress, seek feedback and have many of our partners present such as SKIDs, Jellybeans Music, Argyles, Office Max, Dorothy Butler and more.  We hope that you will join us!

Coming up:

• Whanau focus group - Community Connections on Wednensday

• Minecraft Training

• Visit to Stonefields

• Resource Procurement

• Our Emerging Curriculum

• A visit to Hobsonville Point Secondary School

• Designing our digital korowai

• Strategic Planning for 2019

Term 4 - Week 1 Spotlight @MatuaNgaru

Tena kotou katua!    Week 1 - Term 4

Can you believe it is already Term 4?  It is such an exciting and invigorating term for us.  Six new educators joined the #DreamTeam and we had an amazing week of #ubiquitouslearning together.  Here are the highlights...

Our induction focus has been Communicative - whakaaro this week.  We welcomed the team on Monday with a mihi whakatau that included karakia, Kirstin, Di and Wendy sharing their mihi and the singing of our waiata 'Ko Matua Ngaru Te Tira Waka' which was written by Te Rongopai Morehu of Ngati Whatua O Kaipara specifically for us.  Michael, responded on behalf of the new team members and they sang 'Te Aroha' in return to acknowledge our welcome.  We have spent a lot of our time this week having discussions around our vision, beliefs, principles and practices threaded of course with a lot of team building fun.  Kirstin and Wendy ensured that we all had a 'Blind Date with a Book' and that the team got a few #ubiquitouslearning pieces of swag! A key area we are co-constructing is our approach to behaviour management using a restorative approach and we have Jenny Barker from the MOE and Sue Smith & Andrew Cowie from Upper Harbour Primary coming to guide us on this key piece of work.   We are also super proud of Kirstin, Wendy and Di who have successfully completed their Te Reo Maori course with AUT.  On Wednesday they had their final korero assignment and celebrated the milestone with their classmates through shared kai (food).  Of course, some of our most important whakaaro discussions were with our families through the continued whanau interviews - with 107 learners currently engaged in our pre-enrolment processes.

Our collective and individual creativity had opportunities to flourish as well.  Kirstin and Michael kicked off our innovative Digital Induction Badging programme on Tuesday at Hobsonville Point Primary School.  The purpose of this gamified approach is to empower the team to self direct aspects of their professional learning  in a way that allows them to personalise their learning to suit their specific needs. It also enables them to model our school vision of #ubiquitouslearning while also learning about our school culture. Initially this will focus on professional learning as it relates directly to induction, with the aspirational goal of eventually being extended to include other professional learning opportunities. A huge amount of work and design has gone into this and we are all grateful for the contribution that Kirstin and Michael have put into this. AND everyone has had a go at sketchnoting on their new Surface Pros. On Wednesday, Michael lead Learning Coach Tinker Time  where the team had time to explore and play with lots of 'makery' tools and explore their creative side through some thoughtful (and fun) provocations. But perhaps, the most creative activity this week was when Wendy challenged us to make our Kāinga Cakes!  We were blown away with the collaborative approach to cake design that our 3 teams showcased. Plus, nom, nom nom!

Throughout the week the team was provided with deliberate opportunities to connect, cooperate and collaborate.  Building our school culture requires knowledge and shared understanding around a few concepts such as change leadership, first and second order change and the FISH philosophy.   The team recognises that we are all responsible for this. We explored how to locate ourselves (see the video), ideated around the co-construction of our Norms along with discussion and reflection regarding the curation, conversation and celebration strategies that we can use to deliberately foster and build a positive, inclusive school culture. Michael also had us explore our Super Powers in an exercise of learning how we perceive our own strengths, which is an important self awareness to have and leads nicely into our Hermman's Brain Dominance Indicator work that we will be doing with Luke Sumich in Week 2.   Diana facilitated some initial discussion and sense making activities around collaborative practices and ILE pedagogies to complement the self directed learning the team has been engaged with through the badging tasks. Wendy met with a music provider who we will be engaging with for focused music lessons next year.  She also met with Russell French from Travelwise to discuss opportunities and to schedule some dates.  The building of these relationships now is key for designing 2019 teaching and learning experiences.

Michael and Kirstin ensconced us with the Flexible Learning Fact Sheets through our #ubiquitous PLG - Professional Learning Group- in Flipgrid.  This is an online tool that we can use to pose and answer questions around some of the key terminology that we use.  And speaking of terminology, we all dove into our curiosities through the co-construction (draft) glossary for our kura.  Our hope is that this glossary will be of use for future team members, but more importantly, to the families of our learners.  The team finished Friday with the 2018 edition of the Amazing Matua Ngaru Race.  Kirstin ensured that the teams delved deep through solving riddles, completing challenges and connecting with members of our community.  Dinosaurs, paper swans, Hallowe'en costumes and heaps of selfies meant there was certainly something for everyone!  It was a blast- thanx Kirstin!

What's Coming Up in Week 2.... Whanau interviews Tour of Hobsonville Point Primary School for our LCs EBoT meeting on Wednesday Tikanga Maori Professional Learning with Te Rongopai Morehu and Dawn Piper Workshops with: Jenny Barker - Restorative Practice through a PB4L lens Luke Sumich - HBDI, getting to know ourselves and our team Andrew Cowie - Digital Literacies, a future focus Sue Smith - Culturally Responsive Practices with an inquiry mindset A Maker Focused chat with Mark Osbourne Work on our 2019 Strategic Plan and so much more!  See you next week.

Term 3 Week 10 @MatuaNgaru Spotlight

Tena kotou katoa!

Week 10 has arrived so quickly! We've had a very busy term and accomplished a lot and this week was no exception.  We have been working diligently to prepare for the arrival of our new Learning Coaches in Week 1 of Term 4!


Communicative....


Diana and Wendy are continuing to conduct whanau enrolment interviews. Our extended whanau continues to grow with seven new families having interviews this week. We're thrilled that we are meeting more and more of our future learners.

Wendy also visited Kereru Kindergarten this past Thursday to meet with more prospective families and tell about how we're going to be an amazing place for their children to attend.

Diana, Kirstin and Wendy all continued their Te Reo course at the AUT Northern Campus. They are coming up on the end of their course and have become very confident in their Te Reo and continue to practice and reinforce what they've learned every day with both Amanda and Michael.

This Wednesday also saw an EBoT meeting, which Diana attended and reported our progress to.



Creative....

We had another visit from Mandy, our uniform provider. She came with some great uniform prototypes. They are starting to look really amazing, and are getting close to being completed. This has been a long process and it's fantastic to see something close to the finished product.

The blue colour on the uniforms is not going to be the final colour. We have had a very special "Matua Blue" mixed just for our school which the final uniforms will showcase. You can see a similar blue in the polar fleece, which also feels very soft.

With the new learning coaches coming so soon, Amanda, Diana,  Kirstin, Michael and Wendy have been busy planning the first couple of weeks of Term 4 so that we will all get a chance to become a team. We will be focussing on being Communicative so that we can "go from ME to WE." It's looking like a very fun-filled week filled with lots of new learning. 



Collaborative...


Kirstin and Michael spent the bulk of the week working together to develop a badging system for our Induction. The two have been feeding off of each others' ideas and have come up with some innovative solutions to practical problems that have come up in the course of their design. Together, they are very close to completing this mammoth task so that our Learning Coaches (and SLT!) have a engaging and motivating way to both learn what they need to in order to work at MNS but also to grow as an educator in a way that is personalised.

The team also joined in with Huapai District School for their weekly Friday morning tea. We value our partnership with them and wanted to show support for what they've done for us by providing them morning tea.

Diana also met with John Petrie, principal of Huapai District School, to discuss communicating with the families that have a choice between our two schools.

Curious

This Friday also saw Amanda, Diana, Kirstin Megan, Michael and Wendy take a visit of the new site. The progress from our last visit has been massive. Both our admin block and Arohanui now have walls in place and we can get a clear picture of the layout of both areas. The Kāinga are looking incredible and we can start to see what each space will look like. All in all it was a very uplifting visit and makes this whole journey seem more real, now that our space is nearing completion. Here are some photos of the visit:

What's Coming Up?

• Mauri Stone Ceremony
• ERO Visit
• More Whanau interviews
• Learning Coaches Start Day 1 Term 4