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
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