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.

A progress update with ERO Visit #3 - June 27

We were thrilled to host Cynthia and Graham from ERO on June 27th at HPPS to share our progress to date.  Again we used the 12 areas they supplied to us in November 2017 but added what we shared in our March visit and our next steps.  It was a rather interesting day of sharing as I had laryngitis, but my amazing DPs demonstrated how successful their induction has been as they took over various aspects of our sharing when my voice gave out!  Talk about #DreamTeam.  See our slides below:

ERO was particularly impressed with the depth and breadth of our integration and alignment with our Cultural Narrative and it was wonderful to have Te Rongoapai, Megan, James and Alan from the Board reaffirm much of what the SLT shared in the morning.

We shared with them photos of our site visit as we weren't able to arrange one for them this time but we look forward to joining Cynthia and Graham on a site visit when they return in September.

Making Connections with our iwi and HPPS

Lots to highlight in this post:

Iwi Consultation:

We have been so fortunate to have such high quality support and engagement from the local iwi Ngati Whatua O Kaipara.  It began with the gifting of our school name, alignment with our school vision and continues with support in aligning the cultural narrative to our school approach including our logo, branding and learning hub names.  Tracy Davis and Te Rongopai Morehu have been hugely instrumental and generous with their time and knowledge.  Tracy also connected us with Graeme Tipene who is a talented designer who worked with us to develop our logo, which will also begcome the framework for our learning model.  Te Rongopai and her colleague Dawn Piper have also gifted us PL time this term working with our SLT to ensure we are honouring the history of the local area, including appropriate tikanga in our process development and in selecting our whakatauki for our kainga (learning hubs).  They have also gifted us the names and stories of four animal with significance to the iwi to use symbolically for our kainga.  We'd also like to thank both Dawn and Te Rongopai for translating our mihi and planning ahead with us for Term 4 PL (we have applied for MOE PLD Funding to heighten our Te Reo and Tikanga knowledge- fingers crossed).

See all of our work in our Cultural Narrative document.

Growing our Team
I have been working with Alan Curtis to develop our process for recruiting our Office Administrator who will start in Term 3.  We have had a lot of interest and applications and interview our shorlist of candidates on Friday.

First Time Principal Support

My FTP support continues as well with meeting with Brian Gower who has provided me with essential advice and support with connecting at the MOE level.  Highlights from our March Hui included Appraisal with Dr Wendy Moore, Julien Le Sueur- Getting to Know Your Ministry, Carmel Riordon- Financial Mgmt and Patrick Ikiua from the NZSTA on Governance tips.

Here are my notes from the useful FTP Huis as well.


Immersion in our Current Context
Opportunities abound here at HPPS to learn from and with the team.  Kirstin and I joined in on a TOD session led by Daniel and Lisa that both inducted, grounded and guided their team into their approach to conceptual curriculum design.  So much goodness to borrow from their approach.  We also had an in depth tour of HPPS with Lisa who provided highlights of their leadership and learning journey as they have grown from 50 to 500 since opening.  She talked about how they are working to infuse more play based learning approaches to enhance their learner centred, dispositional approach to T&L.  There was also talk aout how they are focusing on HOW devices are being used in the school to maximise the impact of device use, while increasing exposure to and use of other media for learning.  We were also gifted some time with Kristyn, one of the DPS, who delved deeply with us into their coaching approach- including some very useful advice and some questions we can use to frame our MATEs (Mutually Agreed Team Expectations) which we will develop for the SLT in Term 2.  Kristyn is an absolute think tank and we will be hounding her for more insights along the way!