Term 4 - Week 3 Spotlight @ MatuaNgaru

Tena kotou katoa!

Our focus for Week 3 has been based around developing our curriculum, and thinking creatively about what this might look like at Matua Ngaru School. We also celebrated Kate's birthday with her at the beginning of the week, surprising her with cake and balloons!

Communicative....


On Wednesday morning, we were joined once again by Te Rongopai and Dawn, who helped us to unpack the meaning of our school waiata (song). They also helped us work on our pronunciation of the vowel sounds in Te Reo so that we are able to say the words of our song correctly. Each member of our team shared a short mihi and whakapapa (family history) and talked about a landmark that was important to us. We also spent time discussing our four kāinga animals and their significance to the local iwi.

Heike ran a session with us on the Wednesday afternoon where we spent some time further unpacking  our Herrmann Brain profiles and looking at ways of drawing upon different strengths and preferences to carry out a problem solving task.


On Thursday, our Public Health Nurse, Bridget, came to meet us all and shared a bit about the different services they can provide for the learners and their families. The team are based at Waitakere Hospital and support families throughout the district, as well as over seeing things such as Hearing and Vision checks, and immunisations for Years 7 and 8.

Creative....

Michael led the team through a session exploring creativity and how each of us defined creativity, so that we could move towards a common understanding of what being creative means at Matua Ngaru.

We had an opportunity to get creative and spend some time playing and exploring on Thursday, when Heike took us through a session on Play Based Learning. We were building bridges, making mixtures and creating collages, whilst also thinking about the different skills and learning dispositions we were using to complete each of the tasks. It was heaps of fun, and we were all reluctant to stop and move on to the next activity - just goes to show that everyone enjoys a chance to play, no matter how old they may be.

Collaborative...

Monday morning saw the team revisiting our golden circles, which outline the why. how and what that underpin each of our 4Cs. We took the time to review and refine these so that we can be confident that our practices and beliefs align with our vision, and ensure that everyone has a shared understanding with regards to these. Later in the week, we followed on from this with a session focusing on our emerging curriculum and the types of learning experiences we could put in place to support our learners. As part of this we considered Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and the importance of designing learning experiences that will help meet the emotional and physiological needs of our learners as well as academic learning.

By FireflySixtySeven [CC BY-SA 4.0  (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

On Wednesday, Wendy took the team through a session on ideating what our Whare Hapori (library) could look like, and exploring our ideas about the different ways we can use this space to meet the needs of our learners and the wider community. We are really looking forward to making 
this a vibrant, future focused space for everyone to enjoy.

Curious...

On Tuesday, the team divided into smaller teams and set off to explore different professional learning opportunities. Michael, Yasmin, Heike and Anoushka spent the morning visiting the team at Stonefields School and finding out about their journey as a new school, the development of their curriculum and the practices they have put in place to support learners and educators at their school.

Kirstin, Kate, Kelly and Amy spent the day with the team at Microsoft, exploring the educational potential of Minecraft, Michael joined them after the visit to Stonefields. They discovered that Minecraft provides opportunities for learners and educators to engage in all of our 4Cs as they work within the MInecraft platform. A highlight was being able to construct a building in Minecraft and then export it to a 3D  virtual reality viewer, where the buidling could be placed into a real life setting. We could see a lot of potential for design based projects for our learners.

The whole team were able to visit Hobsonville Point Secondary School on Thursday morning and were shown around the school by the principal, Maurie Abraham. The school has adopted an innovative approach to curriculum delivery and we were interested to hear about the difference it was making to the learners at this school. On display around the spaces were some of the projects completed by senior students at the school, and we were blown away by the detail and sophistication of these projects.

We were also curious to see how our new school buildings were progressing, so on Thursday afternoon, Heike, Amy, Yasmin and Kelly were able to go on a site visit to see how everything was shaping up. We were really excited to see just how close to finished our kura (school) is looking!
       

Coming Up:

• Wendy's West Auckland Library Tour
• Team visit to The Gardens School
• Whanau Focus Group - Curriculum on Wednesday 7 November at 3:15pm
• Curiosity Quencher session  - Thursday 8 November at 3:15pm
• Spotless training session
• More work on our curriculum design
• Another site visit for some of the team

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