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 1 @MatuaNgaru Spotlight

This term sees us based in Room 6 at Huapai District School. This is a fantastic opportunity for us to collaborate with our neighbour school and to base ourselves close to our school community. The staff at Huapai have made us feel very welcome, and we are looking forward to being part of the community.

Our Strategic Leadership Team continues to grow, with Monday being the first official day for our Office Administrator, Amanda Culverwell. Amanda will be in touch with many of you as the term progresses, as we start to set up enrolment interviews later in the term.

Communicative:
On Wednesday morning we attended the second session of a 12 week course in conversational Maori, held at AUT. Each session is 3 hours long and provides us with an opportunity to build our confidence and competence in communicating using Te Reo. This week we focused on introducing ourselves and where we come from, as well as asking others questions to find out the same from them.  We also had an opportunity to learn quite a comprehensive list of words for expressing our feelings in answer to the question, "Kei te pehea koe?"

We also received some wonderful news from the Resourcing department at the MOE regarding our staffing.  We had requested an earlier start date for our Learning Coaches and this has been granted, with the opportunity to appoint learning coaches (teachers) for a Term 4 start.  For a primary school, this is unprecedented.  Historically the MOE policy has enabled primary schools to start staff 2 weeks prior to the school opening.  This news gifts us the time to build our team, develop our curriculum, establish our school culture, co-construct robust induction processes and time to honour our cultural narrative.   This also signals the need for us to adapt our appointment timeframe.  We hope to appoint our learning coaches as quickly as possible so that our successful applicants can negotiate and provide as much notice as possible to their existing schools.  We are so excited to have this time together with the candidates that are able to join us on our journey earlier than we had anticipated.

Collaborative:
Wednesday afternoon saw Diana, Wendy and Kirstin heading down to Mount Maunganui to join the leadership teams from Te Uho o Te Nikau School, Te Ao Marama School and Taumata School, for a Leadership Retreat. Each of these schools will be opening in 2019, which means that all of us are on a similar journey towards developing the different components required to bring a school to life.

During our time away, we had an opportunity to network with each other, share ideas and ask questions. The Deputy Principals from each of the schools met together on Friday morning to establish a Professional Learning Group (PLG). This will enable us to support and learn with, from and alongside each other throughout this year, as well as next year once our schools are open. The Principals, already working together in a PLG, also spent Friday morning engaged in professional learning and discussion, relevant to their role.

Curious:
As part of the Leadership Retreat, we had the privilege of working with Mark Osborne  on Thursday, to explore Managing Change. We began the session by each sharing our personal and professional histories, and it was really powerful to have an opportunity to learn more about our colleagues.

A key message was the idea that preparing for change and sustaining change are just as important as the change itself. An interesting point raised was that resistance to change is not in and of itself a bad thing, and that it may actually be pointing to an area you have taken very little care of. Mark talked to us about the importance of ensuring our systems and structures are scalable and sustainable, meaning that anything we put in place will continue to hold firm over time and as the school grows.

We looked at 5 features of organisations that have adaptive capacity:

• Name the elephants
• Shared responsibility for the organisation
• Independent judgement expected
• Leadership capacity developed
• Continuous reflection and self review

Mark highlighted the importance of building relational trust in order to develop high functioning, supportive teams. This includes taking the time to really get to know our people and to care for their well being, and involves respect, integrity and competence on the part of all involved. 

The final part of the session was spent looking at Organisational Culture and how we can define, build, support and sustain a robust school culture that reflects our vision and values.

Creative:
With all of the amazing new learning we gained during our time away, the next step for the SLT is to look at the different ideas presented, and identify the ideas and practices we can put in place as we build our team of educators and establish the systems and strategies that will help us to make Matua Ngaru School a responsive and supportive learning community.

Coming Up In Week Two:
Tuesday - Uniform consultation afternoon - see our Facebook page for details
Wednesday - SLT Te Reo Course Session 3