TeachMeet 0.3

I love going to these TeachMeets. I always come away being inspired by something and getting excited by little bits of information, or a new tool, or just hearing about what others are doing in their schools. Today was certainly no different - including the awesome food put on by our host school, Villa Maria College.

These are just my notes on today and I have just done a quick summary on each presentation. You can also have a look at the tweets made today using #TMChch.

Aidan Harrison (Middleton Grange School)- Christian Bicultural Learning 

Aidan gave us a quick digital korowai before taking us through his learning as a bilingual teacher. He went through a short Cultural Narrative for Villa Maria College, reminding us all that every school should have one and we should all be aware of this. I thought at this time how lucky we are at Haeata to have had time to explore our Cultural Narrative and how much it underpins all that we will do there.  He talked about Tātaiako - Cultural competencies for teachers of Māori learners and I found this reinforced the learning I have been doing at Haeata over the last few weeks (see other posts on my blog for more info on this). He mentioned about the challenges for staff around not feeling confident with Bicultural learning and he offered support for anyone wanting to know more.

Schira Withers (Our Lady Star of the Sea School) - Facilitating the teaching of Character Strengths using Positive Psychology and enhancing Wellbeing

Schira spoke about promoting wellbeing though Character strengths. There are 5 schools in a cluster on the southeast of Christchurch who are using the VIA Institute Character Strengths to promote wellbeing in their schools for staff and for students. They get everyone to do a survey to start with (on the site) to help them discover what their strengths are. The school focuses on 2 strengths each term (there are 24) for example, Bravery and Persistence and they look at topics such as the Olympics or books on these topics. Their school musical production is based around Creativity and Confidence. This approach works on being comfortable with who you are which I like.

I decided to do this test and it was surprisingly correct for how I see myself so I was pleased to see my top 6 character strengths were Honesty, Kindness, Leadership, Judgement, Fairness and Perspective. 

She also told us about the World Character Day which celebrates these character strengths. This site also has a huge range of resources that can be used to develop character. I had a look at a few of these and was amazed at how many there were and how easy it was to search for one of the 24 character strengths by age and media. What a great resource.

Jenni Williams (Redcliffs School) @nzgirljen - Quick and easy collaborative online tools

Jenni took us through 4 online tools she uses.

AnswerGarden from the TeachMeet

Answer garden - She found out about this at ULearn and I must say it looks great. She asked us "What do you enjoy about being part of TeachMeet?" and we had only 20 characters to answer. A really good way of getting quick brief feedback to get the most popular theme or idea and you can also export to Tagxedo or a wordle, send to Twitter!  The About AnswerGarden page is really useful to describe this in more detail. 

Padlet - This was a reminder for me as I have used Padlet in the past, but one new thing for me was that you can now share it with a QR code. It's really good for collaboration and some of my students have also done presentations with it in the past.

Coggle - This is a simple collaborative mindmap which you can add photos and images to. She got her students (use gmail account to login) to put pictures of themselves and then add information they wanted to share. Jenni used it for students to get to know others and to put in ideas about careers. I do like how it is set out.

Trello - I have seen Trello at a TeachMeet before but this was a good reminder of this project management tool. Jenni uses it for groups of students such as the magazine team or the formal group so they can gather information in one place about what they need to get done. They then have boards for to do, doing and done lists. I want to look into this a bit more and see how it might work for projects at school for myself and ākonga.

Snippet

Just before the break we were shown nGram which shows how many times words have been used in literature over a period of time. We were challenged to think about how this could be used in a classroom. At the end of the TeachMeet, Matt Davis shared his ideas with Pauline Henderson and myself and I got very excited about how you could use this tool to ask the "what if" questions. It also got us thinking about what happened in the past and what effect it had on literature and society. It certainly created a lot of discussion with us at the end of the day. Some of the searches that had interesting results were:

• forces, energy, speed - interesting to see what happened over the 1920-1940 time period and also the 1960s when space travel changed the scientific thinking (see the image here)
• AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ethics -showed an increase in books in 1980s - why?We wondered about  the implications of Moore's law in some books and we wondered about cloning on the effect of ethics. One thing was the AI increase in the 1820's - maybe a book on the future, or maybe AI meant something different then!

Duncan Bond, Nadene Brouwer, Richard McBrearty (Burnside High School) @bondteach - Collaboration in a Secondary School Curriculum Area

This school started with single cell classrooms then cut walls so they could cater for approximately 90 students with 3 teachers.

They made it optional for their faculty to be involved. The timetable had to be changed around so that all the classes were on at the same time and they have ended up with 2 trios at yr 9 and 2 trios at yr 10 - about a 3rd of their students are going through this style of learning that has a skills emphasis rather than content focus. They meet once a fortnight to plan next fortnight and their non-contacts are aligned with each other so they have the time to do this.

There have been many positives from this including their continuous discussions around teaching and learning, and also the great relationships between both staff and students. Some of the challenges were around having conversations when the people you work with do something you don't like, the planning time and the noise in a larger environment.

Lee Nanai-Stewart (Catholic Cathedral College) @Nanaistewart - Culturally Responsive Practice

Lee introduced us to the Educultural wheel which was devised by Angus Macfarlane in 2004 which she learnt about in her Post-grad studies at the University of Canterbury. She talked about how to understand the culture of the child, you have to understand your own culture. Lee encouraged us to share our background with our students and get to know our student's background. We need to demonstrate that we care in actions, not just words. The four parts of the wheel go together to create a culture in your school but are not designed to be taken in isolation. There is a blank version to record examples of when/where the concepts have been present in your class, or not present as the case may be.

She gave us some further reading to do:

Sociocultural Realities by Macfarlane, Macfarlane and Webber

Discipline, Democracy and Diversity by Angus H Macfarlane

Kia hiwa ra / Listen to culture - Chapter 8 - strategies for teachers - by Angus H Macfarlane

Article: Creating culturally-safe schools for Māori students - Macfarlane, Glynn, Cavanagh, Bateman

If anyone that attended has other comments to add about what they heard today, please do so in the comments below. These are just my thoughts and what I took from the session, others may have different takeaways from this. 

I can't recommend attending these TeachMeets highly enough. It is an opportunity for teachers to share what they are doing in everyday practice and I always come away with a taonga for my kete. Exciting.

Haeata - Week Five

Another week has ended and we are halfway through our term. The chance to have this time to learn and reflect is amazing and although I am excited to have our ākonga next year, I will miss the large amount of time we have been given to absorb information and explore ideas to improve learning.

Day One

Our first discussion today was around another Essential Agreement, Communication Fluency, which

looks at a combination of literacies digital literacy, traditional literacy, visual literacy, media literacy, information literacy,  and mathematical literacy. We looked at what Communication Fluency meant to us and then read these two articles: One on New Literacies in the Classroom and one on Is fluent speech the same a good communication? I found this second one particularly interesting as it talks about someone who stammers and how they still communicate effectively. We then worked together on creating some statements on what Communication Fluency means. Our next step was to identify some skills that we wanted to work on to improve our own Communication Fluency. Mine included learning about Snapchat, Coding, Podcasting and more on Dyslexia. I really liked one idea by another staff member around learning about interpreting moko and carvings.

This week we are having more engagement with the closing schools and we had some time to plan what we might do. Korepo (Yr 7-10 hapori) and Ihutai (Yr 11-13 hapori) are going to the closing high school this week and it was good to have time to put ideas together as to how we would engage with our prospective students.
After lunch we had some students from the primary school come in and take us for a session on learning the Samoan language. This has been a passion of mine for a while and I was very excited to get some basic phrases under my belt.

Day Two

We had some more time this morning to work on our plan for engaging with schools and then we looked at our Communication Fluency Essential Agreement. Today was around learning more on something we wanted to learn about in relation to communication literacy. I finally downloaded Snapchat, created my account - suemcl1, and sent my first selfie. Very scary! I read quite a few articles around using Snapchat in education and found this awesome blog by Ai Zhang @aiaddysonzhang - Dinosaur to Digital Savvy: How Social Media transformed my career. From there I went to 5 tips on how to use Snapchat in an educational setting and then I followed Karen Freberg @kfreberg on Twitter so I can learn more through some of her tweets.
Talking of social media - here is a great blog about how Twitter works and looks great for those just starting out. Thanks to James for finding this while he was learning about Twitter. I also showed a few people how to use Tweetdeck - a great place to keep everything ordered and join chats.
I spent a bit of time today working on some flash cards to help with my learning of both Māori and Samoan language. I am currently working through the Māori Made Easy book and as well as using the online help, I have made some flash cards through Anki which is an app you can download onto your computer or phone. It keeps track of your progress, giving you more practise on the words you don't know and I find flashcards awesome as I am a visual learner. If anyone would like to use my deck for practise, you are welcome. You can download Anki by downloading the app on your computer or phone and then you can download decks in whatever language you like, or make your own. I am really enjoying the learning and flash cards make it easier for me.

Day Three

We started today with a session on our Intrapersonal Essential Agreement. After writing what Intrapersonal skills meant to us, we did some research on them. I found it interesting to look at the difference between Interpersonal and Intrapersonal and I found this website that has information about awareness and competencies. Then we looked at the traits of people with high Intrapersonal skills. This site had a great list and had I found it very easy to read. We completed a quick quiz on how we rated on the Intrapersonal Intelligence scale. and we reflected on where we were on this. I do think age has something to do with it as we learn skills over time and we become more comfortable with ourselves. Learning about ourselves and others is hugely important. Setting goals, being empathetic, building identity, being secure in who you are and learning what you believe in all help with learning. All of these things are unpacked in our Intrapersonal Essential Agreement and it places the emphasis on supporting the learner in becoming self aware which I think is hugely important. This led onto a discussion about personality types and we did some research around Introverts and Extroverts and how we can cater for both in the classroom. There was discussion about the difference between being introverted and being shy and I found this article, along with other information on this website, helped define this quite well.
A lot of the conversation was about knowing yourself, so we then all completed the DISC Personality test. (Dominant, Influence, Steadiness, Compliance) I always wonder about these sorts of tests and although I agree in general about the answers I get, I wonder about the accuracy. For this test you have to mark what is the most like you and the least like you for a range of statements. This was often very difficult as all of them were like me sometimes so it was pure chance to what I put. I did the test twice to see if it came out differently but it was similar the second time. Interestingly, I decided to try again on a different site and although they called the factors different things (Dominant, Inducement, Supportive, Cautious) I once again came out reasonably similar being a mix of D, S and C. Interesting though that they call them different things and I am not sure that Compliant and Cautious have the same meaning for me. I was interested to see what happened when someone else did the test for me so I got my daughter to do it as she saw me. Interestingly she had the Dominance and Compliance swapped over, and a much higher Influence score for me. I then went home and did a test based on the Myers-Briggs personality test which I hadn't done for many years. I found this a more accurate way of working out my personality as I could rate each statement rather than having to choose the best of four. Reading the information about my type, I was sure they had it right. Scary!
In the afternoon I took a session with some staff around using Garageband which was fun. For all staff to have some knowledge of using loops would be great so they can make backing tracks and use music in class without having to be hugely technical about it. 

Day Four

Today we read an article The Nature of Learning - Using Research to Inspire Practice From the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation. The underlying theme was that if we have an understanding of how we learn it helps us to work out the conditions in which successful learning can occur. I like the term Gatekeepers of learning which covers emotions and motivation. These two things have a huge effect on our learners and are something we have to take into account when we teach. Many students have had bad experiences and this can impact on their motivation. Teacher expectations have to be positive but realistic and often in small steps. by using re-appraisal - reframing a situation in a more positive way, and de-personalisation - teaching ākonga to be more objective and not take things personally.

"If student experiences have been negative, the teacher may fruitfully provide incremental successful experiences in order to compensate for the impact on motivation from that negative experience"

7 Principles of Learning

1. Learners at the centre
2. Social nature of learning
3. Emotions are integral 
4. Recognising differences 
5. Stretching all students 
6. Assessment for learning
7. Building horizontal connections 

"All of these should be present in a learning environment for it to be judged truly effective"

 I found these aligned perfectly with our Principles and Dispositions at Haeata and I could easily relate them to what we are trying to achieve. 

Building blocks for Innovative Learning Environments

1. Cooperative learning
2. Service learning
3. Home-school partnerships
4. Learning with technology
5. Formative assessment - where are they in their learning? Where are they going and what need to be done to get there?
6. Inquiry based

After this session our hapori went to one of the closing schools and spent some time with the students. We played games, answered questions and showed them the plans for the school as well as some of the uniform items. Most of the students were very excited but understandably nervous about coming to Haeata. It was good to be able to answer some of their concerns, but also be honest that many things are still being formulated and we took away more questions to discuss. 

It was great to be around students again. I felt the energy level rise in all of our staff as we connected to, and were inspired by, our prospective ākonga. 

Haeata - Week Four

Almost November and the term is going very quickly. We are slowly seeing more staff arriving at our temporary base, the old Burwood School site. As the new staff arrive, we gather even more views and conversations about each other and education as a whole. We are so lucky to have this time together.

Day One

Today started with a look at another Essential Agreement - Hauora. The wellbeing of staff and students is such an important part of how Haeata will work and it was good to spend some time talking about how this may look here.
We talked about Te Whare Tapa Whā and the four quadrants Wairua - Spiritual, Tinana - Physical, Hinengaro - Cognition and Whānau - Family/Social. We then split into groups to look at how we could communicate this to our ākonga and whānau. Our group liked the idea of having a circle, as it also linked to the Circle of Wellbeing that we are using for our enrolment process.
Our graphic was a natural circle with simple symbols, a bird for hinengaro, plant for whānau, water for wairua and a fish for tinana. We layered this over our Dispositions and Principles so they would be linked to each part. Each group then presented their ideas to the whole staff so we could get an even better picture and feed into what the SLT are working on in this area.
The next session was looking at the curriculum and inquiry learning models. We had an interesting discussion at the beginning over what curriculum means to each of us and came up with some notes around the positives and negatives of our current curriculum. Then we discussed in groups and at this time I was part of a discussion around the NZC and what subject areas were compulsory or not. This led to me finding this article written in 2013 which talks about the pros and cons of making subjects compulsory.  It made me think about why we have some compulsory and some not - what is important to our community?
We were then split into groups and each group looked at a different inquiry model and then we shared each model in different groups.
Project based
Philisophical
Personal, interest based
Integrated
Play based
Issues or problem based
 I found this really interesting as each model had positives and negatives and we felt as a group that they could all be used a various ages and stages of inquiry dependent on the needs of the ākonga. Our group got quite carried away and related it to baiting and setting traps for students to fall into and then supporting them through it. Also having it being all about knowing the creature you were baiting (Possum vs lion), capture and study them, tag and release. We also talked about having the right habitat for each creature - not putting a camel in Antartica. Yes, we are all a bit mad.

Day Two

The day started with a workshop on Collaborative Practice and Karyn asked us 3 questions around collaborative teaching.

What excites you the most? My immediate reactions to this were around working with others with similar mindsets, being able to pool thoughts and ideas and being able to bounce ideas off each other. Getting other points of view and working on the fly together around student needs had to be a plus. Some of the other comments were around getting to know students from different perspectives and being with "yes" people.

What is your biggest fear?

Not having space to think - always being around people and the fear that we may not work well together - although that doesn't seem likely so far, as all the staff are so awesome - seriously! Some others mentioned the fear of letting go of power and control. I thought about this and from my work in the School of Apps and the School of Music I felt that I had managed this a while ago and it wouldn't be quite as much a factor for me.

What are your questions?

My questions were: How do you create an open, honest group? How do you define Collaborative teaching? This was later answered by teaching models.

We moved into looking at words that mean collaboration - teamwork, sharing, togetherness, conversations, reciprocal, being flexible, taking risks, disagreeing - and then to the opposite - individual, segregation, independent, solitary, one dimensional, own agenda.

(Friend, Cook, Hurley-Chamberlain, & Shamberger, 2010)

One thing that came up was the difference between collaboration and cooperation. We decided that cooperation is passive and has power on one side to go along with it, but you can still work as a silo. It has a feeling of niceness and agreement. Collaboration, we all have input into a goal in our own way, moving on a developing something together. This can make you question yourself and create something bigger.

Team members do not have to be best mates but there needs to be a sense of harmony. 
We then had a look at some team teaching models and although I have not seen these labelled as such, I have certainly used some of these in the past. All have their place in collaborative teaching and we can incorporate this into our planning. We can do this by asking ourselves "Which team teaching model are we using for this part of the teaching?" Karyn also made the comment that when using team teaching you need to talk at the end of the day for 10 minutes to just go through what happened during the day before getting into planning for the next week.  Just so everyone has the chance to say "This is what I feel or have noticed about today."

The stages of team teaching were interesting. Our staff have a wide range of experience in this area. Some have had no experience, and can count how many times another teacher has even been in their class, right through to those that have been collaborating for years. Stages of team teaching that you go through are from Organisational to Cohesiveness. We need to be aware of each stage and make sure we move from each stage to the next, rather than being in a cycle or holding pattern. As new kaiako or ākonga arrive, this stage will shift. Agreements will always need to be made on things but not to the detriment of the next step. Everyone needs to be contributing to the greater good. We need to be asking where are we in this and what do we need to do to move.

We also had a discussion around Pedagogy vs Andragogy vs Heutagogy and I found this article on the difference between these to be very interesting. If we can support students in self-directed learning then we will grow people who will be lifelong learners.

Leaders need to give permission for the implementation dip to happen. Initial data may fall as things are changing and being innovative. Collecting data over time may show that dip but with new innovations, this can take time to come up.  It can happen with achievement, mindsets and relationships and we need to be aware of it and work to move through it.

In the afternoon I was involved in a meeting around Augmented Reality and some possible ideas around how this may be used at Haeata. I am excited by the possibilities that could open up for our ākonga and am looking forward to seeing where this may lead.

After school I went to a lecture on the Pedagogies of Surprise by Professor Peter O'Connor and I have written a separate blog on this that you can read here.

Day Three

The Essential Agreement we looked at today was Te Ao Māori. We revisited our Cultural Narrative and had a look at how we could use the information in that narrative, how it would influence action and how it would inform our planning. We looked at our Cultural Landscape and filled out a sheet that has been developed by CoreEd which was titled "What do we know about our kura and the cultural landscape it belongs to?" There were sections to fill in about possible Horopaki ako, Localised stories, Landmarks, Tupuna, Iwi/hapū events, Waiata, Marae/hapū and iwi, Reo (one specific local difference in dialect being the change from using ng to k), and many more.  I found this to be a really interesting exercise that gave me a lot of insight into where this community came from, what was important and how this fitted with Haeata. I have since spent more time looking at the websites we were given, learning so much more about our Māori history and how it relates to our kura. Here are a few sites that I found really interesting. Ngai Tahu, Tuahiwi Marae, Christchurch City Library for some local history, specifically Tī Kōuka Whenua, and Kotahi Mano Kāika (KMK) .
We looked at our bilingual provision and how that was going to be at Haeata. Getting our heads around the different levels of provision was really helpful and Mel facilitated some role plays where our kaiako were students and she took the class at differing levels. This was a useful way to get our heads around what might happen in our hapori. I know from this that my goal for myself is to be operating at Level 3 of this immersion process for next year. I have a lot of challenges around this, learning about our history, learning Te Reo, but I feel this is the best environment I have had to enable me to do so with support and everyone else in the same waka. It has been a humbling and emotional process that I am very excited about.
The afternoon was spent looking at reflecting and how we do this as well as what we do to learn more and improve practise. As a blogger I find this relatively easy as I am used to writing my thoughts and I read a lot of articles through blogs and from Twitter. I put more personal thoughts on another platform, but a lot of my reflective practise and documenting learning happens in a blog. At Haeata we have a Google site for our reflections and Practising Teacher Criteria (PTC). What I like about this site is that it is split up into our Dispositions and our Essential Agreements for us to place evidence under. These have already been linked to the PTC so we are really focussing on what the underlying Values are for Haeata. The other thing I am really enjoying is getting feedback on my site. We all have one of the SLT as our coach and they make comments on our reflections and evidence. This is a new thing for me, but has been affirming and rewarding as I feel that what I have to say has meaning and is heard. Such a great feeling.

Day Four

Today we had a late start. Nice to be able to take stock and for me, recover from a very exciting evening where my daughter was named Dux of her school. Their kapa haka group has grown so much over the last year and it was good to hear them perform at such a high standard. This had me thinking about kapa haka at Haeata and what that means for ākonga. This led me to an article by Paul Whitinui "Kapa Haka counts: Improving participation levels of Māori students in mainstream secondary schools". This gave me more insight into kapa haka in schools and his views on culturally responsive teaching. I know that I will certainly be a huge supporter of kapa haka at Haeata. Often at Prizegivings you tend to daydream as the other year lists are read, and this one was no exception. I found myself analysing the evening with a Māori lens on and wondering about what an end of year event would look like at Haeata. 
The rest of the day was spent in our hapori. We started with a debrief on yesterday's session around Te Ao Māori where we shared how we felt. Our hapori then joined with Korepo which is the Year 7-10 hapori and we broke into groups to look at what a unit might look like across the kura for our first term. Our group came up with the idea of a celebration of identity and we had some robust conversations around community engagement and what this could look like. It is great to have this time to have these conversations and be able to build on ideas together. Another idea from a group was built around Kī-o-rahi. This was new to me, so I did a bit of research around the rules, history and opportunities. Great game and fun learning!
The next part was around our Principles and Dispositions that related to Te Ao Māori and talking about which we had a strong connection to. I really felt connected to Inclusive:

Inclusive

Ensure all ākonga have opportunities to participate in all aspects of our kura

Everyone will have access to Te Ao Māori and supported in their learning journey.

This really resonated with me as I go through this journey for myself. Haeata has been amazing in it's support and participation of Te Ao Māori and I really have felt at home here. We then wrote collectively into a document around our needs and skills in Te Ao Māori. This will be invaluable as we move forward with our learning.

Day Five

Our morning started with a Community Cafe. Many of the agencies that work with students in our community were invited in to meet with us and talk about what they offer. A great opportunity to meet with a large number of people. Andy gave an overview of where we are at this stage and some background to what our Values are. We were split into cross hapori groups and each met with four of the agencies to find out what they offered. The groups I met with were  24/7 Youthwork, Te Ora Hau, He Waka Tapu, RTLB and GenZ who will be running our After School programme. It was so good to talk to all of these groups, find out what they do and make contacts. During kai I also talked with people from Cyclone and Linc-Ed, connecting the dots from previous communications with both companies. We then shared our thoughts with our hapori, so between us we covered the many community groups that were there. So exciting to see what they can all bring to Haeata and I am looking forward to connecting with them all again once we have our ākonga.
Our afternoon was  a time for well-being and there was a fairly fierce game of netball or three and then some time relaxing and talking at The Bower, supporting our local businesses.

Once again the week has been amazing. Four weeks down and so much learnt and so much more to learn. My Māori made easy book by Scotty Morrison arrived today, so I know what I'll be starting on this weekend!

Pedagogies of Surprise - The joy and art of teaching

This lecture by Professor Peter O'Connor had a room full of educators hanging on every word this afternoon.
The moment we walked into the theatre there was a whiteboard with these questions:

When did you last experience **JOY** and **ART** in teaching?

Who has influenced your practise?

These immediately started me thinking and I know that I have always found joy and art in my teaching, but it was a little harder to think about who influenced me. I think my influences have come from the reading I have done, but also from my own children. Having to be an advocate for them has made me think about how I teach and what I would like for others as well as my own. I also think that the students I teach influence my practise as I work to provide them with what they need. It was interesting this afternoon to chat to the woman next to us as we tried to explain about Haeata and how our way of teaching was not going to be the same as other schools. Very exciting. Anyway, I digress...

The talk began with a background in Peter's own schooling which was with a Sister in a Catholic school. He loved the rituals but also loved the time he was given just to play and explore. He talked about being given time to listen to radio plays and songs, play games about fighting on the beaches of Normandy and games of rugby. Exploring meant that anything could be found and his teacher always said to tell her if they found anything. He always wondered how things got there and thought maybe she had been out there first thing in the morning placing the bugs and twigs for them to find. The joy of lying down and listening to Classical music was also a highlight.

In his teenage years he discovered poetry and decided he wanted to make art and trouble the world. He was introduced to "Three Looms" by Dorothy Heathcote and rediscovered the joy of learning.

I watched the video, after this lecture, of her talking about her work and one quote stuck out for me "to do with teaching teachers to receive, to structure so things flow from children". This is such an empowering statement and one that she made 45 years ago!

Teacher's College was a disappointment and he found it quite conservative. After he left started teaching English at a school that didn't appreciate him taking them out to the riverbank to plant trees and to talk about books and life in a different setting. He then became a teacher in a secure unit where he chose to do some pub drama where he set their work in a pub so they could relate. He enjoyed setting work where no-one knew where it began and where it ended.

I really enjoyed how he told us a lot of stories about his work and what he had achieved and one particular story I liked was about killing monsters. This is a great drama question "Do you want to kill monsters?" The class created a whole village that worked together and tried to kill the monster. He had sound recordings, newspaper articles and all sorts of ideas to make the monster seem real. Then a messenger came from the monster to say the monster demanded a girl under the age of 5. This led to negotiations, bribes and discussion. In every culture that he has worked in, the child is given up. The monster then pays the village in deceit and goes back on it's word. Who is the real monster? The village for giving up the girl? Some real learning happens in this situation. During the drama we start to believe we live the drama. This is the improvisational teaching of the Pedagogy of Surprise.

He then went to work with a Special Needs class and had a scenario of a person called Roger who lived in a cave and couldn't come out. His story around this was very moving and sad, as one of his students was diagnosed with cancer and he used Roger as a learning tool, where the students had to say goodbye to Roger. The student reacted in different ways, some thinking it was a good tool, others feeling they had to say goodbye twice. In school, we are lucky if we can touch on these special moments. Teaching can be a touching encounter.

Two initiatives Peter has been involved with are research into the Theatre of Social Change and the Teaspoon of Light company, which has this amazing video, the Teaspoon of Light where students use drama to make sense of the earthquakes of Christchurch in 2011. Well worth watching as well as is the second one featuring dance.

This really was about teaching as an improvised art form. To say you are not sure what you are going to teach, or where it might lead requires enormous courage. Conversations you create on a riverbank may create great learning and he suggests you "Spend your time on what you are going to start with, not what you finish with". He was lucky to have plenty of time to practise improvised teaching and felt the key was about teaching as a whole person. We need to be teaching for the present not for the future.

Life, death and love are what we need to talk about. Not everything has to be done about learning. We need to learn how to notice things. We should be trained to notice the extraordinary in the everyday world. His classroom was driven by mutual curiosity. we need serendipity - finding valuable or pleasant things that are not looked for. Pleasant surprise.





His final words of advice:

Don't miss the moments of joy and beauty. To be a better teacher, go for a long walk. Retrain your self to notice.

Haeata - Week Three

It is a short week this week due to Labour Day here. Having a long weekend was good to take stock of everything that has happened so far at Haeata. It was time to reflect on new ideas, cement names and faces, and then relax and get some gardening done!  It has been a tiring couple of weeks, even though we do not have students and classes to teach. The amount of new learning has really been challenging and I think as you get older it takes longer to sink in.

Day One

Today we had a few new staff arrive. They were thrown in the deep end very quickly with our workshop on the Essential Agreements which Karyn took. The focus today was on transdisciplinary learning and we started to unpack what this looks like. We started with some statements on interdisciplinary learning which we then discussed with a range of staff, arguing our points where needed. We looked at the difference between multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary and watched this short clip which explained it very well.
In our hapori we had some time to look at what this approach would mean to use as a group which can be very challenging for secondary school teachers as we are often very siloed in our approach. My work with both the School of Music and the School of Apps meant that I am on the right track in this direction but there are still things I could improve on to really make my teaching really transdisciplinary.
This afternoon was Mai time and I spent the time working out how to navigate Google Classroom, as well as writing in my blog and keeping up my reflections.

Day Two

We spent the day out and about today, looking at some of the amazing resources we can tap into in Christchurch. Our first stop was at the Ministry of Education where we were introduced to a large team of people who are supporting our school and our community. It was good to put some faces to names and to make contact here.
Second stop was to Te Pūtahitanga. What an amazing place. This space was full of a range of people who worked on innovative approaches to creating solutions for and with whānau. The design group that has been working with Haeata comes from here and it will be great to work with the Digital Native Aotearoa team in the future. I loved the skills and passions here in all areas and can certainly see many links being formed and fostered with Haeata.
Next stop was Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu (TRONT) where we were given an insight into their education programme. They talked about their digital initiative and also about the work being done to support te reo in the community by Kotahi Mano Kāika (KMK). Our normalisation of te reo in our kura will be a great support for this and I can see links happening here as far as supporting our staff and whānau.
The Ministry of Awesome was just that - awesome! What a great space for a start, where people can work on projects, and then to have the support and connections that the MoA can provide to help out. I loved the sound of the coffee and jam sessions and hope to get to one of these soon. This is a great step for people wanting to start businesses or continue with a great idea. One problem they have had with connecting with schools was the timetable restrictions which we will not have at Haeata so I am looking forward to seeing how this might fit with some of our students. They have also compiled an innovation ecosystem guide, bringing together organisations that offer support for entrepreneurs.
The afternoon was spent at Waitākiri School  which started on a new site this year, bringing Burwood and Windsor schools together. It was good to see classes in action and to have the opportunity talk to students about how they found the new environment, which has large open areas called Studios, and overwhelmingly they said they loved it. Students loved being able to mix with a larger number of students and many said they had a lot more friends. The only negative from a student was around the noise and it will be interesting to see how this works out in our new environment. You can see a flythrough of our Haeata spaces here. The challenge for us will be to plan our learning to really make use of our spaces and to try not to just transfer the traditional classroom into a collaborative space. Neill O'Reilly, the Principal suggested we have a read through "Clever Classrooms' which is a study done by Salford University in Manchester, England. I will say I haven't read the full 52 page report as yet, but the 4 page summary was really interesting. It amazed me that naturalness, which includes light, temperature and air quality, accounted for half the learning impact in this study. As many of the students were using iPads, I also found myself thinking of the SAMR model and putting this over how they were using them. Why and how do we use technology and what are the benefits? Where are we on the SAMR model and where do we want to be?
One of the great things about having this time to explore is having conversations with other staff. I was told about Sudbury Valley School today, which I hadn't heard of before. This school has a really interesting philosophy and the students take part in the governance of the school as well. Well worth reading about.

Day Three

We started with mai time today where I got a large amount of my blog written. It was good to do this reflection on our edutour and it set me up for our hāpori time where we shared these reflections. We also started to share our own thoughts around pedagogy. I felt we were all very much on the same page with the student as the centre of learning. The afternoon was once again around our cultural narrative. We had our first look at the plans of the school and it was good to see the spaces so we can try and imagine what learning might look like within them. We then were told the names of all the spaces and what each space was named for or about. Each hāpori then put together an entertaining presentation about the origin of their hāpori name. Ours was the Year 11-13 hāpori which is named Ihutai after the estuary. We had a lot of discussion about the history and the uses of the estuary and came up with a short skit.

Day Four

The day started in our hāpori with a new karakia that I really liked - Ka haea te ata. For some reason this resonated with me and it is one I would like to learn by heart. We then finished up our pedagogy presentations and then had discussions around some of the more mundane and process issues such as uniform, teacher names and managing of students. Many of these discussion raised even more questions, some of which were put on the wonder wall for clarification by the SLT. We then moved on to writing some narratives around what learning might look like in our hāpori. We have three different blocks of time during the week, kaupapa ako, puna ako, and mai time. Each has a focus from large group to individual and we have been working around possible scenarios for this. Sharing these means building up ideas together as to what learning may look like for our ākonga and once again it is really great to be able to share our ideas and have input into the bigger picture.
Mai time I spent writing blogs and playing with Quiver - a 3D Augmented Reality app that brings pictures to life. I have seen this used as a tool for storywriting and would love to get into it further in the future. One of the staff had organised for us to purchase a lunch from Fill Their Lunchbox. This is a great initiative that gives a lunch to a disadvantaged school student for each one we purchase. Great lunch and a great cause. I wish this happened in every city, not just Christchurch!
After lunch we had reading and viewing time where Andy gave us the results of the survey we did last week on relationships. We looked at what makes good relationships and the main points for me were honesty, openmindedness and communication. He then went on to introduce us to the Ladder of Inference which outlines the way we sometimes jump to conclusions and don't always have the facts we need. This then led to the Ladder of Feedback which we can use to make sure we have good communication and clarify our ideas without going off on the wrong track. When things get tough we revert to type so we need a structure to get us through those times and we can use this ladder to be respectful to others. We need to get the full story from the person who said it and we need to be aware of how we operate so we can be honest and open. This tool is a way of doing that.

Another week gone. Time is flying and the year is going fast. We are learning so much and growing as a team which is really exciting. I am looking forward to the next week and our next steps in creating this wonderful school - Haeata.

Haeata - Week Two

Part of the reason for writing a diary of my journey this term is to reflect on what I have been learning but also to document the path we are following towards starting a brand new school. This is such a different start from just changing schools and I really feel honored to be a part of it. Others have also been doing reflections and it is good to see this journey from different points of view. Karyn Gray (one of our SLT) has written a blog that sums up week one. You can read it here. I find it interesting comparing her viewpoint from my own and seeing how the SLT have been planning each activity.
During this week we also had "Random Acts of Kindness" (ROAK) happening. We picked names out of a hat and over the week, there were many little gifts, comments and cards being given out. A difficult task as we don't have desks or personal spaces, so there was a lot of stealth and asking others to help out.

Day One

The main focus of the first day was on our Cultural Narrative. We were very lucky to have Corban in again to help Mel go through our affiliations and talk us through the background of the naming of Haeata, our hapori and many of the wayfinding areas of our new site.
They talked us through the history of Ngāi Tahu and gave us an explanation of Te Rūnanga O Ngāi Tapu (TRONT) as opposed to the Rūnanga, of which we are affiliated to Te Ngāi Tūāhuriri Runanga. After this we worked in pairs to learn more about other Rūnanga and we created a document with information on to share with others.
I was really interested to hear about the origins of the names for our hapori. They are all connected and show the path of water flowing from Years 1-13. We went on a trip around to see many of these places, where Corban Te Aika told us of the cultural significance and gave us some history around them.
1 - Hikuawa - spring of the water
2 - Kaunuku - flowing water
3 - Kōrepo - swamp marsh bog
4 - Ihutai - estuary, before going out to big wide water

Each hapori also has a siapo design that relates to the name which relates back to the narrative. The community was consulted on all of the names, with the closing schools also given the opportunity to put forward names that were important to their schools. The Pasifika and European communities were also consulted and there are many names being used on our new site.

In the afternoon we did some more work on the Principles, presenting these to each other and then listened to more digital korowai as we continue to get to know each other. One of the staff mentioned this video The People vs the School System  in their presentation, which I had seen before but forgotten about.

Day Two

Today started with our hapori taking the karakia, himene and mihi - dressed in our lycra and fluorescent gear! It was Andy Kai Fong and Karyn Gray's birthdays, both turning 50 today so a double special day. Each hapori took a session this morning and we embarrassed them as much as possible with our hapori getting the Green Goddess to take them through a gentle workout (hence the fluoro). We had a shared morning tea - I swear I have eaten more than ever in a week since being here - and then listened to Rebecca and Jess describe our Transition scheme. It is a big job enrolling the large number of students coming into Haeata next year, all for the first time. The gathering of information from kura and whanau is vital to help us support our learners and in particular those with diverse learning needs.

Day Three

Today we spent the day at the Vodafone Xone in the centre of Christchurch. It was an opportunity to go to a different venue, have a look around the centre of town and spend time in a different space. We had a workshop on the Dispositions of Haeata. These are:

• Collaborative

• Compassionate

• Contributor

• Designer

• Rangitiratanga

• Resilient

• Respectful

We were paired together to look at what we felt these meant to us, and after sharing our ideas we went out into the community to ask them what they thought about one particular disposition. We had Contributor and came up with the question " What does it mean to you to be a contributor in a school setting?". One of the answers we got from a Polytech student which we really liked was to "positively influence the culture of the school". We then made playdoh models of our disposition (I am so not an artist in any way shape or form) and these were put onto a slide show so we all had to guess which disposition has been portrayed. Some were really easy - others were not!
We then split into our hapori and talked about our next steps. We need to work out how we are going to work together so everyone has been asked to think about our ways of working, our roles and look at sharing our own ideas, dreams, pedagogies and experiences. We then went out and had a drink together and got to know each other more, with some crazy story telling and some laughs.

Day Four

I started the day meeting with Andy to talk about our itinerant music lessons. This is very difficult to work out as we have no idea of numbers or of what instrumental tuition we may need. We  really cannot make any decisions until we see the students next year.
We had some time in the morning (Mai Time) to do our own work and I spent time on reflections and writing up a list of music resources that we will use from the closing schools.
Our next block was with our hapori, looking at how we will work together and getting to know each other more. We looked at what we expect from our kaiārahi and our SLT and fed this back to them. We also had another look at the values and what they meant to us.
The afternoon was spent playing a curriculum futures game. This was a really entertaining afternoon with each group arguing for a specific type of curriculum. Many laughs were had, but also many valid arguments. Our group had the project based, community curriculum and we managed to come 1st equal. It was really interesting, as each of the groups had their merits and I felt that what we need in a school is a mix of all of them. You can read more about this game here - or play the online version.

Day Five

Our day started with some more digital korowai and then went into a dispositions workshop. We looked at the answers to people's playdoh models and got a few people to explain them further, as they were fairly abstract! We then got to look at all our dispositions and make comments on them. I found that many crossed over from one to another. It has been great to have this time to look at these, but also to have input into what they may look like for us and our ākonga. Andy ended up wearing someone's halo from our RAOK gifts, which had us all laughing. More Mai time after this to work on our reflections and talk with other staff and then after lunch Andy had us moving into continuums around a range of statements. This was interesting to see how people interpreted each statement but also who was at each end of the spectrum. For example, I am both an extrovert and an introvert depending on the situation.

The rest of the afternoon was answering our questions on the Wonder Wall. We had put a lot of questions up here and it was good to get some answers, even if it was just "we don't know yet". 

Final thoughts

I really enjoyed learning about our cultural narrative this week. It really resonated with me and I found myself talking to others about it, outside of Haeata. It would be great if all schools in New Zealand could have this connection to their community, and I know many will, but I am sure many could do this better. It has been great to embrace Maori culture with our hapori doing the karakia and himene in the mornings this week. It normalises this and I feel it is a great way to start and end the day.

Haeata - Connections in week 1

I have been so excited about starting at Haeata Community Campus and was very keen to keep a diary of what I was thinking and what we have been doing and so I decided I would write a bit each day and publish at the end of the week. This is an amazing opportunity to be in at the beginning of a new school, and the process is very different from when you change schools at the end of a year. I have been lucky to be part of this new venture and I am finding it fascinating.

The day before...

After meeting with #ChchEd Educators @paulinehendog, @mattynicoll, @karyngra and @ginippi on Sunday afternoon, I had more questions than answers and the excitement started to build. We had a good discussion about uniform in schools and I found that I hadn't even given a thought as to whether there was a dress code for staff in my new school. I just assumed that I would wear what I normally would for teaching. It was good having Karyn there, so I did get to ask. Interestingly, she said it wasn't something that they had thought about. There are so many things that a new school has to think about, it has been interesting to see what the priorities are as another school had stipulated what they wanted their staff to wear. As Matt was also going to a new school this term, there was talk about the balance of getting to know staff, but also getting on with what we need to do for planning and I look forward to seeing how this pans out in our induction weeks. I am sure my social media accounts will be busy over the next few weeks as I learn new things and get more excited about meeting our students next year.

Day One

Some nerves this morning as I drove over to the old Burwood School site ready for our mihi whakatau. Great to meet with some new staff first thing and then we were welcomed to Haeata.  After our mihimihi Mana Whenua facilitator Corban Te Aika and Mel Taite (SLT) spent time to teach us the waiata that we would be mainly using. Our day was spent getting to know each other. We spent time in small groups, doing the usual icebreaker type activities and the SLT ran some excellent activities. We went outside and did a treasure hunt in teams - a great way to get to know a few of our colleagues and show our true colours (maybe I am a little competitive). There were lots of laughs and a lot of talking. We also got to see the new uniform, which looks really practical and low cost for families. Over lunch, a few of us decided that the getting to know people was quite exhausting. You are continually listening, talking, asking questions and trying to remember names and details. It really was a tiring day.
During the day we were encouraged to ask questions and a few came up over the day, checking if we can blog/tweet, uniform questions, dates and times as well as talking about going into our contributing schools. Many things are still in progress and will take more discussion over the coming weeks.

Day Two

I presented my digital korowai this morning and challenged myself to present something in a way I hadn't done before so did my first Office Mix and made it into a movie. It was good to push myself out of my comfort zone - something I feel we will all be doing over the next weeks. Each day a few of us are presenting about ourselves - a really great way to get to know one another and learn about some of the interests we have.

We then had a presentation and discussion around our values at Haeata. Andy, Cheryl and Haneta from the board talked us through what the school is based on and how the values came about in consultation with the community. There was discussion around PPP - Public Private Partnership which is what this school has been funded by. You can read more about that here.
We watched The Future of Learning and we had discussions around what this meant for us as a school. We watched it again and were encouraged to take notes in whatever way we wanted. Really interesting to see the range of ways people wanted to record their thoughts. My note-taking lives in OneNote and I love being able to write and draw and highlight as I note take. Being able to put pictures in and links is just the best. I would be hard pushed to find another tool that would do all of that!
After lunch we had a "Passion Unconference". This was the opportunity to experience learning about other staff member's passions. We were treated to workshops from playing cards to baking and writing Chinese characters to making Samoan ula lole. A great opportunity to learn more about others and also experience something a little different for ourselves.We were then split into groups and given a packet of pipecleaners and had to create something that was representative of learning at Haeata. Ours showed chaos, infinity, connectedness, strong foundations, collaboration and thinking outside the box.

Day Three

The day started with our karakia and himene (I have been learning a lot in regards to Tikanga Maori and Te Reo)and then moved into a session on Unschooling. We had a lot of opportunities to talk in pairs and small groups about our experiences and in one part to discuss failure and success and what the conditions were to make us meet these two things. Why do we try again and again and then give up? Or alternatively why do we try and try again and keep trying until we succeed? We came up with a lot of conditions that make these things happen. A really good way to see how we can support our learners to succeed. I realised for myself that I often don't risk take for fear of failure and things outside my comfort zone often don't even get attempted. We are all too quick to make excuses - not enough time, not interested and so on.
Andy Kai Fong talked about the cynefin framework by Dan Snowden (place of multiple belongings) and we looked at what each of these areas could look like in a school situation. I felt this resonated as I know I have been in all four quadrants over my teaching time.
We had some time in our hapori today which was good to get to know each other a little better. We played games (cards were a definite hit) and chatted about ourselves.
I had an interesting discussion with some staff at lunchtime around student well-being and was introduced to the Circle of Wellbeing and Achievement which Haeata is using when interviewing parents of new students. This has a really good framework to get to know students and plan goals and strategies to help with the transition into the school.
We had more digital korowai today and it has been great learning about our staff who have been very open in sharing information about their family and their teaching.
The afternoon was about our personal sites that had been set up for us which have our contracts and information and documentation about our reflections as well as space for working towards our Practicing Teaching Criteria.

Day Four

Our first session was on the principles today - Authentic, Connected, Culturally intelligent, Inclusive, Social, Open, Personalised. These are what Haeata is based upon and it was great to have time to learn about and unpack these. Firstly we had blank sheets of paper to write our ideas and unpack each principle. Then we gathered in groups and were given photos that we felt represented those principles and it was interesting to see how people interpreted those pictures and the different ways of thinking. We shared a story each that related to one of the principles and looked at how we would show success in that area. This was a good exercise in working out how we define success. It made me think more about what success is and how our students show that. In groups we also made a slide show with a quote, definition, song and slogan about one of the principles. This let us unpack them a little more as well as get to know more staff. I felt that the principles are all interconnected and felt good about how they would impact on our teaching and learning at Haeata.

Day Five

Today was a different day. We started with a shared breakfast and then had an Amazing Race. We were split into different groups yet again and sent off around Christchurch to find a range of items, build sandcastles and meet people in businesses. The highlights would have to be one of our team removing the required chicken feather from a dead chicken, pretending to be sheep on the side of the road, meeting some amazing people and convincing tourists to have their photo taken with us. We came back for a BBQ lunch then worked together on a presentation for the rest of the staff on our excursion.


This week has been like a huge week of professional development. My daughter thought it sounded like a school camp and in some ways it was. We had time to socialise, to connect with one another and learn about others as well as ourselves. We are very lucky to have this opportunity.  I certainly felt that my brain was about to explode a few times. However, it has been a very rewarding week and I know that I feel connected to staff and to this amazing new school, Haeata.