Thursday 29 May 2014

Development of the Morningside School Vision

I have a quote that I used to have attached to the top of my laptop.

“Vision without action is a dream. Action without vision is simply passing the time. Action with Vision is making a positive difference.” Joel Barker


In most settings where I taught there was a vision statement usually followed by a mission statement. My expectations were that these statements are what drove a school forward and were the foundation upon which all was developed, as is very much the case in successful businesses, and in successful schools. It always puzzled me as to why in the settings that I found myself in that the vision was never referred to. I solved this puzzle. The answer was poor leadership.  A lack of understanding that a vision statement is the glue holding so much together and that it is a powerful reference for direction, for school community purpose and a reflection of the aspirations that the school community has for its children.

As shared in my first post, the vision statement at Morningside School had outlived its use by date. As a leadership team my AP and I recognised that in order for us to make a significant difference in raising student achievement we needed to challenge ourselves as leaders and to challenge our staff. We needed a plan. As is the case with all plans we knew where we needed to start, but intrinsic in this was knowing where we wanted to get to--in essence the vision.
The Final Version
We began our process by consulting our staff with a draft vision document. We had the staff work with this document and had them pull it apart. This was an excellent process. It really tested my ability to be able to speak with clarity to key elements in this document--my beliefs, my expectations, and showcased my passion for ensuring that I was able to deliver a clear and precise message about what I believed was important for our children.
The first thing that staff gave clarity to was the statement on the top of the document. This was edited with the staff understanding that as a community of learners we all have to be competent, curious and independent. This also showed a clear link to the expectations for how we wanted the curriculum to develop from Years 1 through to Year 6 as can be seen on the right hand side of the above graphic.

We had done enough in-house professional development for me to be able to bring clarity to pedagogy. In essence this was to have the key competencies as its base, be formative in its approach, child centred and led and support authentic learning contexts.

We had done extensive work as a staff in promoting our values and rules over the last three years for all of us to have good clarity on these and the way in which they support our school community.

Teaching as Inquiry was essential in examining all aspects of our practice, especially for our at risk and cause for concern students. My vision for this is that Teaching as Inquiry can only be truly effective in making sustainable changes in teaching practice and better student outcomes if it is done collaboratively. Quite simply two heads or even three heads are better than one in achieving high impact and enduring outcomes. This can only happen in a collaborative team teaching environment--the ultimate aim for the start of 2014. Which happened.

The circular arrows around the outside of the body of the graphic used to contain the words self review. My study and research on self review convinced me that it would be better to talk about a process. When we start a self review process we reflect first. In this reflection process discussions take place, baseline data is gathered, a timeline may be discussed and outcomes are may be established. It may also be that through a process of reflection it has been determined that the status quo is acceptable at present. So to reflect is to either assist a process of action or not. The second part of the process is to review. A call to action. All necessary data is gathered, examined and desired outcomes and the necessary resourcing put in place is identified and sourced. The third part of the process is to refine. This means to put in to action the desired outcomes, monitor these and refine and tweak where necessary. For my school this three step process is in constant motion. This gives me an excellent oversight over all areas of the school. I am very fortunate that my principal and my AP are strong communicators. We work hard at making sure that we are all aware of what is happening and consult everyday. We also encourage this with our staff. I will talk more about this later.

To give more relevance to this document I knew that there needed to drivers moving us forward and elements of school culture that we needed to embody. We just couldn't pluck ideas out of thin air and implement them. The real core of this document is working towards a Morningside School curriculum for our students so that they become competent, curious and independent learners. On the right hand side I placed the words "Guided By". At all times we need to be guided by our school vision-an obvious point but one that I am well aware of that becomes lost. We need to make sure that our school values that support all aspects of school culture are there to support and provide good professional and community boundaries.

Beliefs cover all aspects of the implementation of the vision and also provide good depth to any rationales that we may have. For example, I believe that the best professional development that all staff have the opportunity to grow in and to best meet the needs of the school, is in-house professional development. By gathering data from class observations, conversations with students, parents and staff, tracking and monitoring unit evaluations, reading school progress reports, keeping up to date with my professional readings and taking on board the views of others such as those in the Virtual Learning Network, I can form beliefs about what I think will make a positive difference and also support the school's strategic overview. In believing this I must also give further depth to this by highlighting research that can support this.




Tuesday 13 May 2014

Going Deeper

Looking back on the work that we have done over the last three years, it is satisfying that what I have envisaged is now starting to bear some fruit. A positive school culture with staff that have been carefully managed and lead is leading to many positive collaborative outcomes for our children. But work still needs to be done in two significant areas. The first one is pedagogy and the second one is our curriculum. My AP and myself started a conversation that was borne from the observations that we are noticing in teams who are experimenting, taking some risks and are now aiming to make changes to team programmes. I asked the following questions, "Why are teams changing existing programmes? Is it because existing programmes are not raising student achievement?" This lead to the prompting of further discussion and more questions. We decided to meet with our teams and have look at their programmes in reading, writing and maths. We have issued the following questions that we required them to answer and provide evidence for from their Term One programmes:

  1. What is your programme in reading, writing and maths?
  2. How does it work? Unpack this for us.
  3. Explain how your programme is raising student achievement.
  4. Provide evidence for this.
  5. If you were to change anything, why would you change it? What's your rationale?
  6. How are you tracking student achievement?
These are challenging questions, but will provide us with good baseline data on planning and programme delivery, our teams' awareness of the impact that their programmes are having on student achievement, identify gaps in planning and for us to target specific professional development to assist and to endorse and celebrate where good practice is happening. At no stage of this process will we be making judgments.

My AP and I reflected on our time as full time classroom teachers and recognised that at no stage of our growth did anyone ask us these questions. Changes to our classroom programmes were usually driven by a number of surface features such as the latest and greatest idea from a professional development workshop, or seeing a colleague implementing a new idea and seeing fantastic classroom displays and book work, or not fully understanding the intent of one or more programmes that we implemented or seeing children not engaged and then making changes all over the place to remedy this.

Further into this conversation I also prompted that if our intention is to become more formative in our approach to assessment then we have to look to see if we are providing good structure, tools and time for our staff. This has prompted another look at the robustness of our indicators, our look at how we can effectively coach our staff, identifying points in the week or term to meet with teams to have them evolve to a point where formative assessment tracks student progress and then assist in the the changes required to  individual, group or classroom programmes.

In essence what is being shared here is the starting process of teaching as inquiry, especially the start of the process-Focusing Inquiry. The above questions are excellent prompts and ensure that the conversations begun and examined evidence and data showcase that excellent planning tied in with good formative assessment practice form the basis upon which to further examine the true intent of the direction that I believe our school should be heading in. See my next post for an explanation of our vision document.

The Results
We received excellent feedback from all staff about the questions we provided. It really made them think in their teaching teams about their approach to making the decisions they were making.  It was especially pleasing to see that our senior staff, like us, were surprised and also acknowledged that they had never been asked or challenged by these questions in their careers in different schools as well. All teams appreciated the opportunity to meet with my AP and myself to discuss these questions and their responses to them. The discussions were rich, allowed us to share where we want pedagogy to move towards, highlighted strengths and challenges. It was also a real celebration of how well everyone was collaborating. Key words such as seamless and transition started to appear as we discussed with individual teams what we believe needs to be happening with programme evolution as children transition into new teams at the start of every year. For example, we need consistency in spelling programmes across the school, we already have this in maths which is seeing children starting the new year with a math programme that has familiarity. This also needs to continue with our new inquiry model, reading and writing.
This planning review was prompted by a simple discussion about why teams or teachers believe that they need to change their programmes. This review has seen my teams sharing their answers after only one term of being together. I have included the email that I sent after our staff meeting presentation to staff about our findings.

Planning Review Major Themes
·         Research and Reading
Our vision is guided by research and beliefs that inform best practice. We have identified that in maintaining and growing our rationale for the maintenance and development of our programmes-then we must be challenging ourselves, maintaining our intentions and keeping current. This also supports our growth as professionals.
·         Transitions
More evidence is being provided by teams about the need for us to be transitioning data on children between teams as children move into new teams at the start of the year. We need to continue with documentation that highlights indicators achieved and hotspots identified for children so that teachers have a better baseline to start with.  The classroom description has been identified as one document that can assist with this, as well as classroom visits by colleagues in Term 4 who may be shifting to a new team in the new year. Seamless is a key word identified us. We are also starting to make some forward movement with discussions in how some core programmes e.g. spelling, inquiry can also transition well between classrooms. (It is interesting to note in discussions that the apparent divide that existed between junior and senior schools continues to lurk in the background.)
·         Communication
Communication is strong across the school and is evident in the excellent reflections that teams are showing. This is also evident in the way in which planning information and expectations are being shared with our Teacher Aides. It is pleasing to see that Teacher Aides are being utilised to their fullest capacity as they too continue to adapt to significant change.
·         Planning
Continuing reflection is seeing all teams continuously evolving and taking risks with planning—this is great to see as it shows that none of us are ever satisfied with the status quo—Teaching As Inquiry is playing a major role here. As shared, planning is more efficient when all teachers are collaboratively planning together so that each colleague knows what they should be doing-this leads to consistency with teaching programmes. If we want a seamless approach across the school, this can only happen if it is happening in teams. It is pleasing to see that all teams clearly understand this. We are mindful that single cell approaches are hard to shake off. It is great to see that continuous reflection in this area is seeing some teams working very efficiently and other teams developing excellent systems to support continued growth in this area. Well done.
·         Data
The what, the why and the how.  The gathering of baseline data, the tracking of it and the consistency of tools relevant to year level cohorts requires that we “work smarter and not harder” with this. We are all very conscious of making that each child is well tracked and has their needs identified and then taught to. But this cannot happen for all subject areas and for all 60 children every day. There is a need to tidy up indicators in writing. A big thanks to A-- for extending the reading indicators for reading and for taking a lead in meeting with teams to firm up our writing indicators.

General Responses to the Questions
Maths continues to shine brightly across all teams. As Ali shared, we believe in it, so we are confident with it-we get it and have the available rationale, tools and teaching and learning programme to support all that we do.

Reading is solid. There is continuing reflection in this area as well as the adaptation and evolution of programme delivery to meet the needs of our children in this new collaborative context and of tools-e.g. reading rockets with specific indicators for each level.

Writing for all continues to be our Achilles heel. We have identified this as a professional development focus. A--- has done well to start a journey of discovery in this area with his writing team-J-, Ali and myself.

Next Steps
We will hold a staff meeting—most likely in Term 2 week 8—to have each team present the tracking tools that they are using—why they are using them, what data this gives them to inform about progress or achievement or next steps or change to programme and how they are being used in reading, writing and maths.

Lastly and as shared at the meeting we want to acknowledge that we are thrilled with the work that is happening-being mindful that all of the above is a reflection of Term 1 work. We need to celebrate this very loudly.

Monday 31 March 2014

2014-We Have Arrived

Much of what I have written in my previous posts has been a synopsis of an 18 month journey.
  • A new vision plan and graphic that has been developed and presented to the Board of Trustees  and staff.
  • Professional development in-house that was purposeful and was delivered by leadership. 
  • Targeted group work in these professional development settings to build capacity and to identify good teaching combinations for future teaching teams.
  • Promotion of our ideas through targeted readings that were about research findings and case studies on best practice and future focus ideas.
  • Reformatting of our teaching teams and making sure that our staff understood the New Zealand Teaching Council Criteria by presenting their understanding of these and what they believe is evidence to support these so that we could rebuild our performance management systems and for our staff to realise that they are professionals working in a professional body. 
  • Looking closely at pedagogy and profiling our "typical" Morningside School child so that we could draw powerful conclusions about what our teaching approach should be.
  • Having staff present what they believe the positives and the barriers could be to a collaborative teaching team approach-which we as a leadership team also did.  
  • We also developed a new inquiry learning model. I have shared this on another page.
And so much more so that we could start 2014 with everyone on the same page, that there was no anxiety but excitement about what all we have done to prepare for what we strongly believed would be best outcomes for our children. 

And what a start of the year we have had.

Term 1
Because of the significant front-loading that we had done with both our staff and communication with our new staff our expectations were realistic. Our main focus was on our children and making sure that they were inducted and transitioned smoothly into their new teams and making sure that their parents and Whanau were comfortable with the new settings and contexts that we were placing their children in.  Our teachers had to and did understand very quickly that a major aspect of collaborating successfully was communicating at a higher level than they had ever done before. Not only did they have to be very well planned, but they also had to problem solve and reflect constantly at every break time, after school and before the school day began. Plans did change, sometimes after every break, classroom layouts-where materials and tools were located and where work stations were placed were in constant change in some teams. One aspect that all teams had to come to terms with was transitions. As I have shared in this blog, we made a deliberate decision not to knock down walls between classrooms as we wanted a collaborative culture established first-to problem-solve and get this right. However, our four teams were embracing this new approach faster than we anticipated and it has become very clear that the walls between classrooms are one of our biggest barriers. Transitions are challenging between subject times and to and from breaks. Teams are becoming creative but we know that the walls have to come down sooner rather than later.

At a leadership level our number one priority has been to empower teams to be risk takers, to develop team culture and to connect with their children. Our high trust environment ensured that our staff are able to get on with the job. We had a successful two day induction at the start of the year. As a result of discussions and feedback we also made the decision to include all of our ancillary staff in our induction programme. Our teacher aides continue to collaborate with our teachers in planning and CRT sessions. I will share more on new tools and systems below. In leaving our staff to get on with the job and not placing rigid prescribed systems in front of them we realised that some teams would get up to speed faster than others-the nature of the children in front of them and the induction of new staff were some of the contributing factors for this. We decided to use our staff meetings as excellent opportunities for teams to share what was working well and what wasn't. The feedback from this sharing provided me with a number of themes. I am also in the process of developing a powerful walk through tool for my leadership team to use.

How we started the year.
We started the year with a two teacher only days. As shared above we included our teacher aides and office staff. If we wanted to develop and maintain a whole school collaborative culture we could not discount the input and valuable contributions that these colleagues make. Our teacher aides work in classrooms so we made sure that they are also a part of our teams' classroom release planning time. We started our first day by having each team make a collage about their holidays. They each brought artifacts from their holidays and glued these to a sheet of cardboard. We had a sharing time that gave each team the opportunity to share their artifacts with the rest of the staff. This was a great bonding time. These collages are hung in our staff room and are are there as a reminder that we need to remember balance in our lives and to reflect on good times when the going gets tough. We then had our teams come up with what they thought was a profile for a typical Morningside teacher. This was to compliment the work done on our child profile. If we understand clearly what the significant traits that are apparent in our children then we need to be making sure that our teaching approach and that the adults delivering this are cognizant of the skills set and teaching programmes that they need to deliver.

New Tools and Systems
We understand too clearly that we do not want our teachers "bogged" down in spending their time in dealing with tools that waste their time, that are not purposeful and takes their time away from planning and analysing data relevant for their children. So we updated and developed purposeful tools that would be easy to use and that would provide us with good data. We now use the following:

  • As the school SENCO ( Special Needs COordinator) I developed a Pupil Concern Form that teams fill in if they have any concerns about any children in their class. Those concerns focus on: academic, behaviour, social, health, or other. This form is sent to me and is the prompt that I use to access GSE, my SWiS, RTLit, health nurse, RTLB and other in school intervention supports. I build a data base and share this with teams twice a term. There is only one condition that I accept a Pupil Concern Form-parents and whanau must be contacted and spoken to about the concern before I will access supports. This process has simplified our referral systems and also allowed me to identify trends very quickly in the school.
  • Out IEP (Individual Education Plans) have been simplified. I have made these more targeted and purposeful. IEP meetings are held once a term and are driven by three specific goals for the child that are reviewed. I found that a start of the year and end of the review were not as productive as they could have been. Our teacher aides are very much involved in this process.
  • ORS (Ongoing Resource Scheme) release time. I deliberately give this time to teams. I built a schedule of how ORS time is to be used. In teams that have ORS time given to teachers, we employ a reliever to come in and release teachers one day a week. We then give an individual teacher a one and a half hour block out of the classroom to do all of the work that is involved in maintaining their ORS child's support such as working 1:1 with the child, doing testing, organising IEPs, meeting case workers from GSE or other agencies, meeting with the teacher aide, meeting with me as SENCO and anything else that they think needs to happen. We then have the teacher go back into the classroom to work, observe, partner with other professionals in the classroom setting.
  • Classroom descriptions. We greatly simplified this document that is required to be filled in once a term. We use the key competency headings. Each term our teams are expected to fill in the relevant information about what has worked and what isn't, what they are observing, what tools they may be developing, any change to classroom behaviour management that has happened or is continuing to work and a range of other information pertinent to each heading. This information is added to each term-we do not require four separate documents per term. This tool is also a great source of evidence for the RTCs and Teaching as Inquiry and to support teacher growth during termly meetings with their mentors and at the end of the year for meeting with the leadership team. Other system information is included such as ethnic breakdown and focus children for reading, writing and maths.
  • We use eTAP as our student management system. I updated key aspects of this: curriculum data input by teachers and the guidance section for teachers to record and track behaviour concerns. I look after pastoral care at school and have made sure that this tracking is done to assist in identifying trends and to document concerns in order to present data at parent and caregiver meetings and to support agency referral.
  • Classroom release time (CRT). We give each team one day at least two times a term and in some cases three according to our CRT release schedule. We employ to part time relievers to come and release the two team teachers for the day. We also release the team teacher aide to work with the two teachers with planning. 
  • Annual CRT and assembly schedule for the year. This was published at the start of the year so that teams could plan ahead especially in meeting IEP requirements, long and short term planning and scheduling any other meetings.
  • I simplified the duty roster and have used teacher aides where ever possible to free up teachers especially on road patrol before and after school and play and lunch eating times.
  • We also made the main focus of our staff meetings as sharing times. We made a conscious decision not to embark on any further major themes-"taster" sessions or big picture sessions. Our staff have more than enough to get their heads around-piling more on their plates would have been too much when we want their focus to be on classroom time and collaboration.
  • As has been shared already, we updated performance management systems across the board. Gone is the once or twice a year formal classroom observation and then a conversation about this. I believe that leadership should be present in all team and classroom settings all of the time and that feedback should be given to celebrate the good things that are happening and concerns expressed when things need changing or to challenge approaches at odds with expectations. Another important aspect of seeing leadership in classrooms all of the time is that it informs the focus for professional development staff meetings. Leaders can quickly address concerns by targeting specific areas or bring to the fore colleagues who are moving forwards in the desired direction and have them lead staff meetings. 
  • We also embedded our RTCs into all areas of performance management. The onus is on our teachers as professionals to store and provide evidence of how they are growing as teaching professionals. Staff now fill in one form only to state how they will store evidence, who will mentor them-the mentor (this can be someone in or out of school) is not an appraiser-and be expected to meet with their mentor at least once a term. All of this leads up to an end of year appraisal show and tell meeting with the leadership team.




Friday 14 March 2014

Ideas to Shift School Culture

One thing that I did early in my education journey was to read extensively and build up a library of books and articles that I identified with that would form the foundation of my approach to leadership and best outcomes for children. I have written a number of journals, and still do, that document my leadership journey, my thoughts and reflections, my planning and a record of key conversations and sayings from other school leaders. I have looked for mentors to guide me, to discuss ideas and to give me feedback. I have also made a deliberate attempt when I have been with other school leaders to make my voice heard so that I can expand my network, make a contribution to the discussion and see where I am in sync with my leadership peers. It is also where I further develop my listening and speaking skills and my risk taking skills. I know my challenges in this area and seek to learn from my mistakes and successes as I have to develop confidence when leading professional development programmes in school.

One author that has made a significant contribution to my thinking is Michael Fullan. His book The Six Secrets of Change has had the biggest impact on my thinking about what school leaders need to do to establish, embrace and recognise that change is a constant in education. This book has been the main building block from which I have launched discussions, intiatives and direction for my school. I have also used many of his other books. Another author that planted the seeds of progress is Rick Dufour. His many publications about professional learning communities challenged existing thinking about how school change can be significantly accelerated when teachers work together to narrow the gaps between low and high achievers. Robert Marzano and Carol Ann Tomlinson have also had me thinking in depth about absolutes that need to be in schools such as a valid and viable curriculum and the power of differentiation in classrooms. I am also a great fan of the Best Evidence Synthesis Iteration documents which have a wealth of excellent evidenced based approaches to leading, teaching and learning.

I also visit schools to talk and discuss with teachers and leaders about their current situation, their challenges and take from these visits many ideas. I am fortunate that my principal has been a very strong advocate for my growth and has encouraged these trips.

The single most important idea that I have read and seen that comes through strongly for me is that there are only two types of schools: 1) Failing Schools and 2) Successful Schools. The single most important factor in these schools is leadership. It is as simple as that.

As you will see when reading the rest of my blog, my AP and myself are massive ideas generators.We talk extensively about our school and what we need to be doing to move things forward. We record these ideas on A2 pieces of paper-mind maps, notes, prompts and comments that we leave in our office and come back to over a period of days and further reflect, review and refine and then work towards presenting to our principal, staff and board where ever the priority or target audience is.


Monday 24 February 2014

The Pieces of the Puzzle
As shared, we believed that we needed to make sure that before we implemented our new vision, we needed to have starting point. Any starting point needs to be based on current realities. The best place that I have found to start is bringing an objective approach to current realities and expectations. The first port of call is meeting with staff. They are the ones that are best placed to give the best type of objective feedback, the ones that have to work with the decisions that are made and the ones who can give clarity to current realities. A meeting was called in June 2012 with all teaching staff to discuss what our current realities were. This was a great success. My AP and myself were very honest about our own failings as leaders, the restrictions that we found that we were operating under in our current set up and our firm belief that with the staff sitting in front of us that we could, collectively, move forward to better places. We placed in front of our staff a very rough sketch of the vision graphic that is shown below and an edited version of our vision statement. We believed that we needed a starting point to generate discussion, to show that we are serious about moving forward, to show that while we may have identified shortcomings that we held to the belief that if you have a problem then show me a solution so staff could also see that our problem solving capacity was purposeful. We tried to generate good discussion, but understandably there was much about the culture of our school that over a period of years saw staff being used to a top down approach of leadership and not being empowered to have a real voice in the direction of the school. This was a reality that we were aware of and knew that we had to change. We invited staff to join us in setting up a "Future Focus Team". This open invitation saw a colleague join us to begin an exciting process. The first piece of the puzzle was in place. We then decided to tackle two large curriculum areas: maths and inquiry learning.

Maths
2009 was my first year at Morningside School. I was one of the first cohort of teachers trained in the Numeracy Project while working in Nelson in 2002. Though the training was challenging, I knew that this approach to teaching maths was the way forward for maths education. I left Nelson during  June 2005 and went to Shanghai to teach and to become a vice principal of an International School. When I came back to New Zealand in 2009, I observed that the Numeracy Project was not embedded in school practice and culture in not only my school but many others. After speaking to teachers and my leadership team, we made the decision to pursue an intensive three year maths professional development programme with Peter Hughes-an author of the Numeracy Project and a lecturer at the University of Auckland. This saw every teacher enrolling at the University of Auckland to complete a maths paper each year in 2010, 2011 and 2012. This approach to whole school professional development set into motion a self review process that was purposeful and targeted to student achievement. This approach to whole school professional development also assisted us in using better and more refined approaches to gathering data to support self review. This added another piece of the puzzle in allowing us to focus our overall objectives collectively as a staff and for the staff to see that as a leadership team and as a focus team we were committed to making substantive changes to school culture.

Inquiry Learning
I also recognised that as our evolving ICT hardware and software was being updated and as we were adding new staff that we were losing consistency with inquiry learning. I trialed four different approaches in my team over a two year period to determine what would best meet the needs of our children and curriculum coverage. My AP and I also visited a number of schools to understand the approach that these schools had taken. We were slowly building up a good understanding of the direction that we wanted to be heading towards. At the end of 2012 my principal invited staff to make a proposal to concentrate on an area that they had a particular professional interest in that would also support the needs and direction of the school. Resources and professional development support would be given. Two colleagues decided to focus on Inquiry Learning and reaching conclusions about the best approach to use in the school. My AP and myself were also invited to assist with this focus. Each colleague took a different approach building on work that they had previously done in their classrooms. After many discussions and school visits made by all members of the leadership with our two colleagues, we eventually firmed up our inquiry process. Pivotal to this was the approach used by Kath Murdoch. We developed a planning guide and held two staff meetings that focused on making sure that the choice of language that we used to define the process was well understood by all staff. This was invaluable. And secondly we made sure all staff were clear on what was expected to happen at each step of the inquiry process. This was also an excellent way in assisting us in seeing where parts of the process were weak in understanding and where parts of the process were strong. We adjusted accordingly.


Saturday 8 February 2014

Staff Meetings-Continued Focus, Continued Drive, Continued Collaboration

Staff Meetings-Our driver is our vision
This is the fourth draft of our vision graphic. It has been presented to the board and is our launch pad for all future growth. I will discuss this more in upcoming posts.

Our key driver for all aspects of what we wanted to achieve was the implementation of our new school vision. However, we believed that this could not be done effectively until we raised our professional expectations for all teaching staff. Our number one focus was to have our staff unpack the New Zealand Teachers Council Registered Teachers Criteria. The leadership planned a staff meeting schedule that promoted collaboration and staff presentations so that we could gauge levels of understanding. It also gave us an excellent opportunity to see how well our staff were working together. We paired staff together and told them what their criteria was and when they were expected to present this to their colleagues during Term 1 2013. This pairing of staff also gave us an opportunity to see how well staff worked with each other, and with an eye to 2014, it also gave us an opportunity to see how effective some individuals were when working with different colleagues. This gave us some really good insights. We entrenched this approach for all staff meetings for the rest of the 2013 school year.

Staff Meeting Topics: Continued Reflection and Planning
At the start and during every term I would sit down with my AP and plan every staff meeting topic. We would reflect on our purpose for these meetings, how they are tied into our vision, expected outcomes and the format that these meetings would be take such as group work, jigsaw activities, presentations or a show and tell. This was-and still continues to be-a very thought engaging and productive process. We always aim to make sure that we keep things very simple.
We have two approaches when selecting staff meeting topics. One is what we call "Taster" sessions. These sessions were opportunities for us to give our colleagues a small taste of a larger topic that we knew we would revisit at at later date. "Taster" sessions focused on topics such as pedagogy-what pedagogical approach would be the best approach for our children and for teachers, 21st Century Learning-our aim here is to look at current thinking, especially with knowledge and how this is used, and Child Profile-we focused on profiling our children so that we understood traits and what we need to do to cater for need. These topics will be revisited this year. These "Taster" sessions also allowed us to trial resources and to make sure that we had a delivery style and approach that gave us small insights into what would work in the future.
Our second approach is our "Moving Forward" approach. These staff meetings are planned so that our absolutes are worked on and implemented into school practice and culture. Topics included the work we did on our Registered Teacher Criteria. This work saw us develop and implement a new performance management structure that has been implemented in 2014. It is an excellent tool. I will discuss this later. We also worked on our new Inquiry Learning structure and have developed our own approach for Morningside School that meets the needs of our children. This has been implemented in 2014. An outstanding approach that we are all excited about. We worked on Teaching As Inquiry. This has been unpacked to make sure that terms and process are understood. This has been entrenched in our classroom description documentation and attached as a vehicle for evidence in our performance management process.
In forward planning all of our staff meetings we have also been very flexible. After every staff meeting we debrief and evaluate all aspects of the meeting. It is a given that we do this. It provides us with rich opportunities to process the meeting format, the topic, the pairings, the feedback and comments during the meeting when we work with staff and to think about whether we need to do more work or to change the topic for the next staff meeting. We look at the next up and coming topics and decide whether to either continue with our meeting schedule or what we will change. My motto "Festina Lente"-hasten slowly-guides me in making sure that we do not rush our staff, we remain focused, we remain flexible and we listen and gauge effectiveness in the moment and change when and if we have to. Staff meetings have also seen me grow as an adult educator, as a leader and to take risks, to implement my ideas and those of my leadership team and to see my staff having buy in and seeing the purpose for doing all that we are doing. We work hard and I am having so much fun. But most importantly for me, I have the opportunity to assist in the implementation of our vision and purposeful targeted growth for my school community.

Monday 3 February 2014

The Start

Welcome to my blog!! I am using this blog to detail our journey here at Morningside School in Whangarei that has as its focus collaboration as a culture of learning, teaching and of community. 2014 is the start of a journey of collaborative teaching teams and the further development of a culture of collaboration in our school. 18 months of self review and professional development have got us to this point. I have included the word kotahitanga in my title. This is te reo maori and has many meanings. I like one meaning that this word has and that is unity. By collaborating with common purpose we draw closer together and unite in forging best outcomes for our community. I have also included the word connect. Collaboration and kotahitanga-unity are powerful vehicles but can only be made purposeful when we make the effort to connect with each other. Key attributes for this are to be found in the New Zealand Curriculum Key Competencies especially Relating to Others and Participating and Contributing competencies.

My name is David van de Klundert. I am the Deputy Principal of Morningside School. Morningside School is a decile 3 contributing (Years 1-6) school located in the suburb of Morningside. We have a growing school roll and have started 2014 with 205 children.

So how did we get to this point? I will detail this throughout this blog. The first place that we started was looking at our existing vision plan. It had reached the end of its useful life and was not in sync with the current direction that the school was heading in. Lots of different factors started coming together in 2011-12 such as a new approach to whole school professional development that saw possibilities for approaching pedagogy in a different and more meaningful way, a need to update our performance management systems to an evidence based approach, the introduction of National Standards and the updating of indicators in literacy and maths, visits to other schools to look at modern and collaborative learning environments and the continuation of our journey with ICT and many other aspects of daily school life. This saw us in 2012 setting up a Future Focus Team made up of my Assistant Principal-Ali Booth, a teaching colleague-Gina Kitchen and myself. This team was charged with developing a new vision graphic. The journey had begun.

2013-A Change in Focus
At the end of 2012 we reviewed our team format. Essentially we had a junior team of four classrooms and a senior team of four classrooms. In reality, even though we were doing good things, we were running two schools in one school-a junior school-Years 0-3 and a senior school-Years 4-6. We looked at how effective communication was across the two syndicates and the school. Syndicate meetings were being held every second week with staff meetings being held every other week. We found that there was a lot of communication that could be shared across the two syndicates that were applicable to the whole school such as whole school sports days, nuts and bolts or house keeping items. In general we found that time was being wasted when such things as field trips were being discussed that only two classrooms were involved within a syndicate. For 2013, we made the decision to have a staff meeting every week. The focus for these staff meetings would be purposeful whole school professional development. Our eye was firmly on the ball in relation to our eventual goal of turning the school into a high performing collaborative environment. The expectation was communicated to all staff that if you have a need that needs to be addressed be it in relation to classroom programme, behaviour, technical issues, big or small problems then you communicate with the person or people that can assist. We also provided and updated existing tools to assist with communication. We utilised our scheduling board in our staff room across two terms more effectively and ensured that all relevant dates were placed on this in a timely fashion, we gave clearer expectations for the delivery of termly documentation such as classroom descriptions and assessment data and made sure that staff-when they could-gave forward notice of when relievers were in their rooms.

The next aspect of this was also making sure that staff were communicating with their parents and caregivers with more expediency when issues related to individual attention needed input from school and home. The impact of these changes was better than hoped for. All staff knew what the expectations were and that being proactive instead of being reactive in communicating delivered great results for both students and all staff. Less time was being wasted and communication was being targeted by individuals and groups to the relevant points of assistance. This then meant as a leadership team we were able to use our staff meeting times with greater purpose and focus. Our staff just got on with the job.