School Leaders PLD

This morning the CoL across school teachers had the privilege of being invited to the School Leaders PLD.  This is an opportunity for school leaders (SMT), Manaiakalani Facilitators and Staff to meet to discuss topics pertinent to our Manaiakalani community, teachers and learners.

We kicked off with a korero from Russell Burt, Convenor, who discussed the main goal and focus for us at the moment; getting a '3fer'. A 3fer meaning getting accelerated progress in Reading, Writing and Maths. Our data shows that we do well across the cluster in writing, and that we have teachers  in our schools who are able to get a 3fer, but we need to get this consistent across all classes and maintain it for three years. He also discussed the need to collect data, as the Ministry of Education is falling short at investigating the things that teachers are doing and the impact this has on student learning.

We heard from Dorothy who recently lead this keynote for Hapara,  Fiona lead conversation about what is working in our schools and then it was our turn as CoL teachers to advertise our support in school.

Kiri from the Manaiakalani Research team then discussed the upcoming observations. These observations are really crucial for us to be able to pinpoint the direct acts of teaching that has a positive impact on student progress. The research team go into 20 percent of the classes in each school and observe the teachers, but also look at their planning, interview the learners and look at the student outcomes from the session, such as our blog posts. The observation from is available for all teachers to read and use; Dorothy suggested that BT's could use it when observing their mentors. You could also use it for a self reflection - this would have been great for me to do when I was on ClassonAir. So perhaps I will whip out the video camera once again.

Finally we discussed our continued use of the Learn, Create, Share cycle and the different opportunities we are providing for our learners to do so. We heard about lots of really cool expo's and creative ways that teachers are empowering their tamariki to share.

I thought this was a really rewarding morning. It is always great to connect with teachers across our cluster, remind ourselves of our 'what', 'where' and 'why' as Manaiakalani teachers.