Qu 1: Student Inquiry Foci...

With the Manaiakalani goals of achieving 1.5 years progress inside a year (big 3), improving teacher practice, increasing attendance and hauora in mind, Richard Johnston, (our principal), challenged me to look at 'How we (PBS) are using PLD to accelerate shift across our school'. Having inquired into my own practice for many years I was excited to embrace this much bigger school wide focus. However, when I sat down to map out the way forward I realised I could make more impact if I looked across my own team, the senior syndicate.

To do this I am going to need to drill down into student achievement and teacher planning across our syndicate and look closely at how my team is using their new knowledge to change their practice and accelerate shift in student achievement in Literacy. To ensure this new learning becomes embedded within teacher practice we capture the journey via our appraisal system. This gives both myself as the appraiser and the teacher as the appraisee, a shared vision of how we can both contribute to their professional growth moving forward. It also means I can, to quote Russell Burt, capitalise on my role as our in school COL teacher to lead the teacher inquiry process to help 'build teacher and school capability in raising student achievement outcomes by linking evidence to practice.'

When looking at our class data we already have processes in place that allow each teacher to identify where the gaps are and think about why these gaps might be there before we can begin to fill them. It is not about trying to fix everything but rather strengthen the areas that need the most focus. In our team we do this both individually at class level and collaboratively at syndicate level. It helps to identify the commonalities so that we can move forward together learning with and from each other along the way. I will share this process in my next post.

My challenge now is to find out how I can capitalise on the learning gained from professional development undertaken by my team to help accelerate shift across our Year 4 - 8 classes. When I unpacked my journey forward I realised it's not about only strengthening teacher practice but also about how we can harness the creativity and power of our new learning to strengthen student engagement and spark curiosity in literacy.