Te Kahui Tai Kura o Te Hiku Across School Leader

When I first started as an Across School Leader for our Kahu Ako, I was tentative in my role and unsure of the journey I was undertaking. I am part of a team of four Across School Leaders and I believe that as a collaborative team of professionals, we are starting to find our way! It seems to be that whenever we bring different groups of teachers together, the conversations and connections that take place are dynamic and develop relationships across our Kahui Ako. Surely this is key to strengthening collaboration across our kura.

Our Within School teachers are an amazing group of teachers who are willing to share their experiences in their own kura with others. Together we have furthered our understanding of the Spiral of Inquiry and inquiries based on this model are happening across our Kahui Ako. Our Student Agency Survey was completed by many of our schools and it due to be repeated early in term four. I look forward to working with as many groups from across our Kahu Ako and collaborating to improve Teaching, Learning. Transitions and Hauora across our Kahui Ako.

Inquiry: Acceleration v Remediation

During the last several years, our Intermediate Department has grappled with accelerating our students in writing. We have viewed our writing data with concern and have tried many different strategies to accelerate our students progress. We ran our inquiries for a year and got some small shifts, but no true acceleration.

Then.....I read the book by Suzy Pepper Rollins titled 'Learning in the Fast Lane" and I knew that this could possibly be the game changer for both our students and ourselves. We began to implement some of the strategies outlined in the book. We developed our own learning walls and vocabulary (word, meaning, picture) that we front loaded the students with.

 We shared exemplars and the AsTTle rubrics to develop student agency in the learning process. We wrote with Chromebooks and used our Google Site to share the learning with our students. Our Writing Inquiry ran for 10 weeks and when the teachers met to look at our data pre and post inquiry, we were amazed by what we found. In 10 weeks, our students moved several sub levels, with one moving two curriculum levels! All students made huge shifts (up to two curriculum levels) in vocabulary, spelling and punctuation rubric scores.

As a team of teachers, we are excited by this collaborative inquiry and will continue to use these new strategies that have changed our practice and accelerated our students achievement in writing. Collaboration and new learning for both teachers and students is vital for acceleration!