Today 13 senior leaders from Uru Mānuka schools and our Outreach Faciliator (Mark Maddren) met with Aaron and Cynthia from Woolf Fisher Research Centre to share and discuss our 2016 student achievement data and plans for next steps. Hornby Primary had 3 teachers attending.
This was a great opportunity for our senior leaders to engage with the research and data, and identify the teacher practices that are accelerating student achievement. In the past, principals have attended these feedback sessions, but today senior and middle management were able to connect thus providing a wonderful opportunity to grow capacity across our schools. We want everyone to engage with the likes of Aaron and Cynthia, another way of thinking about this is to compare it to taking everyone to the movies! How often have you heard people commenting on movies and saying, "you have to see it!" Well, we want all of our teachers to hear the important messages from our WFRC colleagues.
One of the many positive aspects of today's session was that all schools within the cluster have effective pockets of practice occurring within their schools. The challenge for us now is to ensure these practices are spread across the cluster to ensure all of our learners are able to benefit from the affordances of Learn Create Share and digital technology.
Today's session builds on the work of our Professional Learning Groups (PLGs) Link and provides more evidence to support the emerging findings from WFRC research.
Comments from our 3 attendees
"Great to have the opportunity to reflect on the cluster achievements and discuss our next steps."
"Wonderful to have the 3 of us hear the same messages and collaborate as a cluster."
"Reinforced the importance of feedback (which I already knew), but in particular the transfer of feedback, which I am now going to blog."
Gary
ReplyDeleteBang on the money .. not only reinforcing the underlying message about the efficacy of MKO and our 'Learn Create Share' pedagogy, but probably MORE importantly growing leadership capacity within our schools. There is the TRUE strength of this sort of sharing and collaboration.
Thanks.
R
This will be a first for academics presenting research to be (favourably) compared to a night at the movies! I do agree with you though. It is a privilege to be able to sit down with the team who evaluate our practice and be able to learn from the patterns of great practice they observe across the cluster. I look forward to learning from you as you decide what to do with this new knowledge.
ReplyDeleteExcellent reflection on yesterday Gary, there is real power in presenting what is happening in the cluster and then allowing conversations to occur to between teachers to change practice in the classroom the next day. I guess the challenge for us is to grow those facilitator - teacher - teacher -teacher - facilitator conversations. Awesome to see so many pockets of promise across our cluster and across the curriculum.
ReplyDelete