'Spreading the Word' and Sharing

Yesterday we were visited by the Acting Prime Minister Paula Bennett and David Hiatt the National candidate for Wigram.

Talia and Lasa greeted the Minister and escorted her and David to Ruma Toru
(bilingual Yr4-6) where Ricci performed his mihi followed by a class waiata.

The Minister was then informed about their learning and entertained, some of it not neccesarily related to education (thank you Ricci!).

It was a wonderful opportunity for the children to showcase Learn Create Share and the affordances of digital technology in our Hornby setting. A great 45 minutes was had by all!.

Creating to Learn

Today Makaea shared her learning with me. Rūma Toru are investigating and learning about internal organs this term. This week they dissected a lamb's kidney and then created a slideshow to demonstrate and share their learning.

This got me thinking about creativity. Creativity is central to the Learn Create Share pedagogy that we are implementing across Uru Mānuka. Creativity provides opportunities for children to express themselves and produce something unique.

While Makaea was creating she was learning, and then she was able to share her creation and learning on her blog with a worldwide audience.

I loved Makaea's kidney creation and the topic related vocabulary she used to label her creation - checkout the link below.

A great example of how Learn runs through the entire Learn Create Share cycle! Another affordance of digital technology is the video embedded in the slideshow allowed Makaea to go back (rewind) and watch the dissection again if she needed to.

Slideshow

Another one of Mikaea's creations..

Professional Learning - Growing Capacity

Uru Mānuka Senior Leaders PLG

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."