School Goal #1: Raising Maori Achievement

In our department meeting today, we focussed on ways to address school goal number one, how to raise Maori Achievement.  Our achievement successes have been varied over the years, but generally our Maori students overall are still well below the national norm.

Culturally Responsive and Relational Pedagogy underpins student success. 

Introducing the goal
A way to introduce the goal to my team was to revisit some of our professional development the we as a school undertook last year around Culturally Responsive and relational pedagogy.  Culturally responsive and relational pedagogy is understood to be contexts for learning where learners are able to connect new learning to their own prior knowledge and cultural experiences.  

I printed off a copy of the front page and separated the definitions from the meanings, then handed the activity to my team.  There was a bit of reshuffling and refocussing and when it came to checking our answers, we all agreed that we needed to be reminded about each of the dimensions of learning as we got half of the answers wrong!

Site creation

I wanted to ensure that this goal was front and centre of our thinking, so I created a site on our department page focussed on tracking our progress towards our goals.  I like the centralised location of a site and how it allows us to find things quickly.  

I will continue to add resources to the site for staff to think about.  As I googled CRRP, I found some of the links that were coming up with our own staff blog posts about PLD that they've had on CRRP as well inquiries centred around Maori achievement.  I will be adding these blogs to our repertoire of resources. 

There are on average 3 students at each year level for each of our senior teachers.  At the end of the session, our homework was to ensure that we have had a meeting with each student and created a profile of learning for them.  We will also write down discussion points and goals to be shared at our next department meeting.  For my team, understanding how to address this goal will help them focus on setting goals during our appraisal meetings.