Term 1 2023: Presenting our COL inquiries to our whole Staff

In today's staff PLD session the CoL teachers presented the progress so far of our inquiries.

Our focus was on profiling and identifying our learners to provide a base on what will lead our inquiries.

Here is my part in the presentation:

Here is my whole presentation.

Staff PLD 2023: Dr Rae Si'ilata and the Va'atele team

Today we were blessed to have Dr Rae Si’ilata and her amazing team lead us through a whole Staff PLD discussing the Tataiako and ways to implement the competencies.  

Here are a few notes that I took from the PLD

We started with Dr Rae introducing herself before blessing us with a waiata.  We were then asked to consider the following questions:

I felt confident that we have started working towards knowing our mana whenua better and the histories of our community thanks to the Hikoi our staff went on last year.

The other 3 questions were really interesting to answer and our group identified the need to make a more concerted purposeful effort to achieve the answers to the questions.  Below is a favourite whakatauki that Dr Rae shared.

I will not be lost, I am a seed descended from Rangiātea.

The activity below asked us to identify and match what the competency was, a definition and an example.  

A member of the Va'atele team is Kyla Hansell, an 'old girl' of our cluster who taught at Tamaki Primary for a number of years returned to share how she supported the Māori students of her class in 2017.  Below are some of the images she shared and discussed.

I felt so inspired after the presentation and am excited to now venture into how to apply the competencies into my own teaching space.  

Staff PLD: Professor Graeme Aitken presents 'Understanding the Aotearoa Histories curriculum'.

Today our guest speaker was Professor Graeme Aitken who came to speak to us about the evolution of the Aotearoa Histories curriculum.  It was amazing to have him break down how the AOH came about in layman's English from his very experienced perspective.  

Side note:  I have known Professor Graeme for over 20 years.  He was the co-ordinator of the very first Diploma in Teaching secondary programme at the University of Auckland to which I was in the first group who took the course and here I am still here today teaching.  He is truly an inspiration.