COL Inquiry #2: Collaborate with school leaders and colleagues

Collaborate with your school’s leadership team and colleagues to identify areas where your inquiry will make a powerful contribution to wider school and cluster goals.

Today we met with our Principal, Deputy Principal in charge of Curriculum and our other COL leaders to discuss what our inquiries may be based on this year. I shared my possible inquiry and talked extensively about the links to our school wide goal on raising achievement and cultural visibility for our Māori students. I shared the fact that working with the Level Up team and literacy experts would help not just my inquiry but should support staff who are find supporting their learners in read difficult. I also shared the need for us to delve into Dr Russell Bishops writing of 'Teaching to the North East' as a support guide for our staff.

My presentation was received well my our leaders who offered support and advice for my inquiry. They felt is was important to support the literacy needs of our students and could offer PLD for our staff.

Here is my presentation:

COL Inquiry #1: Summarising, describe and explain the challenge of student learning

Question #1: Summarise the challenge of student learning you plan to focus on in this inquiry.

The challenge of student learning the I plan to focus on is around supporting my year 9 students to read.  I am thinking about my Māori students as a particular group to focus on.  A number of reasons for this are:

• My focus has always been writing but I’ve learnt that kids can’t write if they can’t read
• I have a new year 9 class with mixed abilities and ethnicities and I enjoy hearing their stories and where they’ve come from.
• Reading is a key focus for our cluster.  
• Our students arrive at our school well below the national norm.

Question #2: Describe how and why you have selected this challenge of student learning. Locate your inquiry in the context of patterns of student learning in Manaiakalani overall.

• A key factor to succeed in Senior Social Sciences is the ability to critically think and comprehensively describe and understand key concepts.
• In our recent cluster wide discussions, a number of groups are tracking well in reading but at our school, there is more work needed to be done with our juniors.

Question #3: Explain why you judge this to be the most important and catalytic issue of learning for this group of learners this year.

• This year I teach two year 9 classes and have compared their term 1 PAT schools. One class has a number of students sitting at stanine 8 where as the other one has a number of students at below 3. I can see in the students' behaviour and engagement the impact of not have literacy (or numeracy) skills could impact on their learning. I believe it is important look at strategies which could support the wide spectrum of learners in each class as well as accelerate who are below the national norm.

COL meeting number #1 2024

Today we had our first COL meeting for 2024.  It was good to reconnect with the other COL teachers in our cluster and to hear from our COL leader Russel the challenges that we face as a cluster.

We looked at our data from last year in PAT Reading and Maths and although some results were good, it was also a sobering reminder that we have a lot of work to do.

There were 4 cluster goals that our Principals have discussed and were relayed to us.  We want to:

• Have 1.5 Years progress inside a year (big 3)
• Improve Teacher Practice
• Focus on Hauora
• Focus on Attendance

These goals have led to two big ideas:  Acceleration and engagement.

Currently, our College faces the same challenges as many schools simliar to ours, in that students come to school behind in their literacy and numeracy levels.  We are struggling to get our kids to the correct learning levels as we have to accelerate their progress from behind. This challenge is something our inquiries can address through understanding the challenge in student learning. 

A focus for us is our student reading levels and our literacy experts and researchers have developed a Reading Practice Intensive to support staff in understanding, designing and implementing effective reading practices needed to our learners.  This programme will be something me or my team will be keen to do.  

Level Up! A Tāmaki College literacy and numeracy initiative

As part of an initiative to drive Literacy and Numeracy at Tamaki College, a group of HOLA's (Heads of Learning) banded together to look at ways to address the challenges.  In year 10 we started by offering level 1 credits before they expired which helped to put our kids on the board.  It was a successful programme which led to 95 of the 120 students achieving at least10 credits in literacy and 103 achieving at least 10 in numeracy.

We wanted to continue that moment into 2024 so formed a committee.  Recently we presented at our staff teacher only day to share insights into the initiative, ways to support staff and future goals we have moving forward.  

A key focus for term 1 in the junior school is reading.  At our presentation we discussed two key aspects we wanted to address in term 1:  PAT data and how to understand it.  There are two people at Tamaki who have excellent insight into what the data tells us and how we can use it and they are Marc Milford our literacy expert and Mele Suipi Latu who has a masters degree focussed on literacy and currently works with our ESOL learners.  We enlisted the help of these experts to show support for our staff.  Here is the presentation that we led, along which has accessible links on the presentation.