Reflecting on our Cross-curricula collaboration from term 2

At the beginning of this term, Jannie and I had been working with 9PKr's English teacher to collaborate on a shared unit around our community.  They had been reading a novel in their English class that had similiar links to Marae life and growing up in New Zealand.  We'd had a few meetings to design a programme and although they were productive, I feel the unit didn't get off the ground as productively as it could've.  On reflection, I wonder if the context had enough links across our curriculum areas to connect it better to each other or if it was just bad timing.  

In their mid-term exams, students are required to write an essay on our significant places in our community and to think about why it is important to know about our community.  13 boys sat the exam and 5 of them passed.  7 girls sat the exam and only 1 of them did not achieve.  Overall, I was disappointed with the results as I thought the context of learning about our community would've engaged them in their learning and motivated them to try harder. 

For my next steps, I want to utilise the strategies that I had learnt from Jannie in term one and focus on really 'energising their brains' to slow down the learning and focus on understanding and applying key concepts and terms. 

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.