Revisiting Our Vision #2

There is a lot to think about when checking the quality and relevance of our school vision statement. Our vision statement was created with input from staff, Board, whānau and students. It belongs to them all. However a school community changes over time and it is really important to check in and question the relevance of the vision for the current community.

We need to critique its effectiveness, asking questions such as:

Is it specific?
Is it magnetic?
Is it aspirational?
Is it relevant?
Is it challenging?
Does it describe what success would look like?

We need to consider what our school would look like in three years time should we achieve our vision?

We need our stakeholders to consider what they think our school would look like in three years time should we achieve our vision.

How will we go about collecting voice on these questions?

Revisiting Our Vision @stfrancischch # 1

      

Our school has now been open for four years and in that four years we have worked towards realising our vision:

Choosing to be an innovative Catholic Learning Community that inspires and empowers learners to succeed.

This vision was created with input from whānau, staff and students in the latter part of 2016 - with final decisions being made at the beginning of 2017.

We are proud of its aspirational view. We spent a lot of time choosing every word from the feedback and aspirations of all our stakeholders.

A lot has changed though as we have moved forward on our journey.

Since this vision was established we have joined the Manaiakalani community which has helped us increase our students and our own Digital Fluency. We have moved forward in our bid to provide collaborative and visible teaching and learning, anytime, anywhere, anyhow. 

We have taken an innovative approach to reporting to parents using Linc-Ed which has now migrated to LINC-ED Hero. Our parents have information at their fingertips regarding their children's current goals in Reading, Writing and Maths. We are soon to add Religious Education to this list as well. 

We deliver the rest of the curriculum through a Project Based Learning Approach. This isn't new - we were doing this from when our school opened however our approach is much more refined. We try to give the students real life problems or issues to work on collaboratively. We share our learning with our community and also the world via student blogs. Through this approach to delivering the curriculum we are able to focus on the 6 C's; Character, Citizenship, Communication, Collaboration, Creativity and Critical Thinking. We use the Linc-Ed tool to report on these areas as well.

Key Areas of Investigation for 2020

The Power of Autonomy

We try to put the learners at the centre of every decision and we ensure that decisions are also based on current research. Our Leadership Team Inquiry in 2019 was based on The Power of Autonomy. We have learned that student autonomy = student voice + student agency + student leadership. We are not there yet but this continues to be a huge focus for us in 2020.

Cultural Responsiveness

This is an area that we are also growing as indicated in our last ERO report. We have plans of increasing whānau engagement with Whānau Hui. All of our staff have attended a workshop at Tuahiwi Marae which has been a great ignition for our work in this area.

Structured Language Approach to Teaching Reading

This year we have introduced this approach to teaching Reading in our Junior School. Maire Bowler (DP) is leading this. A lot of background research and thinking has gone into the decision to change the approach we use and we believe that this will better set up our students for success in the future.

Springboard Trust Strategic Leadership for Principals

This year I am participating in the Springboard Trust Strategic Leadership for Principals 2020 programme. Over the year I am participating in workshops that will lead our Board of Trustees through the process of developing a new Strategic Plan.

One of my tasks  at the moment is to lead the revisiting of the vision to see if it is still relevant for us now, nearly four years after it was created.

This is a great time to be doing this - we can reflect on our our journey over the last four years and throughout our time of Distance Learning:

How relevant was our vision throughout this time?

How relevant is our vision now? 

Does our vision encompass the Manaiaikalani pedagogy that is becoming embedded in our school? 

Is our vision future-fit?

These are just some of the questions our Board and other stakeholders will want to be discussing in this process. 

Ubiquitous Learning

The kaupapa of the day is Ubiquitous - especially pertinent for me today as I have just sat the Level 1 Google Educator exam. I have spent a few hours revisiting learning in my own time as the business of the school day has not allowed time for this. I have been grateful to be able to access the learning when it has suited me.

The last few weeks of DFI have ben full of new learning for me as well as revisiting some things I had already learned. One of the best things for me has been the way we have been able to access the rewindable learning afterwards to learn at my own pace.

What I really like about this is that because I knew that the learning was visible and that I had access to go back and revisit it, it took the stress (if there was any) out of the face to face (online) sessions. This must be the same for our learners in our schools - knowing that they can revisit the learning is extremely reassuring for them.



The Manaikalani kaupapa has been modelled so well for us in the running of the DFI over the last 9 weeks. 

The DFI seamlessly went online when Covid -19 forced us all to stay home, as did our learning programmes at school. 

The DFI has ensured that all learning is visible and shared with us well before we have to engage with it - as have our teachers who have ensured that this is the case for our learners. 

The DFI format has ensured there has been rewindable learning for all cohorts - just as our learning programmes have for our students.

We have been connected and have been sharing our learning - linked up with others teaching and leading throughout NZ, just like our learners at school have been connected and have been sharing their learning with their peers and also globally. 


                                           I think this slide said it all for me today.

At St Francis I would like us to aim to apply this to all our teaching and learning from here on in - capture the teaching and learning and make it rewindable for all our learners.

What is your biggest takeaway from the DFI?

DFI #8 Empowering Learners & Rock, Paper, Scissors - Computational Thinking

What a great journey we have been on over the last eight weeks. Alongside the DFI I have also started on a journey to review our schools strategic plan with the help of the Springboard Trust Programme: Strategic Leadership for Principals.

This week at DFI we explored the kaupapa of "empowered". This is also one of the key words in the vision of St Francis of Assisi Catholic School. This week at the Springboard Trust workshop we started to unpack our vision and look to see whether it was time to review whether this vision was still relevant for our school.

I felt like it was serendipity that in two workshops this week I was able to unpack this word and see what it meant - not only as part of the Maniaiakanlani kaupapa but as part of the vision of our school - the vision we have for all learners in our school.

Our vision: Choosing to be an innovative Catholic Learning Community that inspires and empowers learners to succeed.

The Manaiakalani kaupapa of empowered is about learners being able to take control of their learning - it actually mirrors the kaupapa St Francis of Assisi Catholic School has about students having agency. I understand why Manaiakalani use the word empower - the word agency has different connotations in the Manaiakalani decile 1A community than it does in ours however I like the word empower more anyway. 

At St Francis of Assisi we want to empower our learners to succeed, we want them to be digitally fluent, have agile characteristics, and we need our learners to be empowered to contribute to the future - the big picture.

We will be working more on unpacking our vision over the next couple of months - one thing though that I can say is that the word empower is one that we want to be part of our vision moving forward.

New Learning:

This week we also explored computational thinking. We had time to explore a few different programmes that offer learning in basic coding. I loved this explore time. I have played around with Scratch before so decided to find out more about Microbits. Might have to purchase some of these for our code club - was a lot of fun.

Here is my Rock, Paper, Scissors game, and the code behind it.

DFI #7 Being Cybersmart and Devices

There are a plethora of excellent Cybersmart resources posted on the Manaiakalani site to help us "prepare and empower our learners to manage in an online world".

One of our aims is to empower our learners to be smart and make smart decisions. This needs to be a whole school focus and this session has made me reflect on whether this is the case at our school. 

In our first year of Manaiakalani Outreach it certainly wasn't - it seemed that the Manaiakalani pedagogy was only reflected in the work of those that were working with the Education Programme Facilitator. 

This has definitely changed over the last year and a half - we can see and hear a  growing common language around our Cybersmart practice. There is planned and deliberate teaching and learning that focuses on smart learners, smart footprint and smart relationships at most levels. 

I think we still have work to do in this area however so that it becomes a shared language across all levels of our school and that it is reflected in the discussions we have and information we share with our whānau.

It wasn't really until this session that I realised the depth of the resources that have been created and shared with us as part of Manaiakalani Outreach. Moving ahead from this I am going to start to share the ideas and thinking around these resources with our whānau - a new section called cybersmart snippets in our newsletter. We want to empower our whānau to connect with their children's learning as best we can.

New Learning

While learning about the kaupapa "cybersmart" at our DFI session we were challenged with using different devices this week.

I didn't think this would be too much of a bother until I had to find all the shortcuts on a Chromebook - so good learning for me. 

Our students are so adept at using Chromebooks which is fantastic but I certainly had some learning to do! Digital Fluency is about being able to use any device - it is really important that we understand the learning experience our learners are having so I am glad that I was able to experience this. 

Are you digitally fluent?

DFI #6 Connected to a Powerful Network!

We are delivering education in very different times at the moment - not really planned for however actually maybe we could say well planned for. 

A couple of weeks ago I remember reporting to our community that ...

"The last few weeks have certainly been fast and furious but I am so proud of our school's response to Distance Learning. It is like we have been gearing up for this as the shift has been relatively seamless".

The shift for us has actually been quite seamless and I think this is because of the powerful connections within and across our Manaiakalani Outreach Schools.

The kaupapa for last week's DFI session was the pedagogy around Connected. I like the phrase - Connected Learners Share.

Our learners have many opportunities to share - the main one being on their blogs. However my focus today is on our teachers.

Our teachers have had to pivot many times in the last 6 weeks. Support from our Manaiakalani whānau has been vital. A shout out to the awesome support we get from Mark Maddren and Sharon Spragg for the way they have provided support to our staff during this time. 


Pre- Rāhui

Before the Rāhui - we were working on making Teaching and Learning more visible using Sites - I am sure some teachers could not always understand the why, or see the worth but we were working towards this anyway. We had our Education Programme Leaders onsite one day a week supporting each Hub to get the sites going as well as many other things.

Rāhui - Pivot

Now delivering Teaching and Learning by Distance, all of a sudden those teachers who were not using sites as much could see the value. We had two days to provide onsite support and then it was all go. Support form our large connected network has been helpful at this stage as well

Alert Level 3 - Pivot

We have left all our teachers at home delivering Distance Learning and two members of our SLT are managing the bubbles at school. We wanted to have the least number of people onsite as possible but also give more time for our teachers to deliver Distance Learning, to refine systems and to provide the best Distance Learning we could.

The SLT have had to pivot to now working onsite with our bubbles. 

Our teaching staff pivot is that they are now being asked to review what they are delivering using the criteria from last week's session; Visual Appeal and User Experience as well as feedback that we have received. We want to ensure that what is being delivered is high quality; providing stretch for some and the right supports for others. 

Some things we are considering:

- Is there too much text on the Learn, Create, Share instructions?
- Is the pathway clear?
- Is there opportunity for students to show stretch?
- What workshops (google meets) can we add that will support the programme?
- How will we gather student voice on Distance Learning?
- How will we gather Whānau voice?
- How are our learners managing student agency?
- What has been the best of what we are offering?
- What new areas of the curriculum can we offer now that the Core subjects are well embedded?
- How can we use our support staff to provide more support for those who need it?

The next pivot point will be when we are asked to go to Level 2 and when all teachers come back on site. There will be another set of questions to focus on then for sure.

Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano (@langwitches) in her blogpost Let’s Not Go Back, Let’s Go Forward! asks these questions:

"What will we keep? What will we throw out? What will we upgrade?"

"How can we prepare to not “bungee chord” back to the way teaching and learning “was done” or was accepted as the norm before the COVID-19 crisis? What skills and literacies are suddenly relevant? What will we learn from the disruption? How will we adapt, evolve and improve education?"



These are great questions  - we are going to need the power of our connected network as we collaborate and find answers to these over the coming weeks. 

Being part of this connected network affords us so many opportunities - and our teachers are now more aware than ever of the advantages. 

We have been lurking, taking advantage of the professional development on offer and improving our practice. We have learned so much during this time and I believe we have an obligation to share this learning and play our part in finding the answers to these questions. - Connected Learners Share! 

DFI #5 Collaborate - Visible Teaching and Learning

Ever since our school opened in 2016 we have been striving towards the kaupapa of Visible Learning. As a leadership team we had spent some time looking at Hatties research that breaks down what provides the most success in learning.

Hattie defines Visible Learners as students who can:

• Articulate what they are learning
• Explain the next steps in their learning
• Set learning goals
• See errors as opportunities for further learning
• Know what to do when they are stuck

Our expectations have always been that teachers would share learning intentions and co-construct success criteria, provide feedback for students,  and work with students to set their own goals.

What has changed since we joined the Manaiakalani whānau is the introduction of the Learn, Create, Share pedagogy. This structure has taken a couple of years to embed at St Francis but finally we are seeing consistency across our school about what Learn, Create, Share looks like.

Teacher planning is created within a Learn, Create, Share framework that is now used across the school. 

Visible teaching and learning places the students at the centre and when this becomes the default it guides decision making in a school.

How will the students make their learning visible? Blogger is the platform that was chosen for this. The students share their learning to a global audience.

How do the teachers share their planning? Each Hub has a google site where all planning is uploaded and accessible not only to the students but to whānau as well. It is accessible, available and there in advance! 

It is also very worthy of note that it is available to any other teacher as well and not just those at our school. Any teacher can access, make a copy and adjust for their learners. This has expanded our professional learning network immensely.

Making teaching visible makes so much sense - we are not trying to keep what the students are meant to be learning a secret from them, they need to know what they are striving to learn otherwise how will they know when they get there? We need to remove the barriers in every way we can and making teaching and learning visible is a huge part of this.

This Week's New Learning

One of the ways that teachers can make learning visible is the use of Google Sites. I have dabbled with sites before but it was fabulous to get a deep dive into this tool. Thanks to Vicki  Archer and Dorothy Burt for the sessions on this. 

I loved this session - so much so that I finished my site over the weekend and was able to give it to our Year 7/8 team to use this week. I aimed to motivate the learners to engage with the curriculum, and provide multimodal opportunities to engage with the learning - I will be interested in the feedback from the teachers and the students in due course!




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