Kenakena School
Bruce McDonald discusses bringing the focus of the school back to curriculum.
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Clip duration: 3:23
Getting the fundamentals right
The first thing we focused on was behaviour management, especially with the older kids. The staff identified right from the start that we needed to define what was expected from our kids in terms of behaviour, and that we needed to stick to that consistently. That had a big effect on teachers, teacher morale, parent perceptions of the school and on the flow-on effect through the school to the other children.
The second thing was to try and get teachers self-esteem up by enabling them to return to 'the magic of teaching', as Mary Chamberlain refers to it, and give them the opportunity to regain their confidence as teachers.
We didn't have a school scheme or any documentation that set out how we delivered the curriculum at Kenakena School. So I basically said, "You now need to choose the contexts of study that you think the kids will be interested in learning, which you will be motivated to teach, and we'll worry about tracking that back to the curriculum later." That was our immediate trigger for change.
I was able to bring to the process the research and professional development I undertook as a principal working with Mary Chamberlain, in her capacity as Rural Adviser in Taranaki, to look at a way of delivering the curriculum that would make sense to teachers. Mary talked about the curriculum being so big that to try to teach and assess every objective was very difficult for teachers.
What was also highlighted to me was that, within the teaching framework, the planning doesn't have to be a linear process. The starting point can be anywhere. Bringing that philosophy to Kenakena, we decided that we would use the context for study as our starting point and relate that back to the curriculum. From there, we would highlight the strands and objectives that particular work would meet.
We embarked on developing our teaching framework, which is a series of statements that describe how we're going to deliver the learning at Kenakena School, supported under each area by a series of 'therefore we will' statements. The teaching framework is also the teacher job description which is linked into the professional standards. It becomes part of the self-appraisal and corporate development appraisal process for teachers.
New Basics – rich tasks
Another influence on my thinking was last year when I went to Australia to look at Education Queensland's New Basics project.
One of its major premises is the concept of working backwards from outcomes of where they think students should be at key points in their learning. Schools can then design curriculum profiles for themselves and the learning contexts that they will teach the children in order for them to actually meet those outcomes.
One of the key approaches in the New Basics project is rich tasks. These are substantial tasks that children do at key points in their learning. Those rich tasks are centred around what is referred to as deep knowledge and deep understanding.
When designing integrated units, we start with the big idea. It focuses the teachers on what deep knowledge and deep understanding they want the kids to get out of a particular unit of study. The teacher can keep referring back to the big idea and develop learning ideas from that.
We feel it's important to share the learning of the big idea with the children so that they can understand the purpose of the study they're doing and how the activities they're going to do relate. The big idea helps them understand why they're undertaking a particular activity or project.
We felt that in the school we were doing perhaps too many units, so we've made decisions to slow things down and make our units more substantial and longer in time. Many of our units now last a minimum of five to six weeks, or sometimes for a whole term, and draw from a lot of different curriculum areas.
We want our teaching framework to be reasonably flexible. Rather than have an odd year/even year cycle where we teach the same thing every two years, we look at a 2-year curriculum, then stop and redesign it for the next 2 years. The key to it each year is for us to track back to the curriculum, see what strands we have covered. If there are any gaps we need to cover to meet our obligations to deliver the present curriculum, then we look for the next context of study that will enable us to do that.
We have documents which have a range of contexts for us to choose from, but we're not going to tie ourselves down in saying in the odd year or the even year we'll do this in term 2 or term 3, so it gives us a lot more flexibility. Our teachers choose contexts for study that they're going to be interested in and motivated to teach, and that they believe that the kids at the school will be interested and motivated in as well.
One of the things I talked to the staff about last year was the importance of the quality of feedback. That was based on some of the work that John Hattie had done for the University of Auckland – that it's the quality of the feedback that can have a huge impact on how well students learn.
Skills for the future
In our last strategic planning process, we identified the need to develop our cross-curriculum activities, in particular the skills kids need for the future. We wanted a skills focus, in particular, thinking skills. If kids are not taught to think, why are we teaching them at all?
We looked last year at various methods and philosophy behind teaching children how to think. We wanted to look at ways of explicitly teaching thinking skills through our programmes, so we set up a project team which has provided guidance and in-school professional development. They also work with outside facilitators who come in and work with the staff on those things as well. We're looking at philosophy for children as a way of getting kids to think more deeply about the world around them and how they relate to the world.
We're looking at methods like mind-mapping, and De Bono's Six Thinking Hats. We're looking at some of the Court stuff as well with PMIs (Plus-Minus-Interesting creative thinking strategies).
We do a parent survey each year to find out what parents think about the school. We ask simple questions: "What's the school doing well? What can we improve on?" This year our strategic planning process will ask parents what sort of things they would like to see happen in the school in the future.
Parent leaders
We know that as parents ourselves, we have concerns about parenting our children effectively. If that's happening positively in the home, the impact on our school is likely to be more positive, too, so we have a project team managing Ian Grant and John Cowan's Parenting with Confidence programme.
We trained four teachers and a couple of parents as facilitators. We're running two programmes concurrently at the moment for parents of 0 to 5 year olds and from 6 to 12 year olds on Tuesday and Thursday nights for 6 weeks. We began the programme in 2003 and we've had about 50 parents through the programme to date.
We're looking at running No Sweat Parenting/Whakangahau Whānau, which is also part of Parenting with Confidence but aimed more specifically at the parents of Māori and Pacific Island children.
We encourage risk taking in terms of trying things out. That's part of being a successful learning community. We expect leadership from parents. We've set up a whānau group within the school from our Māori community.
The board of trustees is very supportive of professional development for the staff and is very keen to find out how that professional development leads on to learning. The board set up a study grant for the first time this year to enable one of our staff to apply to go to Melbourne when our children go there on their annual exchange with Caulfield Junior College. This will enable the teacher to spend time at the school looking at their programmes.
Radio Kenakena
Our ICT use has really just started to take off, probably in the last 18 months. We suffered initially from lack of infrastructure so we upgraded our computer suite and our network, and put more ICT in classrooms. We've provided substantial in-school professional development and teachers are now using ICT more naturally as part of their programmes.
We've set up a school radio station which is a different use of ICT. The idea came from a school parent who had been a DJ, had the equipment, and was interested in helping out with a radio station. It broadcasts from Waikanae to Raumati South at the moment, but we've just bought a new transmitter which gives us a wider range. The kids are running a radio idol programme. It's been a lunchtime thing, but we're looking at expanding it and getting ideas from other schools that also have radio stations.
Positive school culture
We've grown significantly since 1998, from 290 kids through 500 now, so one of the things we've tried to do is keep a positive school culture as the school has grown.
We know our programmes are working through the reviews we do, both curriculum reviews and by tracking two cohorts through the school. We start off with a year 2 cohort and a year 4 cohort and track those kids from year to year.
One of the things we noticed through our review of reading was that 9 and 10 year old boys were more reluctant to read than girls. We also noticed that the girls tended to be higher in their reading ages. We looked closely at our teaching practice, introduced a greater variety of activities and resources, and in our latest cohort reviews have found that our boys have come up to a very similar level to the girls now.
Our kids are a lot calmer. We don't have as many behaviour problems as we have had. Our year 7 and 8 kids in particular have benefited from 4 or 5 or 6 years in the school. Each year they seem to get more confident and more motivated with their learning. I think we're doing things that we might not have attempted 5 years ago because we believe our kids are ready for certain things as well. A few years back we wouldn't have attempted our annual exchange to Melbourne because we didn't believe our kids were ready or independent enough to embark on something like that. Now we do.
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