Overview

This video of Beckenham and Opawa leadership teams gives an example of how each of the school pairings worked together and separately on their planning documents.

Documents

Download the documents discussed in the video.

Transcript

Beckenham and Opawa schools came together for a day to work on their action and annual plans for 2011.

As part of their ongoing review cycles each school had used the Self-review Tools to help work out their priorities and plan the next steps to take in response to student achievement data they had collected during the year. This video shows the two schools working together and separately on planning after their reviews.

Nick Major: principal, Beckenham School

There’d be little point in gathering a whole lot of self-review information and doing nothing with it. The whole purpose of gathering that information is to turn it into an action. And what I’ve found most valuable about the exercise that we’re doing today is that we feel as if we’re going to be hitting 2011 running. In other words we feel as though we will start next year with a very good idea of where we’re going. We will have lots of actions plans to do with budgets, to do with professional development, to do with staff responsibilities already embedded, already in place. And I think that we’re going to achieve a lot more than in previous years when, perhaps, we had some hazy idea of where we were going but it wasn't as definitive as it will be for 2011.

Beckenham leadership team

Teacher: Does it matter if it does go on into 2012?

Teacher: Yes, I’d like to embed some best practice in oral language before we start looking at moderation. We’ve already got that with reading, and that to me is the process – you get the practice in place first before you start the moderation, and I think we’ll need all year to do that.

Nick Major

One of the things I think is important to understand is that there’s a limit to how many things a school can take on at any one given time; so the other aspect of looking at priorities for the coming year is to look at that big picture of where we’re coming from, where we’re going to. And we find that by discussing it as a leadership team we’re able to zero in or focus in on the different things that should form our priorities for different parts of the school year and which things, indeed, should be left for the following year.

Shane Campbell: principal, Opawa School

Heading into 2011, what we’re going to be doing is ..we’re going to be focusing on continuing to enhance our capabilities within each of the domains of self-review. It's important for us to get down to the teacher layer in terms of digging down there and teachers identifying what it is they’re that getting from the achievement information from their students, and looking at the questions of “so what?” and “now what?”. That’s the area of strength that we need to grow.

Opawa School leadership team

Principal: The outcome is to strengthen the consistency across the school in terms of teachers' or students’ understanding? Or both?

Teacher: Both. We also started to talk about, too, the time-frame around that … the fact that, at the moment, we’re trying to assess, twice a year, all those key comps – you know what I mean? And so we need to be aligning that with all those things like the semester goals, our long term plans and all of that. And actually aligning that with our inquiry topics and things… and doing that year view – plotting that by year, so that we’re actually being clever about it.

Susan Jennison: second deputy principal, Beckenham School

Like everyone, were always looking at ways to improve our reporting to students and to parents. We’ve done a lot this year in terms of incorporating National Standards and our hope would be that we’ve “Beckenised” them in that we’ve put them in perspective alongside the broad curriculum at Beckenham School. And we sought input from parents and students last term over our interim National Standards reports, and the feedback we’ve had from our community is that we’re doing a good job in implementing the Standards and also keeping the broad picture out there.

Beckenham leadership team

Principal: We’ve decided that, following this end-of-year report, we’re going to embed things in 2011 and then look again for some specific feedback in 2012

Teacher: So what’s the outcome?

Principal: The outcome is that, following a period of embedding in 2011, we seek further feedback in 2012.

Teacher: Is the outcome that (interjection “that parents are informed”) students and parents are happy with the report and that their views are taken into consideration?

(General agreement)

Principal: Yes. So the reports would reflect what students and parents would like.

Opawa leadership team

Teacher: One of the actions is to take it from whatever you’ve got in your semester goals .. which filters down into your long-term plan and integrating inquiry, that’s what should be assessed in your portfolio, not the whole lot.

Teacher: Yes.

Teacher: We’d talked about it earlier, but we haven’t actually put it down there as an action. It’s also an outcome … because, I mean, the outcome will be .. that will be a cyclical sort of thing as opposed to just twice a year … having a look at those things.

Teacher: So we’re changing from coverage to…

Teacher: More purposeful assessment around teaching and learning.

Beckenham leadership team

Teacher: I’d certainly like to put something for supporting children with special needs in the programme at some stage.

Principal: Yes.

Teacher: I feel like we need a session like that at least.

Principal: OK, what about early in Term 2? Something like that?

Teacher: Yep, it could be any time.

Teacher: It’s quite important to do it earlier than that, because of the learning support plans, the nature of IEPs and teacher aides and (interjection “gifted and talented”) yes, gifted and talented, and those programmes… to get them up and running at the beginning of the year, are we going to fit it in Term 1? Could it be a teacher only day?

Beckenham and Opawa leadership teams share comments with each other at the end of the day

Principal: We see these columns tracking what it is that we achieve as we go on. For example, one of our actions is to visit Ilam School to have a look at what they are developing around self-regulated learning. And from that visit we will then determine some next steps for our school, and when that can actually occur.

Teacher: We had a big talk, moving down some of our next steps, about the school vision and making sure that it’s embedded .. and not just standing on its own … with the New Zealand curriculum. And an awful lot about ensuring, not just in 2011 but right down to 2013, ensuring that feedback to the parents is driven by us, the parents, and the students … making sure that that triangle’s really nice and strong. And, the outcomes, I thought, were the most interesting. We kept asking ourselves, what is it that we want to achieve? And by actually asking those questions – you can backwards plan, in a way as well.