James Cook High School
Bryan Smith is leading change at James Cook High School by encouraging interaction between primary and secondary teachers, and through hosting and participating in the Manurewa Enhancement Initiative (MEI).
Seamless education
I am committed to seamless education, and to making the links between primary and secondary teaching and learning. I am aware, for example, that primary schools in our area have been using different recording systems for attendance and intake, and that there have been about thirty different ways of measuring reading.
As a result, we have committed time to sit down with our primary and intermediate colleagues so that we can listen to each other's challenges and ideas with an aim to improving learning outcomes for our students.
Pedagogical beliefs
I have a very strong belief that our job as teachers is to meet the children at the gate, and to understand exactly where each individual student is at in their learning. Then to work from that point and to provide a programme that meets their needs. Of course we can't have 1500 individual programmes, but we've tried to produce curriculum programmes that are mainstream-based, but are matched to student needs. I also believe that we must deliver those programmes in a stable and common manner.
I place great emphasis on pastoral care of students. I think happy students are students who feel they have connection with the school, and they are more likely to learn in the classroom. This is part of our school philosophy and part of our culture.
As secondary teachers, we need to make a much greater effort to interact with our primary colleagues and to help create a seamless education system. I believe that conformity between school systems could alleviate some of the issues that our students face here in Manurewa.
I saw an opportunity to establish those links by being part of the Manurewa Enhancement Initiative (MEI). This is an initiative involving primary and secondary teachers with a central goal of raising student achievement.
Host school for MEI
We are host school for MEI. There are about 30 schools signed up to MEI and that includes all primary, intermediate, the three secondary schools, and three Kura and the Wharekura in the Manurewa area. Through MEI we are trying to align the work we do so that we can enhance the opportunities for our students.
We made a decision to involve James Cook High School in every activity that was offered. And, being host school, we are squarely in the frame to be involved in this initiative because a lot of the activities are around our school.
We also made the decision to choose teachers who were committed to working with primary schools to take part in the project. And I think, as secondary teachers, with our background in curriculum we saw a strong leadership role for ourselves in the curriculum area.
The community are important to this project and we bring them into the cluster in two ways, firstly as board representatives on the steering committee. Secondly, we have formed an advisory committee for Māori parents in the area, and an advisory committee for Pacific Islands parents. They feed into our steering committee via the two representative positions that are reserved for them. They are strong contributors and are important to the success of the project.
Our Effective Practices Group includes 10 principals. I'm one of those and we meet about once a term. Each meeting has a theme and we contribute what we are doing in each school and we share ideas. We talk about how we are meeting any challenges and discuss solutions.
Making connections with other schools
At the start of the initiative, the principals talked amongst themselves for quite some time, and tried to identify the areas where we thought we needed to make some real changes. We chose four areas to focus on. These were: trying to improve attendance beyond national averages; transience (which is a major problem in this area), literacy; and numeracy.
We recognised that the teachers in our schools were working as hard as they could, and that this initiative wasn't going to work without appointing fulltime coordinators for literacy and numeracy, and part time coordinators for attendance and transience.
Initially, coordinators were seconded. They would work with a lead teacher in the school who would get time to work with the other staff. In this way we have freed up several teachers across the cluster, equivalent teachers, to work in advancing the aims of literacy and numeracy.
Reaching agreements with such a large cluster had some challenges and it is fair to say that we haven't reached full agreement around all issues. For example, our literacy group discovered that among the 25 or 26 primary schools in the area, there were something like 30 different ways of measuring and recording student performance in areas of literacy. Through a concerted effort many of the schools have now settled around the asTTle material as a basic tool for measuring assessment. However, several have reserved their position in this aspect of MEI.
In the past, there has been quite a disconnection between what primary and secondary teachers do. For example, when we started on this project our English teachers said they didn't know how to teach reading. As a result, we had one specialist reading teacher who tried to deal with 800 junior students. Now that our teachers are meeting and talking with primary teachers and understanding how reading can be taught, we are making changes.
James Cook High School has joined the numeracy project and this adds to the seamless nature of the children's learning. Students who have been working under the numeracy project in the primary school come into secondary school and continue with the project. We are hopeful that it is going to show marked improvement in NCEA results in two or three years time.
The MEI has provided the opportunity to work closely with our primary colleagues and to streamline our ways of working to the advantage of our students.
Stable teaching platform
We try to create a stable teaching platform for our teachers and students through the collection of robust data to inform our practices, through defined class routines and unified messages to the community.
MEI is a data-driven project and the first year or so we spent a massive amount of time gathering data around attendance, transience, numeracy and literacy, and that forms our baseline data. We go back and measure against this data each year to see if improvements are being made. We are using asTTle as the measuring tool for literacy and numeracy in our school.
When I began as principal here I decided that the most important thing was to clarify the routines that we use in the school. About three or four years ago at a principals conference Lorraine Monroe spoke and as a result of that we introduced the Blackboard Configuration to our school, and the staff has taken that on. All our junior classes use this as part of their lesson structure, and it's used in a lot of our senior classes too.
The youngsters know as they approach the door of the classroom what is going to happen, there are no surprises. They know they line up, they know they go in, they know the 'do nows' are on the board. They know the aim of the lesson is on the board, they know whereabouts on the board the information is, and so the lesson starts itself. We have shared this strategy with others.
Another interesting project has been to decide how all schools would adopt a common approach to dealing with absence from school. The intention is that parents pick up a pattern of expectation when the child starts school, so that we have a common approach from primary to secondary. For example MEI has decided on a timeframe for absence. So after three days every parent is contacted by the school, after 6 days absence, every child is referred to the local district truancy service.
MEI has also set benchmarks for irregular attendance. We have tried to show parents through our newsletter that this is a common approach throughout the Manurewa area regardless of which school the child attends. We expect explanations if the child is missing on average one day a week, and we are starting to see the effects of that in our secondary schools.
Singing from the same song sheet
The main highlight for me has been working with some primary principals and being able to establish some very good professional friendships with them and that's been a real bonus to me.
Once we joined the cluster, we found that our primary colleagues were facing exactly the same sort of problems that we were, and we discovered that they were working just as hard as we were.
By observing primary teachers' practices, which, I believe, are much more inclusive than ours, these have started to creep into our school. And our youngsters have responded well to that.
By improving communication between the primary, intermediate and secondary sector I believe that we are contributing to a more consistent and unified approach to education and that can only benefit our students. Boards and teachers in MEI are starting to sing from the same song sheet.
