Cobden School
Jill Cogger-Mathieson is building relationships with the Greymouth community and actively supporting families of children with special needs.
Community voices
When I became principal we needed to review our strategic plan, hear the voices of everybody in our community, start to refocus, and ground the school in what our community, our parents, and our children needed us to do.
We have a good solid base of families that have been here long-term. We also have a group who struggle financially to keep their families together. The school is 36 percent Māori, and that's quite a large percentage for the West Coast, so we need to be able to cater to those needs as well. We have recently enrolled six ESL students who are Tongan, and we are learning to cater for their needs also.
To hear what's important to our families, we held a community dinner and facilitated a discussion. We gained a huge insight into some major indicators that our community wanted. These included the relationship between school and home, and between the student and the teacher, the physical environment, and that we acknowledge Māori culture and other cultures within the school.
The community needed to see that the school was being led. Not just that the principal was the leader, but that the leaders within the community and within the school were having an opportunity to do what they do best.
Addressing diversity
Our deficiencies in addressing the needs of some of our children were highlighted for me through my Diploma of Special Teaching Needs studies, and by children that had come into the community who had been in a Kōhanga Reo, bilingual, or Māori immersion situation.
We clearly needed to develop more specific programmes aimed at addressing the gaps in student learning, and also make sure our teacher aides were skilled and able to support individual programmes.
When students who had been immersed in other languages came into the school it was a huge cultural change for them. I could see straight away that we weren't meeting their needs. We found it very difficult to access resources needed to support their learning and to maintain their dominant language. These children could not access the curriculum and build relationships with other students and that manifested in behavioural challenges. It also impacted on their ability to engage in the learning that was happening in the classroom.
One student in particular had behavioural needs because of the frustrations he was experiencing, and when withdrawn, would make movements with his hands that would suggest a sequence similar to using a taiaha. It was obvious to me that he found these movements therapeutic and we clearly were not able to meet him on the level he needed us to.
When the opportunity came about to be part of the Te Kauhua Māori in Mainstream project, it was empowering to know that we were going to get the support that we needed to address some of those issues; through the development of action research projects, professional readings, building closer relationships with our students, whanau and iwi, adding a face to the project through our kapa haka group and coming together as a professional learning community.
Special needs
We have a very strong relationship with the parents of our special needs students. Through a process called community reference assessment I support our Special Needs Coordinator when she is working with our parents to establish the learning needs of their children both in school and out, helping to identify the skills they need to be more successful in all the environments they live and play in.
With a special needs child, the challenges are about what's happening at school, and how they are functioning and coping within the environments outside. Often parents will feel unsure about what support there is for them, and sometimes blame themselves for the difficulties that their children are experiencing.
And so it becomes really important to have a shared responsibility in addressing the needs of these children. Communicating with their parents is really important.
What's important to us at school may not be the most important thing for a parent, so we need lots of discussion with the parents. The skills required to be successful at home may not be the same for success in the school environment, for example, routinely putting school belongings away on arrival at home may not be as important as being able to remain on task for an extended period of time at school.
If we can support parents to help their children to adapt, and learn to cope, then that equally is our responsibility. Observations and anecdotal records from parents about student behaviours and challenges may indicate specific areas of needs that can be incorporated in an Individual Education Programme (IEP). Daily progress is recorded, and reviewed on a six-monthly basis, unless daily data collection identifies a need for further refinement of the IEP.
Narrow the learning gap
Everything we do with our special needs children is logged on a behavioural graph, so within a few days we can see if the programme developed specifically for the student is having an effect on their learning, either positive or negative. That is incredibly powerful in itself, because you are making the best use of the time available, not wasting time doing things that will not have the desired effect.
And so Precision Teaching and Direct Instruction methods are really important for that, because you are framing the instruction within the student's capability, and using clear communication, so you know that the student understands and is able to repeat what it is that you are asking of them. We need to use the data collected to show us how to refine the programme to make the most significant progress in the time available.
Yes, special needs is a bit of a bandwagon for me. But for a teacher in a classroom, who is coping with special needs in the mainstream very early in their teaching career, not having had time to develop the skills to be able to do that effectively, and with limited funding or resource support, and without people around them who can enhance what they are doing, it is a very difficult task, and very, very frustrating.
We try to address these issues by making sure we support teacher aides to gain qualifications that enable them to apply practical hands-on strategies to help manage students' programmes and behaviours.
Our teachers are supported by a very well-qualified and extremely effective Special Needs Co-ordinator. The Board of Trustees has allocated a substantial amount of money to support our programmes, and we take advantage of any professional development we feel will support what we are doing. We have an open communication culture and shared leadership amongst staff, which allows us to discuss concerns, successes and strategies to support each other.
We have put in place really practical programmes that show us whether or not we are having an effect on learning, and the growth is tremendous. We know it is because our data tells us. All programmes are based on Precision Teaching, Direct Instruction and Applied Behaviour Analysis.
These children have the right to be taught in a way they can learn, and it's really important for us to narrow the gap between their learning and the learning of children in the mainstream. And the closer we can get to that, the more successful the kids are in the mainstream.
Community library
Our community library is a very important part of the strategic plan. We needed the school to be a focal point of the community, and we wanted to invite our community into the school. And so when we did extensions to the library we integrated a community section where there are books relating to parenting, to Do It Yourself, recipes, budgeting, and then a good old read as well. The local newspaper comes in daily, and we have a Woman's Weekly, and some comfortable chairs, and it's a nice environment to be in.
When you join the community library, with your membership you get access to email and Internet and word processing. So we are inviting parents into the school to experience a little of what is happening, and to see what their kids are capable of, and it's really exciting to them.
Trusting communication
One of the most important factors of my leadership is having a good relationship with the Board of Trustees.
I have a strong relationship with the Board Chairperson, Margaret Power. We work very closely together and it also helps that she works at the high school and has an understanding of how schools work.
She and I have very similar values and belief systems. One of my goals is to leave no stone unturned when it comes to children's needs; whether that's special needs because they have a learning difficulty or whether it's because of their behavioural challenges.
Kids have the right to be taught in a way that they can learn. So I just make sure that I am communicating those thoughts and feelings to Marg, and they are reflected in the policy review that we do.
I feel I relate really well to the challenges that our children have because I've had to bring up a family of my own as a single parent, and wrestle with the financial burdens, and the parenting skills that are required when there is only one person to do that job.
We have a cycle of review, and when decisions are being made, I try to put across my feelings about how the children are at the centre of every decision that we make in the school. And that's a community responsibility. We are in it together. We need to work together. We need to have positive relationships.
