Forbury School
Janice Tofia has led the staff of Forbury School, in South Dunedin, during a period of regeneration and rebirth. She has used the arts curriculum as a springboard to build self-esteem and improve levels of student motivation and engagement.
Vision and purpose
My role as leader in this school is to have the vision, the focus, and the courage to support the teachers who are working here, so they can help our children make the most of every opportunity. And the arts curriculum is so powerful in being able to achieve that.
Our path in the arts has been interesting because we have started from a position where we had to do an awful lot of work to get the children into a position where we could actually work with them.
When I first arrived at Forbury School, the children had terribly low self-esteem. They destroyed things around them and there were many fights. I was continually putting out bush fires and still am to some degree today.
So we had to work at improving the self-esteem of the children. That was done by everybody taking every micro-opportunity to feed children positive messages: to have corridor displays that contained positive messages, to celebrate anything, it didn't matter how small it was, but to find the opportunity to celebrate anything that the children did at school.
Assemblies were very difficult at the start, but now they have grown into a wonderful opportunity to celebrate the children's achievements that have been gained over the week.
The immediate priority was to improve literacy and numeracy. And we focused on developing the outcomes for reading and writing, so everybody would know what they expected children to be achieving at each level.
I believed the arts was the most important curriculum area that was going to get our children motivated to achieve better levels of engagement in their learning, and to have them enjoy coming to school. Our focus on the arts curriculum was very timely because it gave us an opportunity to become involved in the professional development contract provided by the Ministry of Education.
Providing in-school leadership
It was a whole-staff development. The first workshop was dance. This was terribly threatening for the teachers and me, but as time went on we became a little less inhibited, and began to wonder how we could implement this in the classroom.
The springboard for getting dance implemented at Forbury School was our contact with a wonderful person called Tama Dean. Tama came and worked with our children to put on a performance that our parents really enjoyed, and it involved some elements of dance and drama.
Tama offered to work with one of our teachers. We identified Michelle Faulkner-Barclay because she had been the person who had taken the time at lunchtime to get the children involved in dance practices. So she worked for a couple of days with Tama, and he taught her the skills that she would need to get the best out of the children in dance.And it was nothing to do with dance steps; it was to do with motivating children, and engaging them in the activity that they were working on, taking responsibility, and having a good attitude and all of those things that are needed for success.
When Michelle worked with the children she had to be accepted by them as a credible person who could teach them something that they needed to learn. They saw her in the school as the teacher of new entrants. They didn't see her as a person who was going to be teaching them dance. So she had quite a battle on her hands to get these children into a state of mind where they worked positively on dance activities. But she did it, and she was very committed, and supported the children all the way.
Public performance
Michelle took the big step and enrolled them in Dance Otakou festival. The opportunity to perform in public really motivated the children.
Our dance group was duly named the Stage Bouncers. One of our fathers sponsored the children's jackets and they looked really good, and then he told them that if they performed really well at Dance Otakou, then he would buy them some trousers to match, which he did.
So they ended up looking spectacular in their uniforms and feeling really good about themselves. Their self-esteem and confidence really lifted. They thought they were something special at school, which they were and are. Stage Bouncers are an integral part of the school now. The children have to audition to be part of the group, and they have their set practice times.
Following the performance at Dance Otakou I spoke to the NuZtyles hip-hop dance group. They offered to do a performance for our children. They could see that many of our children faced some of the difficulties they had, perhaps, faced in their lives as well, and they were really keen to work with disadvantaged youth. So we struck up a relationship which meant that they could use our resources, our hall and power and so on, in exchange for training our children. It's a very healthy relationship, and there is benefit for all.
Every main performance that NuZtyles have, they incorporate Forbury. Recently they had a large hip-hop concert and Forbury School had three opportunities to be on stage. NuZtyles trains a girls group each week and on another day the boys practice with one of the NuZtyles dancers.
Hip-hop dance is just one part of dance that happens at Forbury School. We have the kapa haka group and they enjoy their waiata aringa. We believe that anything that involves movement is helping our children develop the skills they need to achieve the objectives of the arts curriculum. The Jump Jam programme that a number of our classrooms are using is certainly a good forerunner to dance.
Music calms the soul
An important thing for me was to have happy classrooms where our children enjoyed being at school, because unless they enjoyed what they were doing the level of engagement was not going to be very high. So we had to really work at that before we could think about layering the next stage of learning on top of that.
As part of our rebuilding of Forbury School, we were part of a Ministry of Education School Support project that focused on training teachers in holistic education, and one aspect of that was the use of music in the classroom. It was very new to all of us. We learnt about which aspects of music supported certain parts of the curriculum.
Music can help calm children, and get them to reflect on what they have been doing. It can get them into brain gym activities where they get ready for learning, and where they have the integrated brain working together. It gives a space where children can sit and just reflect on how they are feeling, and get ready for starting the day.
After each break time most of the classes put on some classical music. The children sit and think, or the teacher does some visualisation, talks to them, or reads with the music on.
So we have music playing in our corridor and that helps create the air of a happy place. And if the music is not on, the children are now at the stage where they ask, "Why isn't the music on?" And if they want to borrow the CD they always make sure that my classical music CD is put neatly on my table so that it doesn't get lost. So we are enjoying our music in the classroom.
Music was an area that we really had to work on. We started with singing, and we had a little choir group originally, and we visited the old peoples homes on both sides of the school. The old people enjoyed that, and the children enjoyed the opportunity to perform. Then when we became involved in the music side of the arts professional development contract, we learnt more about teaching singing, and now I think it's a real strength in our school. We are slowly building in the instrumental side of music into the classroom, and we have purchased some resources and we've got some teachers with musical expertise, but the children are certainly able to be more involved in that.
Gifted and talented
In this decile 2 school we very quickly realised that we have many children who have many gifts and talents in lots of different areas, not only in their ability to read and write and do mathematics, but there is a lot of talent in the arts.
And so I took the opportunity to become involved in the gifted and talented Music Heartland Programme. This is the third year of the programme. About nine of our students have benefited from individual piano and guitar lessons and they are certainly excelling. All of our community now understand about Music Heartland. There are auditions each year and there is a good line up of children whose parents want them to be auditioned, so it's a valuable component of our school's music programme.
Teachers
Currently we have two female staff members, and three male staff, which is a real bonus in a community where many of the children don't have a positive male role model in their lives.
These teachers are committed to the children. They are risk-takers. They are here because they want to make a difference in children's lives. They will take every opportunity to get excited and celebrate children's efforts and achievements, and that rubs off on the kids. Children know when teachers are genuine or not – they can see it their faces and they can hear it in their voices.
Monitoring students
As a school leader I spend a huge amount of my time doing social work. I have in excess of 40 students who require close monitoring, and I work with other agencies, health professionals, counsellors, and special education people to try and improve things for them.
Many of our children have huge issues going on in their lives. It's my moral responsibility as an educator to try and meet those as best as possible, so that they can learn. Perhaps this will help break the cycle of disadvantage, because that's what it's all about.
