Murrays Bay Intermediate
Colin Dale is leading change at Murrays Bay Intermediate, a decile 10 school located between Milford and Browns Bay on Auckland's North Shore. Colin empowers staff and students to take leadership roles and encourages his staff to use teaching strategies that support how children learn.
Vision
My vision for Murrays Bay Intermediate is to create an invitational school, a place where everybody wants to be. It will be a school that is developing all the time, with classroom environments that mentor learning, and where children can glide in and out. It should be a place where learning is exciting and in which everybody is a learner, especially the principal.
This is a place where everybody's contribution is really valued, where we can enable people to be creative and divergent thinkers about how they handle any topic. Advanced technology would take children anywhere they wished to be. I'd like a school where kids can say, "I had a great experience and this has changed my life".
As we work towards this vision, we have a stable, experienced, and competent staff. Among them are 10 staff members who have had principal or senior management experience, but who are choosing not to be in that role any more. So it is an interesting and challenging framework to work with.
We have very clear multi-levelling expectations in this school, in which the teacher will teach to the potential of the child. So one class may have a child working at level two as well as another working at level six, and we expect that to happen.
Progressive pedagogy
I believe in a progressive pedagogy that has core beliefs. One of our core beliefs is that we should not only look at the style in which children learn, but also at the psychological underpinning of how they learn.
This belief in a holistic understanding of intelligence has led us to focus on Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences. We seek to understand the people at our school, as they are a very valuable part of our learning organisation. To maximise their learning, we need to understand their emotional intelligence and respond appropriately to their everyday experiences.
For instance, I don't think you can succeed in any of the intelligences if you don't have a certain degree of linguistic intelligence and ability to communicate. I don't think that you can be an outstanding mathematician if you don't have self-esteem. So we look at emotional intelligence as a way of understanding how children overcome challenges and cope.
Understanding emotional intelligence helps us to contribute positively to a situation where we want kids to be excited about their learning. It's about understanding behaviour so that we can use strategies that are more effective; and understanding, but not excusing. It's about being able to put that new learning into authentic concepts that the children will experience. We are positive and proactive about changing learning here.
I think literacy also underpins everything that we do. I am not just talking about the literacy of being able to read a book, but about being able to interpret, to visually analyse, and to understand a person's visual, oral, and other responses. It's about ways of communicating and taking on board cognitive skills that embrace literacy. An example of that would be using an inspiration spreadsheet, or using a graphic organiser to organise one's thought.
Distributive leadership
We practise distributive leadership. To reach our vision, we use staff in a way that can maximise their best possible leadership potential. We empower them without putting up barriers. I believe that staff lead effectively because we understand each other, and we are able to trust each other. I think that's huge.
We have a functioning student council with a voice. The council leaders go to a board of trustees meeting once every six months. Every one of their requests is explained and considered, and the students are involved in the decision-making process.
We have school leaders who also go to staff training sessions. For example, we use KnowledgeNET, but we don't just train the staff, we also put students through the training.
So that they know their leadership is valued, and that their voice is important, our children are allowed to use all resources such as photocopiers and colour printers, and we don't restrict their use.
Instead of the principal running assemblies, or welcoming guests from overseas, children do it. (We have a large placement of international teachers at the school.) The children record phone messages. We have a TV which provides all classrooms with daily news and access to school-wide video resources. Every day. our television is run for students, by students. So students are very important in distributive leadership. Parents are valued, too. For example, we have a reference council for gifted and talented that uses parents from our community.
Business in schools
I believe that sometimes we short-change the innate potential of a child by putting them in situations that we assume are authentic. To address this, we have created a 'business in schools' concept. We have affiliation with eight businesses at the moment, and we are just negotiating a ninth. That enables children to go out into the workforce or into an industry or a television company for authentic learning experiences.
Attached to the school is a design business, and children are able to put their learning or their new innovation into real-life situations, have them approved, recognised, discussed, and sometimes even torn to bits.
We have created these opportunities so that we can teach children to be emotionally stable about being critiqued, and that is going to help them a great deal later on in life. It's also about letting children, particularly at ages 11, 12, and 13 years, understand that ongoing change and challenges to relationships are quite normal.
A new syllabus
We are creating a new syllabus that has a media inference, in that we think design is important right across the syllabus. For example, in mathematics, if one wants to measure a cylinder (which would be a level 5 activity), then we would probably do it in the context of a design, or a building, so it's real to the child and has meaning.
We have introduced the concept of e-classes, which have interactive activities and no desks. E-classes are about teaching in a different way. We have 13 computers in the e-class, as we want computers to be available to children at any time of the day, for any aspect of their learning.
We have an intranet that has a curriculum library on it and a virtual library. We have introduced SMARTboards that have virtual activities, and children run the SMARTboards themselves.
We have created four mini-schools with eight classes in each school. Added to this are four other specialist mini-schools: the School of Learning Potential, the School of Developing Talents, the School of Technology, and the School of Visual Arts. In our School of Learning Potential, for example, philosophy underpins how children think and we have 'learning to learn' as a topic and a metacognitive syllabus. So these schools are about doing things in different ways.
Rarely would you see a whole class lesson in these classes, although we think whole class is fine, if it's appropriate to the whole class.
The greatest changes I have seen at the school as a result of the developments we have undertaken are in people's attitudes to learning and in the way they solve problems. I see staff and children explore concepts. Instead of having a 'one way fits all' mentality, we have a smorgasbord of different approaches to learning. Murrays Bay Intermediate has a culture that is developing all the time, so it is becoming a very exciting place to teach and learn. We are changing from a school that was about knowing, to a school that is about understanding.
Taonga – the treasure
The most satisfying moments for me as the leader of this school have been the generosity of the staff in accepting, going along with, understanding, coming on board, and supporting the changes that we have made. Combine this with the satisfaction of hearing the students' responses, and their ability to critique each other without being defensive.
In this journey, I have learned that theory is important for any educational leader to understand and to draw upon. But I have also learned that the people are the taonga, the treasure of any organisation. It's the people who can effect the change. It's the people who can be passionate – it's not systems. And it's people's inner response and passion that makes the difference
