Attending Poukai at Te Awamarahi Marae

I attended the Poukai in 2017, 2018 and are planning a visit in 2019. I was very nervous at my first attendance and I attended with a group of students from Whare Manaaki.
It was so important for me to become more familiar with Tainui Tikanga and understand the way the marae acknowledge those that have passed in the last year. It is also really important for building professional relationships with local iwi.

See Saw: Digital portfolio

We have been using seesaw for 2018. Here is an info-graphic sharing information about the app. There is 104 families signed up and 1546 comments made by whaanau about their child's learning. This app allows professional relationships with parents that are based on their childs learning. See saw is used for children to reflect on their learning in classrooms. To share and reflect on their work and share these reflections with their parents. Our challenge for 2019 is ensuring that we get all whaanau signed up and provide places and opportunities for parents who do not have a smartphone to login to see their child's learning. 

Appraisal report by Barbara Duckworth

Deputy Principal Appraisal document

Whanau Engagement Teacher Inquiry

 Assignment 2: Research and Community Informed Practice:

Click here for a Google Slides Presentation on my Inquiry

This was a teacher inquiry plan: Using the Spiral of Inquiry model.

What impact does Whanau engagement have on student achievement?

My research study was on the impact of home/school relationships on achievement.

Here is my research study


How does what I have learnt impact Tuakau School....

One of our strategic goals is 
Develop an educationally powerful partnership with the parents, families and whanau of their tamariki and explore opportunities to improve student agency and accelerate student achievement in mathematics.

What the research taught me is in order to create educationally powerful partnerships we need to create true equal recipricol relationships. We need to really listen to the families and hear their dreams and aspirations for their tamariki. We need to do things differently. Not just invite them to a meeting at school, led by us to tell them how we are going to work together to raise achievement.
We need to design the intervention together and we also need to involve the community. This is very timely as we are meeting Te Iwingaro Dunn tomorrow to talk about how we are going to engage our priority learners through our focus group.

2018 Spiral of Inquiry

My Professional Inquiry:

2018 Professional Inquiry

Mindlab

November 2017 I started mindlab. It has been something that I have wanted to do for years but I did not want to travel to Newmarket. An opportunity came to do it in Bombay, which I jumped at.
I am looking forwardd to the Digital and Leadership PLD. Its going to be alot of work so I am going to have to stay on top of it and wrk hard to eep a balance in my life.
I have created a blog for the course and my reflections

Click here for the blog

Acting Principal Term 1: 2017

Reflections on being a Principal:

Relection: Shared with Margaret Kaa



This was an amazing opportunity for me to really see what life is like as a Principal. I had an opportunity to earn lots of new tasks and get a reality check ofwhat a varied and busy role it was.  You are juggling so many balls in the air at once and then you get a new event that you have to deal with but you still have all the smaller jobs that must be continued for theschool to run effectively.

I was quite anxious about Novopay as it was something I  had had no experience with it but I learnt so much about that and feel fairly confident with that now. I asked so many questions about banked staffing as it was one of the more difficult areas to understand, and our novopay rep would pass me on to her manager and through this I discovered a novopay error from last year that ended up crediting the school back about $30,000. I even got offered a job at Novopay after my detective work. ha ha ha.

Another challenge during Term 1 was managing a Mumps outbreak and working with Auckland Regional Health to manage this. Lots of new learning for me and the schoool.

Managing peopleI was probably the part that I had the most growth and reflection. I had quite a few difficult conversations and I got to know so much more about the staff at Tuakau School. I learnt that different pepole require different ways to communicate. I learnt that the strategy of listening, pausing and repeating back to the person is the best way to make sure I captured the conversation correctly. I learnt to ask what the person would like to see happen. All great things for me in the future.

Being Principal in Term 1 just lit my fire that I would like to do this in the future.

Setting up labels for the STANDARDS FOR THE TEACHING PROFESSION

Te Tiriti o Waitangi partnership
2. Professional Learning 3. Professional Relationships 4. Learning-focused Culture 5. Design for Learning 6. Teaching