Rāmere, te 3 o Hūrae , 2020
Kia Takatū ā-Matihiko
Message from Kia Takatū ā-Matihiko/ Digital Readiness:
All our virtual meetups are aligned to the Ministry of Education’s digital technologies implementation support tool and are designed to support you whether you are Now Underway (orange), 2020 Ready (dark blue), or Leading and Innovating (purple). To read more about the Digital technologies implementation support tool click here
Please note, we are delivering our main meetup programme virtually for the remainder of the year. However, limited face-to-face event.s are in place in collaboration with Kahui Ako and Code Club for Teachers. Visit ahikaroa.kiatakatu.ac.nz to register.
Reflections of a teacher aide
Jess Galloway is a teacher aide at Waikanae School. Here she reflects on the joys and challenges of her job, and why the teacher aide pay equity settlement matters. Read more here
How to empower students
The empowered classroom is a shift from giving choices to inspiring possibilities. It’s a shift from differentiating instruction to personalising learning. Interested in hearing more? Watch this short video.
Genius Hour as a Form of Professional Learning
We’ve all heard about Genius Hour, or 20% Time for students, but what about teachers? How about setting some time aside for you? Genius Hour is about personal freedom. And yet, having a few rules for yourself actually frees you up for better creative work. 
If you’d like to read more, the full post can be found here.
Matariki Celebrations
Matariki has come at the perfect time to get us out to celebrate together post lockdown. Some of our kura have started already and others are going to jump in at the start of next term as the holidays fall in the midst of Matariki this year. We have included some photos of some of our tamariki in action below:
Orewa College students weaving harakeke at Te Herenga Waka o Orewa Marae
Māori lessons planned for term 3
Our Kāhui Ako ‘ready to teach’ lessons are up online for term 3. We have included them here for those of you who have begun planning for next term. These lessons come with teacher notes and recordings that guide teachers of any level of competency or confidence through from start to finish. These lessons align to the curriculum guidelines for teaching te reo Māori and include games, karakia and waiata to ensure the experience of students is broad and includes the wider aspects of te ao Māori.
Term 3 and 4 Māori planning 2020
Positive wellbeing for teachers
2020 has certainly been a different year for us all. Teaching alone can bring many stresses and it is important to take the time in our break to look after ourselves. Creating a culture of wellbeing where we enable our community to flourish ensures teachers returning next term are able to be at their best in front of our students – well teachers means well students.
Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment
The model is often described as ‘pillars’ and involves assisting individuals to explore the five domains that encompass PERMA as a way of holding themselves up. While the model has not been designed to be prescriptive, the evidence within each pillar tells us there are simple things we can do to support our own wellbeing and the well being of our students.
As our term 2 draws to an end reflect on these five questions:
- Positive emotion. When are you happiest at work? What emotion are you experiencing?
- Engagement. What do you love most about your current role? What strength are you using?
- Relationships. Who supports you most at work? Who do you support?
- Meaning. What is most important to you about your role? Why do you do what you do?
- Accomplishment. What big or small achievements have you made in the past week-month -term?
Are you Flourishing? Follow the link here to read more on the PERMA model and how to put this model into positive action here
Writing Moderation
Our Term 2 across school writing moderation was held on the 18th June at Orewa College. The purpose of regular moderation is to ensure accuracy and consistency of assessment in writing in all of our kura continues to be a main focus. The LPF framework is used as our common assessment tool as it spans curriculum levels 1 to 5 in the NZC. Schools continue to use their own assessment tools for internal moderation purposes.
We focused on the aspect ‘vocabulary’ as this was the most inconsistent area in our pre-assessment results. Due to time restraints, our discussion and reasoning was not always able to be shared as fully as in past moderation meetings. We did however have a 19% ‘shift’ in our final decision making and agreement of final assessment levels.
Curriculum levels 3 to 5 continue to be our levels where we need to align closer. More shared discussion at these levels needs to be planned for future moderation.
For our next moderation meeting we will mark our pre-moderation examples based on each kura’s own writing assessment tool to obtain a curriculum level. Levels will then be moderated against using the Learning Progression Framework to compare our results and check for consistency.
Holiday Reflection
It has been a fast paced term in a very unusual year. On reflection, there were parts of lockdown which made us slow down and enjoy the little things around us. This holiday we have more freedom, but we should take care not to rush around.
5 Wishing Fingers is a tool you can use to make decisions or plan for anything. It is great for students who struggle with ideas, solutions, decisions. On reflection of Lockdown, we can remember activities which made us slow down, relax, enjoy ourselves and share time with loved ones.
Kāhui Ako ki Orewa 
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