Week 31 Blog
I will be using Rolfe’s model of reflection
for this blog.
The one thing I love most about teaching…are our children. I grew up in South Auckland and was taught
predominantly by Pakeha teachers. What
made these teachers exceptional was their ability to bring out the best
qualities in each of us students. Past
pupils would often reflect on the best years growing up and attending East
Tamaki Primary School!
What?
Our school is currently evolving under new management. The one area
I think we are doing well is the school vision, mission and core values. Teachers have been given agency over the
changes and this process has been clear, open and transparent too. Our whanau were given the opportunity to
share their views and contribute to the new changes in our school. Together with our communities we have made
great progress to building a better learning community for our students.
However, I believe that we could improve in the area of
communication for home and school partnerships. Although we use traditional
methods of contacting families, technology has created another platform for
communicating with whanau. Our goal is
to empower families, by slowly introducing new tools such as student/teacher
blogs, Facebook, email, class dojo, and Google classroom (to name a few). Furthermore MOE described how partnerships
could be enhanced through technology. It
is our hope that whanau will “buy into” using these tools sooner, rather than
later.
So WHAT?
When I look at Milne’s continuum, I view our school to be sitting on
“Benevolent”. The reason why I think this is fact that teachers are swamped
with delivering the curriculum, meeting assessment deadlines and collecting
data. Most teachers (wholeheartedly)
want to deliver a program that is culturally responsive, but I feel that most
professional development has been around the “mechanics” of teaching, rather
than ways of looking at the learner and ways we could improve learner focused
relationships.
WHAT NEXT?
The one thing I like about our team at our school is how we reflect
upon our current practice and look for ways to improve. A colleague of ours was
fortunate to attend a whanau hui at another school and met a leader who specialises
in Indigenous studies and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy. With this in mind, he
has agreed help us as a facilitator at our school to help improve this area of
learning for our teachers. I see this is
a step forward towards making positive changes, not only for our teachers, but
for our community too.
Implementing changes will take time.
With this, comes a better understanding of the world of our
learners. I see this as a key to
improving student outcomes at our school and building stronger home school
relationships.
What does this mean for me? I
hope to create learning experiences that my students can talk about in years to
come. Everyone talks about that one
teacher who made a difference in his or her lives. Those teachers from my primary school years
made education count for me. I hope to
do the same for my learners today too.
References:
Ministry of Education: Enabling e-learning: Beyond the classroom: Home school partnerships: Te Taiao Ako
Retrieved from: http://elearning.tki.org.nz/Beyond-the-classroom/Engaging-with-the-community/Home-school-partnerships/?tab=js-tabcontainer-1-tab-2
CORE Education.(2017, 17 October). Dr Ann
Milne, Colouring in the white spaces: Reclaiming
cultural identity in whitestream schools.[video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cTvi5qxqp4&feature=em-subs_digest
Rolfe,G., Freshwater, D., Jasper, M. (2001) Critical reflection in nursing and the helping professions: a user’s
guide. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillian
You are right. It is really hard to consistently be culturally responisve when we are constantly teaching to the curriculum. It’s hard work keeping up especially as a BT. I am looking forward to working with a facilitator that is going to help uplift and educate us in this area. As a person who was raised in South Auckland (Mangere) I am passionate about building relationships with our community because I know how much our community would love to be involved. This is what we are striving for and this is what they are waiting for.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing your comments Santana. I have learnt that teachers who have a culturally responsive pedagogy help accelerate student learning. While teaching in the UAE with Arabic students, the one key message teachers were given, was to build strong relationships with the child and their families. When this happens, your students will enjoy their learning journey and begin to experience the success education could provide for them.
DeleteParents were keen to be informed about their child and used many mediums of technology to keep in touch with teachers. They appreciated the calls/ texts/ whatsapp messages /video clips that shared the success of the child and captured those moments of learning.
I also believe that, as a result of strong home school partnerships, I really enjoyed my time teaching abroad. But this was also because of leadership team who believed in the home school partnership and the value our families brought to our learning community.
Now that I am back home in NZ, I would like to improve home school partnerships in our team and school. This will take time, but I know, if it is done well...everyone will share in the benifits of student learning and success in education.
I agree with you. Providing options of communication will prove beneficial to parents, teachers as well as students and hopefully this approach will encourage consistency in both the school and home environment of a child. Great to see an acknowledgement of culture and the value it has towards a child's learning. Good job !
ReplyDeleteI see teachers who go well and beyond the classroom to ensure that home school partnerships grow stronger. It is because of these relationships, you see our tamariki at the center of education and they flourish better under these conditions. Parents have a clear idea of the learning journey for their child and they have an oppotunity to have a say where it matters most.
DeleteI hope to see home school partnerships flourish the way I say them grow while working overseas with my Arabic students. I loved the way children and families knew what was going on in the school. The community not only embraced having western teachers teaching their children, but would message us really pleasant commentaries after we have sent video clips, pics of student work and weekly updates of our class. This made me feel valued too as a teacher. I felt really appreciated by our community and am grateful to have experienced that while working in the UAE.