Senior Leadership Day July 2019

Our fabulous leadership team met today to work on our three-year strategic roadmap. We are focussing on achieving our school vision of ‘enabling confident & capable learners.’

We also did some professional reading on well-being for staff & students. We plan to do some self-review on well-being using the NZCER Well-Being at School tool. Our professional reading included ‘Assessing & building wellbeing’ by Sally Boyd.

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DFI Session 1 The Principal Becomes the Student

The Principal Becomes the Student I've previously dabbled with the Google suite of apps and used Google Drive out of necessity in my professional life but to be honest I still feel more at ease and in control using Microsoft Office products to create. Today's first DFI (Digital Fluency Intensive) session had moments "Whoa! Can I keep up?" and "Yeah, I've got this!" I have to say that in this first session I have learned truckloads & today's day out of school has not felt like a chore. Here's a few of the things that Dorothy Burt, aka Mrs. Manaiakalani, has put me (and my esteemed colleagues) through in our very first DFI session: 1. 'Marie Kondoing' our google drives. Yes, these are in desperate need of a tidy up and reorganization. It will make life simpler, faster & easier. Make folders, colour code & have calendar years on them. Simple!!! 2. Useful tips and tricks. This included keyboard short ...

DFI Session 6 Computational Thinking - Unplugged & Hardwired

Today's little ripper of a session was at Tonui Collab (formally Mindlab). We've had a great day exploring, hands-on, digital technologies. Our morning kicked off with Dave Winter, the Manaiakalani Programme Outreach Co-ordinator, presenting on the Visible component the Learn, Create, Share pedagogy. Visible learning through digital affordances opens the door of the classroom and the learner to whanau, professional colleagues and further afield if desired. It also means that learning is re-windable. Students can catch up if they've missed something or if they need to revisit learning. Visibility of learning can be found in class and individual student blogs and through the google sites spaces that teachers set up for learning. Students can find what they need for learning within a couple of clicks. They can find exemplars of the learning, instructions, rubrics, information, learning tasks etc... (if the teacher has this set up for them). Da...

Reading Intensive Programme - Session on Vocabulary & Decoding

Yet again, another very busy but well-constructed session from the Research Team at Manaiakalani. Vocabulary is the key to learning. We kicked off by having a korero from Dorothy Burt on vocab growth being directly related to achievement. Many of our learners start school on the back foot. As schools, we have. the job of each child learning 8-10 new words a week, 700 a year and being able to use and understand these words in context. We cannot leave the teaching of vocabulary and decoding to chance. It needs to be planned for. Students need to learn how to explore words - one exposure is not enough. We need to raise children's (and our teachers) lexical bar and find the Goldilocks zone - just right to give some stretch and challenge to their learning. There are four approaches to explicit vocabulary instruction. These are: Build word consciousness Deliberate, robust teaching of words (affixes, base words, contexts) Skill...

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