The Start

Welcome to my blog!! I am using this blog to detail our journey here at Morningside School in Whangarei that has as its focus collaboration as a culture of learning, teaching and of community. 2014 is the start of a journey of collaborative teaching teams and the further development of a culture of collaboration in our school. 18 months of self review and professional development have got us to this point. I have included the word kotahitanga in my title. This is te reo maori and has many meanings. I like one meaning that this word has and that is unity. By collaborating with common purpose we draw closer together and unite in forging best outcomes for our community. I have also included the word connect. Collaboration and kotahitanga-unity are powerful vehicles but can only be made purposeful when we make the effort to connect with each other. Key attributes for this are to be found in the New Zealand Curriculum Key Competencies especially Relating to Others and Participating and Contributing competencies.

My name is David van de Klundert. I am the Deputy Principal of Morningside School. Morningside School is a decile 3 contributing (Years 1-6) school located in the suburb of Morningside. We have a growing school roll and have started 2014 with 205 children.

So how did we get to this point? I will detail this throughout this blog. The first place that we started was looking at our existing vision plan. It had reached the end of its useful life and was not in sync with the current direction that the school was heading in. Lots of different factors started coming together in 2011-12 such as a new approach to whole school professional development that saw possibilities for approaching pedagogy in a different and more meaningful way, a need to update our performance management systems to an evidence based approach, the introduction of National Standards and the updating of indicators in literacy and maths, visits to other schools to look at modern and collaborative learning environments and the continuation of our journey with ICT and many other aspects of daily school life. This saw us in 2012 setting up a Future Focus Team made up of my Assistant Principal-Ali Booth, a teaching colleague-Gina Kitchen and myself. This team was charged with developing a new vision graphic. The journey had begun.

2013-A Change in Focus
At the end of 2012 we reviewed our team format. Essentially we had a junior team of four classrooms and a senior team of four classrooms. In reality, even though we were doing good things, we were running two schools in one school-a junior school-Years 0-3 and a senior school-Years 4-6. We looked at how effective communication was across the two syndicates and the school. Syndicate meetings were being held every second week with staff meetings being held every other week. We found that there was a lot of communication that could be shared across the two syndicates that were applicable to the whole school such as whole school sports days, nuts and bolts or house keeping items. In general we found that time was being wasted when such things as field trips were being discussed that only two classrooms were involved within a syndicate. For 2013, we made the decision to have a staff meeting every week. The focus for these staff meetings would be purposeful whole school professional development. Our eye was firmly on the ball in relation to our eventual goal of turning the school into a high performing collaborative environment. The expectation was communicated to all staff that if you have a need that needs to be addressed be it in relation to classroom programme, behaviour, technical issues, big or small problems then you communicate with the person or people that can assist. We also provided and updated existing tools to assist with communication. We utilised our scheduling board in our staff room across two terms more effectively and ensured that all relevant dates were placed on this in a timely fashion, we gave clearer expectations for the delivery of termly documentation such as classroom descriptions and assessment data and made sure that staff-when they could-gave forward notice of when relievers were in their rooms.

The next aspect of this was also making sure that staff were communicating with their parents and caregivers with more expediency when issues related to individual attention needed input from school and home. The impact of these changes was better than hoped for. All staff knew what the expectations were and that being proactive instead of being reactive in communicating delivered great results for both students and all staff. Less time was being wasted and communication was being targeted by individuals and groups to the relevant points of assistance. This then meant as a leadership team we were able to use our staff meeting times with greater purpose and focus. Our staff just got on with the job.