2014-We Have Arrived

Much of what I have written in my previous posts has been a synopsis of an 18 month journey.

• A new vision plan and graphic that has been developed and presented to the Board of Trustees  and staff.
• Professional development in-house that was purposeful and was delivered by leadership. 
• Targeted group work in these professional development settings to build capacity and to identify good teaching combinations for future teaching teams.
• Promotion of our ideas through targeted readings that were about research findings and case studies on best practice and future focus ideas.
• Reformatting of our teaching teams and making sure that our staff understood the New Zealand Teaching Council Criteria by presenting their understanding of these and what they believe is evidence to support these so that we could rebuild our performance management systems and for our staff to realise that they are professionals working in a professional body. 
• Looking closely at pedagogy and profiling our "typical" Morningside School child so that we could draw powerful conclusions about what our teaching approach should be.
• Having staff present what they believe the positives and the barriers could be to a collaborative teaching team approach-which we as a leadership team also did.  
• We also developed a new inquiry learning model. I have shared this on another page.

And so much more so that we could start 2014 with everyone on the same page, that there was no anxiety but excitement about what all we have done to prepare for what we strongly believed would be best outcomes for our children. 

And what a start of the year we have had.

Term 1
Because of the significant front-loading that we had done with both our staff and communication with our new staff our expectations were realistic. Our main focus was on our children and making sure that they were inducted and transitioned smoothly into their new teams and making sure that their parents and Whanau were comfortable with the new settings and contexts that we were placing their children in.  Our teachers had to and did understand very quickly that a major aspect of collaborating successfully was communicating at a higher level than they had ever done before. Not only did they have to be very well planned, but they also had to problem solve and reflect constantly at every break time, after school and before the school day began. Plans did change, sometimes after every break, classroom layouts-where materials and tools were located and where work stations were placed were in constant change in some teams. One aspect that all teams had to come to terms with was transitions. As I have shared in this blog, we made a deliberate decision not to knock down walls between classrooms as we wanted a collaborative culture established first-to problem-solve and get this right. However, our four teams were embracing this new approach faster than we anticipated and it has become very clear that the walls between classrooms are one of our biggest barriers. Transitions are challenging between subject times and to and from breaks. Teams are becoming creative but we know that the walls have to come down sooner rather than later.

At a leadership level our number one priority has been to empower teams to be risk takers, to develop team culture and to connect with their children. Our high trust environment ensured that our staff are able to get on with the job. We had a successful two day induction at the start of the year. As a result of discussions and feedback we also made the decision to include all of our ancillary staff in our induction programme. Our teacher aides continue to collaborate with our teachers in planning and CRT sessions. I will share more on new tools and systems below. In leaving our staff to get on with the job and not placing rigid prescribed systems in front of them we realised that some teams would get up to speed faster than others-the nature of the children in front of them and the induction of new staff were some of the contributing factors for this. We decided to use our staff meetings as excellent opportunities for teams to share what was working well and what wasn't. The feedback from this sharing provided me with a number of themes. I am also in the process of developing a powerful walk through tool for my leadership team to use.

How we started the year.
We started the year with a two teacher only days. As shared above we included our teacher aides and office staff. If we wanted to develop and maintain a whole school collaborative culture we could not discount the input and valuable contributions that these colleagues make. Our teacher aides work in classrooms so we made sure that they are also a part of our teams' classroom release planning time. We started our first day by having each team make a collage about their holidays. They each brought artifacts from their holidays and glued these to a sheet of cardboard. We had a sharing time that gave each team the opportunity to share their artifacts with the rest of the staff. This was a great bonding time. These collages are hung in our staff room and are are there as a reminder that we need to remember balance in our lives and to reflect on good times when the going gets tough. We then had our teams come up with what they thought was a profile for a typical Morningside teacher. This was to compliment the work done on our child profile. If we understand clearly what the significant traits that are apparent in our children then we need to be making sure that our teaching approach and that the adults delivering this are cognizant of the skills set and teaching programmes that they need to deliver.

New Tools and Systems
We understand too clearly that we do not want our teachers "bogged" down in spending their time in dealing with tools that waste their time, that are not purposeful and takes their time away from planning and analysing data relevant for their children. So we updated and developed purposeful tools that would be easy to use and that would provide us with good data. We now use the following:

• As the school SENCO ( Special Needs COordinator) I developed a Pupil Concern Form that teams fill in if they have any concerns about any children in their class. Those concerns focus on: academic, behaviour, social, health, or other. This form is sent to me and is the prompt that I use to access GSE, my SWiS, RTLit, health nurse, RTLB and other in school intervention supports. I build a data base and share this with teams twice a term. There is only one condition that I accept a Pupil Concern Form-parents and whanau must be contacted and spoken to about the concern before I will access supports. This process has simplified our referral systems and also allowed me to identify trends very quickly in the school.
• Out IEP (Individual Education Plans) have been simplified. I have made these more targeted and purposeful. IEP meetings are held once a term and are driven by three specific goals for the child that are reviewed. I found that a start of the year and end of the review were not as productive as they could have been. Our teacher aides are very much involved in this process.
• ORS (Ongoing Resource Scheme) release time. I deliberately give this time to teams. I built a schedule of how ORS time is to be used. In teams that have ORS time given to teachers, we employ a reliever to come in and release teachers one day a week. We then give an individual teacher a one and a half hour block out of the classroom to do all of the work that is involved in maintaining their ORS child's support such as working 1:1 with the child, doing testing, organising IEPs, meeting case workers from GSE or other agencies, meeting with the teacher aide, meeting with me as SENCO and anything else that they think needs to happen. We then have the teacher go back into the classroom to work, observe, partner with other professionals in the classroom setting.
• Classroom descriptions. We greatly simplified this document that is required to be filled in once a term. We use the key competency headings. Each term our teams are expected to fill in the relevant information about what has worked and what isn't, what they are observing, what tools they may be developing, any change to classroom behaviour management that has happened or is continuing to work and a range of other information pertinent to each heading. This information is added to each term-we do not require four separate documents per term. This tool is also a great source of evidence for the RTCs and Teaching as Inquiry and to support teacher growth during termly meetings with their mentors and at the end of the year for meeting with the leadership team. Other system information is included such as ethnic breakdown and focus children for reading, writing and maths.
• We use eTAP as our student management system. I updated key aspects of this: curriculum data input by teachers and the guidance section for teachers to record and track behaviour concerns. I look after pastoral care at school and have made sure that this tracking is done to assist in identifying trends and to document concerns in order to present data at parent and caregiver meetings and to support agency referral.
• Classroom release time (CRT). We give each team one day at least two times a term and in some cases three according to our CRT release schedule. We employ to part time relievers to come and release the two team teachers for the day. We also release the team teacher aide to work with the two teachers with planning. 
• Annual CRT and assembly schedule for the year. This was published at the start of the year so that teams could plan ahead especially in meeting IEP requirements, long and short term planning and scheduling any other meetings.
• I simplified the duty roster and have used teacher aides where ever possible to free up teachers especially on road patrol before and after school and play and lunch eating times.
• We also made the main focus of our staff meetings as sharing times. We made a conscious decision not to embark on any further major themes-"taster" sessions or big picture sessions. Our staff have more than enough to get their heads around-piling more on their plates would have been too much when we want their focus to be on classroom time and collaboration.
• As has been shared already, we updated performance management systems across the board. Gone is the once or twice a year formal classroom observation and then a conversation about this. I believe that leadership should be present in all team and classroom settings all of the time and that feedback should be given to celebrate the good things that are happening and concerns expressed when things need changing or to challenge approaches at odds with expectations. Another important aspect of seeing leadership in classrooms all of the time is that it informs the focus for professional development staff meetings. Leaders can quickly address concerns by targeting specific areas or bring to the fore colleagues who are moving forwards in the desired direction and have them lead staff meetings. 
• We also embedded our RTCs into all areas of performance management. The onus is on our teachers as professionals to store and provide evidence of how they are growing as teaching professionals. Staff now fill in one form only to state how they will store evidence, who will mentor them-the mentor (this can be someone in or out of school) is not an appraiser-and be expected to meet with their mentor at least once a term. All of this leads up to an end of year appraisal show and tell meeting with the leadership team.