Kotahi - As one

Kotahi te hoe, ka ū te waka ki uta

Paddling in unison the waka will reach land

Kia ora e te whānau

This week I want to share three important issues with you. These were discussed at our national executive meeting last weekend.

Curriculum, Progress and Achievement (CPA)

I have addressed this issue in my column for the Term two NZ Principal magazine. In that column, I talked more about assessment.  Rather than repeat that here, I will focus more on Curriculum.

What we want to see in our Curriculum are all the things that we consider essential for our students’ learning as well as layering that with our own local flavour. That’s where our local community and iwi come in. We want to ensure that the key competencies are paramount and that we include Inquiry in all that we do. That creates some assessment challenges but we believe they are not insurmountable.

What will help is the establishment of the curriculum, pedagogy and assessment Unit that is proposed in the Tomorrow’s Schools Report. Having academic and professional experts to call on to assist schools develop their local curriculum, will create an important resource. A further resource to help us is the development of progress assessment tools. What we don’t want is to be measuring outputs!  We want consistent ways of measuring progress so that we can identify next learning steps. That means that our curriculum must have sharp clarity, especially if we are providing progress updates to our parents across the whole curriculum.   

We discussed the concept of ‘a system that learns’. We see this as committing to an inclusive, bi-cultural education system where students are at the centre and the NZC underpins learning. Everyone with an interest in student learning would contribute to each other’s knowledge and insights. There would be well-designed feedback loops to achieve this, so everyone learns from each other. Collaboration would be a key to the success of such a system.  The other key consideration for the success of  ‘a system that learns’ is PLD. See my section below on PLD priorities.

The other key to success is supporting Māori medium education. This requires a different approach from English medium in that it recognises education as a means to realising Māori aspirations for language, culture and wellbeing.

In summary we found that there are four main areas to consider to create a successful system that learns.  These are trust (to collaborate and share information); clarity (about the curriculum direction and aspirations); Information needs (so that all have access to the progress information needed to promote ongoing learning); networks (to share expertise and strengthen inquiry and learning networks); capability (to design, implement and evaluate local curricula).

PLD Priorities

The proposed national PLD priorities in (English medium) are:

• Cultural capability
• Local curriculum design
• Using information to support learning   

The NZPF executive discussed the priorities and broadly agrees with the three priorities outlined. We would also like to see wellbeing added to the list.

You have until the end of today (10 May) to have your say on these by giving your feedback. Here is the link to the survey. 

Networking in Singapore

During the school holidays I travelled to Singapore to attend the World Edulead Conference.  Two of the Keynote speakers were Professor Michael Fullan from Ontario and Professor Pasi Sahlberg from Finland. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to speak with them informally during the conference.

Professor Fullan was particularly interested in our Review of Tomorrow’s Schools and was well versed in the Report. He also had some warnings to share. He revealed the experiences of his home country, Canada, where attempts were made to make quite sweeping changes and they failed. They failed because they tried to achieve too much. This was his warning to us. In his view, we are also trying to do too much at  once.

Connecting with the Regions

It was a pleasure to join our Taranaki colleagues in New Plymouth yesterday at their biennial regional conference.

I felt honoured to be able to address a large gathering of principals, along with their senior leadership teams and to speak alongside a respected group of speakers.
I applaud the conference theme "BE THE CHANGE MAKE THE DIFFERENCE - Ko au te taupā kīhai e puāwai i aku moemoeā" and the opening keynote Lane Clark from Canada, with her focus on deep curriculum learning. This is an area that is receiving a huge focus as a part of the Curriculum, Progress and Achievement conversations.

Next week I’m looking forward to joining our King Country colleagues and the following week our Ngāti Porou colleagues.

I am always interested in your feedback and welcome comments from you.

Ngā manaakitanga

Whetu Cormick
whetu@nzpf.ac.nz