I do hope you enjoyed the long weekend, while suitably marking the death of our Head of State, Queen Elizabeth the second. Breaks are always welcome, even when they are close to the end of term. That said, you have probably been extra busy this week.

It’s the end of the winter term - another reason to celebrate, once those last tasks are all completed! 

Principals wear many, many hats - from the counsellor, the data analyst, the listener, the mediator, the report writer, the strategic planner, the cheerleader, the project manager, the communicator …. Each hat represents different skills that you bring to the job, to create ‘Ngā Whakapiringatanga’ – ‘Optimum conditions for learning’. 

I hope, these holidays, you get to wear a sunhat, or no hat, as you take time out to rest and recharge!

Assessment, achievement, and alternatives:
Concerns over assessment and achievement from early primary to NCEA levels have been well aired in the media and amongst school leaders. These all take place in a context of covid.

Without doubt, covid has had a negative influence this year – perhaps more so than the previous two years. This year you have reported more fatigue and stress as attendance numbers have waxed and waned and as you have struggled with the logistics of staff absences. 

At the NCEA level you have the added concerns of students who have experienced their entire NCEA schooling in a covid context, and will next year be leaving school. The disruptions to the learning of these students means they are not ideally prepared to face the next stage of their young adult lives.

In the face of adversity, there are always things we as leaders can learn.  One thing that covid has done is make us re-evaluate the merits of the current way in which we assess students. It has also prompted us to think about whether we are assessing the right topic areas that best prepare our young people for their futures.

Questions we might ponder include priorities and whether a focus on student wellbeing, resilience, self-efficacy, confidence, team work and communication, might come into sharper focus alongside goals for literacy, numeracy and other more formal subject areas.

It is pleasing that at the primary school level, we are now considering measures of progress over more traditional assessment methods. This better reflects learning in a post-covid era, where students are arriving at school with vastly different levels of learning.  For some students the effects of home-learning and hybrid learning have been minimal and for others, the effects are profound. A focus on progress allows all students to continue their learning from where they are at now, rather than be concerned about where they should be according to set curriculum levels.  

It is also a good time to reflect on the concepts of success and failure. What do we mean by success in learning and is there a place for failure when learning is progressing at the pace and from the place learners are at? How we report to parents about the progress of their children’s learning will be key to how they approach future learning. It is helpful to consider learning as a life-long process rather than a process confined to the schooling years. In this way we can instil in children the love of learning which will continue throughout their lives.

In my experience, what parents want to know is

     -     What their children can do,
     -     Where they are ‘at’,
     -     Where they are going next and
     -     What everyone can do to help them reach their next milestones

Reporting that is clear, factual and positively ‘forward-focused’ matters.  Reporting that considers the ‘whole child’, their hauora and well-being, matters just as much.