Reflection on the first ECE-NE/Year one teachers’ meeting for 2020

Invitation	ECE in our Kāhui Ako area

The first meeting for our ACCoS ECE-NE/Year 1 teachers recently took place on Tuesday the 10th of March at 6:30pm. This first event was hosted by Newmarket School. My name is Sarah Morrison and I am the In School Leader coordinating connections between the schools in our Auckland Central Community of Schools and our local Early Childhood Centres and Kindergartens. In order to ensure all the ECEs from within our Kāhui Ako area were invited, I sent out eighty invitations to centre managers and leaders of junior school teams in our schools. There were fifty respondents from twenty schools and Early Childhood Centres. I received some excited responses from centres that had not attended any of our events before. I decided to start the meeting earlier than last year so people had time to look around the junior classrooms, have a drink and something to eat before the meeting began. Many people came early to look around the classrooms and luckily the fabulous Te Ako Kowhai (Junior team) teachers from Newmarket School were available to show them around and answer questions.

The session started at 7pm. Lynne Keesing, a Resource Teacher of Literacy, was our guest speaker. At our school we have found that many children are starting school without the phonological awareness skills expected of a 5 year old and I thought that this was an area that would be of interest to all the schools and centres in our cluster.  Lynne has worked with our junior team previously and we have found her ideas and activities to be helpful and to have a big impact on the children’s learning. Lynne discussed the different stages of Phonological awareness and the expectations of children when they start school. She provided resources for each school or centre to use and showed several examples of activities that could be carried out with many different age groups. Every time Lynne runs a session, she provides different ideas and resources so even though she has worked with our team at Newmarket before it was great to get some more ideas and activities to add to what we do in class already.

After the meeting I was able to speak to some of the teachers from our local Early Childhood Centers. I found it valuable to continue building these connections and I hope to visit some of the centres in our area in the next little while. There were people that I was looking forward to meeting. However, we had little time to chat and there were so many people there that I didn’t get to connect with everyone. People wore name tags saying where they were from and this was important for making connections over shared children and colleagues. Several people who had not RSVPed came and that there were a few name tags that did not get picked up. Next time I will organise a sign in list so that I am clear on who attended.

Overall this first session for 2020 was well received. I think people took away lots of learning ideas. I look forward to continuing meeting more people in our cluster and developing relationships especially with our local ECE centres.

I will continue to advertise events in order to ensure strong attendance for the rest of the year.  Our next meeting will take place in term 2, week 6, on Tuesday 2nd of June.  Maungawhau School will be hosting the event and the focus for the session will be Transition to School. Different schools and centres have been asked to share what they do around transitioning children and what they find to work well. Discussion time will be scheduled so that people have a chance to share what they do. There will be an opportunity to discuss in groups and connect with staff from the different centres and schools. 

TeachMeetNZ meets ACCoS 2018

On Tuesday November 20th we had a fabulous session of TeachMeetNZ with our Across School Leaders in our Auckland Central Community of Schools.

Special shout out for teachers who came in to support the session such as Wendy Kofoed who tweeted throughout the session and to Catherine Palmer who was our timekeeper. Below you can check out our ACCoS playlist of each speaker.

If you click the presenters topic link, you can visit their page and rewind their slides.

All in all a fabulous effort from a team of dedicated educators.

	Direct Link to Video Clips	Presenters	Topic & link to slides	Twitter
	Whakatauki	Erin Hooper
1	Welcome and background	Jill Farquharson		@JillFarquharson
2	Writing	Erin Hooper Clara Kim	Writing Initiative slides
3	Working with the Learner	Lisa Murphy Sue Spencer	Working with the Learner Initiative	@mathsdr
4	Mathematics/Pāngarau	Sonya Van Schaijik Clara Kim	Mathematics Initiative slides	@clararosekim
5	Teacher Agency	Catherine Palmer Alaric Nicholls	Teacher Agency Initiative report	@CatherineP63
6	Learner Agency	Leigh Duncan Mark Hassall	Learner Agency Initiative Slides	@leighcduncan
7	Oral Language	Mark Hassall Erin Hooper	Oral language initiative slides
8	Transitioning Children to School.	Sarah Brown	Transitioning Children to School Initiative

ACCoS Happenings Term 1 2018

So- what’s been happening ?

Initiatives Update

Last term saw a massive amount of work in each initiative. A summary of the three key take outs for the term have been highlighted by those leading the initiative.  

Teacher Agency - Catherine and Alaric

• Co-construction of a shared understanding of the concept of teacher agency between the ISLs and SMT of the schools in this initiative, building effective working relationships in the process.
• Co-construction of the teacher agency progression matrix with the ISLs, who then distributed and facilitated the collection of data from the teachers within the 4 schools in the initiative.
• Analysis of data to take place  in week 2 of term 2. Findings therein will guide our work for term 2 and onwards.

Learner Agency - Leigh and Mark

• We have aligned our understanding of what learner agency is, and co-constructed a shared definition that schools can use in their individual approaches.
• Collection of baseline data. We created a learner agency questionnaire to be carried out with a sample of students.
• A teacher survey was created as a self-assessment tool. ISLs undertook to complete this by the end of Term 1.

Where to next : An action plan will be developed after analysis of the data that has been gathered.

Writing - Erin and Clara

• Focus areas for PLG’s established across schools in initiative-Pedagogical approaches to writing-Extending teacher content knowledge-Identifying where the student fits in all of this?

Professional development for ISL’s -focusing on teacher inquiry cycle and developing rich, challenging question and understanding the Literacy Learning Progressions

Networking meeting early Term 2 which will  involve all teachers in this initiative. Intention is to set up across -school cycles of observation and critical feedback between the teachers.

Where to next:

• Creation of a survey for students to gather information on their attitudes towards how we teach writing and looking at effect sizes in relation to pedagogical approaches being trialed through PLG/’s.

Oral Language - Mark and Erin

Have completed baseline data collection at both schools with a random sample of approximately 50 Year 1 and 2 students.

Have established hunch and structural timeline of inquiry for 2018. Some key resources have been identified, including people from beyond our CoL who we hope to involve in future PD.

Planned collaboration and professional development between CPDS and RPS

Where to next:

Action plan being co-constructed and extension of  networking and collaboration  opportunities within CoL , and beyond Col - including ECE.

Mathematics/Pāngarau Initiative - Sonya and Sue

• Identified  maths as a strength in all three schools. Questioned if teachers were catering to the strengths of our learners.
• Historic learning data has been gathered over the past three years and this year student attitude data will be used as a comparison indicator to gauge how successful the initiative is in strengthening teacher pedagogy and content knowledge when teaching maths in our schools.
• Extending  involvement of our parent community. Schools are still working through how this will be part of their action plan.

  Where to next:

• Teachers sharing their learning in school, across schools and across Kahui Ako will be discussed when the teachers come together to share inquiry goals and to begin across schools collaborations.

Working with the Learner -Lisa and Sue

• EGGS staff have now all joined a cross curricular PLG for 2018 which relates to one or more of the 3 strategic aims for 2018: Curriculum design, Pedagogy for Innovative Learning and Building Relationships and Restorative Practices. Student agency is at the heart of all three strategic aims.
• The PLGs are furthering the cross curricular and collaborative connections between teachers.
• There are 14 ISLs and they have each identified how 'Working with the learner' and  'Learner Agency' will be developed within the PLG that they lead.
• Staff are developing their own Action Plans to identify research and strategies needed to enable the above. Staff are at the stage of researching, developing goals and gathering student data, under the supervision of the ISL.
• Cross curricular projects in the junior school are being developed between staff from different learning areas at EGGS this year.

  Where to next:

The two ASLs in the school are continuing to coach the ISLs and periodically meet them all together to share findings so they can learn from each other, and report back to the curriculum group.

Transitioning Early Childhood & New Entrants – Sarah Brown ( ISL at Kohia Tce)

• We have tapped into a need to create of local forum to rebuild relationships with 30-40 people attending our meetings.
• We have  set 13 goals for 2018 and have achieved four of them so far this year.
• We  had  a successful meeting in February on supporting children with special needs. Guest speaker, Felecia Tomich, shared resources and information on how we can support these children at a ECE/NE level.