The school year has got off to a great start at Bay of Islands College with a teacher only day.  This was a chance to reconnect with familiar faces and new members joining the teaching staff.

Led by Ruth Hills, teachers were introduced to the school’s professional development team which included Nyree King, Susan Arrowsmith, Patsy Wynyard and myself.  Collectively we’ll be working to ensure their professional learning is cohesive and aligns with their chosen inquiry.

We began with Ruth revisiting some excellent and simple teaching strategies that teachers can use with their own students.  Great icebreaker activities that demonstrated how sharing circles can foster a safe learning environment and help to build trusting relationships with students.

We also used a sharing circle with Nyree as she unpacked the ‘Why’ behind the NZ Curriculum Refresh.  I was really taken with the power of authentic sharing in this exercise. We were asked to reflect and share something from our own education. I was taken quite by surprise as I became a little emotional reflecting on my childhood experience and the separation of my parents during my school years.   Who would have thought that I could have such a response so many years later.  Many of us commented on the impact our schooling had and how we were determined to do whatever we could to make sure our students had a positive experience.

Last year, I attended the 1st PPTA Te Wehengarua National Secondary Education Leadership Conference and it was there that I heard Hana O’Regan from Core Education talk about the history of New Zealand’s education system. Her presentation Inequity by design was recorded and is an excellent watch.  So inspiring and motivating.

Patsy’s facilitation included a Create activity using the whakatauki, He Waka Eke Noa (working together) as our guiding philosophy.  This was a fun, hands-on activity with teachers creating their own hoe (paddle) to represent their teaching journey.  Each part of the hoe representing teachers’ professional practice. 

My role in this te ropu was to highlight Learn, Create, Share and show how teachers could turbocharge students’ learning with digital technologies using a Google Draw template and/or using the green screen.

Using the green screen meant teachers could easily remove the background when using a site like remove.bg  and then swap it the background out for something else of their choosing.

This year I really want to ramp up Create activities with my facilitation practice and show teachers how with a little ingenuity, they can provide these options for students at a reasonable cost.   The final test piece in this prototype worked out ok, but there’s plenty more for me to play with here.

We wrapped up with teacher’s sharing their reflections on the day by writing a blog post like Andrew and Kamlesh