Milestone 1 - 2008

Well done everyone. Our first milestone for the, "I Can' We Can" ICT development cluster has now been completed. It most certainly outlines the fantastic progress we are making in achiving our primary ICT goal for the year of shifting from learning about and with ICT to learning through ICT. This has mainly come about by your true belief in the power of the ICT tool to improve current learning outcomes for our students and the importance of this tool for their future lives. It has then cme about by your willingness to take on new ideas, when convinced of the value of them, and to work hard to implement change. I look forward to continuing on with our current development focus which is the analysis and assessment of what currently is Inquiry in our school which I am sure will lead to improvements in this area. A special acknowledgemt to our lead teachers. Thanks a lot.

Milestone Summary

Why Inquiry?

• To engage students
• To teach transferable skills (such as finding and applying information) at a deep level so as to enable students to truly be lifelong learners.

Action Plan

• A schoolwide understanding of our definition of 'Inquiry', so staff and students have a common understanding and can clearly articulate from year 0-8 what inquiry is. Part of this is also using common vocab. This became clear when asking students. They had some understanding but not a clear, consistent understanding across the school.
• A schoolwide model that is collectively understood and I think needs a visual element to help children.
• To continue to refine our planning of a schoolwide inquiry unit each term.

What are the outcomes or expected outcomes?

• For students to be more engaged in learning.
• For students to be independent learners with skills they can transfer throughout life.

Inquiry Staff Meetings

We have held 2 staff meetings this term that have focussed on inquiry. Our goal with this was to revise our inquiry matrix. We found that we in fact needed to go back a couple of steps and make sure we have an inquiry model that is generic throughout classrooms and that is understood clearly by all staff and students.

Our next step (as Fiona has mentioned previously) is to work on this model and then the assessment matrix will flow more easily.

To assist with this staff have had the opportunity to look at a variety of Inquiry, Integrated Learning and Action Learning models for ideas both online via Del.icio.us and in a wall display in the staff room.

ICT Cluster Day 22nd May

Thanks to Coley St for sharing your journey with us, and the paths you have taken along the way. After reflecting about today, we (Neil, Tab and myself) have discussed our next steps, and where we want our school to be heading. A main concept that came through for us is the need to develop a visual representation of our inquiry model that is consistent throughout the school. This will help us and the kids to focus on inquiry and what each step is for them. The idea of putting this into a roundabout picture has been discussed, as this fits in with our curriculum model of a highway. Tab and I are going to present this concept at our next professional development in 2 weeks time. Work has already begun on developing this concept!
We would also like to work on developing some planning templates for our kids to use, and discussing the different levels of inquiry and where we want to head with this.
We are also going to work on setting aside a teacher only day to go as a whole staff to visit other schools.

Term 1, 2008

Congratulations to all our wonderful staff here at Poroutawhao School for continuing on with the implementation of our localised school curriculum suitably titled, "Poroutawhao School Learning Highway". It warms my heart to see the ideas that we have "thrashed out" over the last two years or so come together into a framework that is truly focussed primarily on the needs of our students, modern educational theory and our own community values. Further to this, I am absolutely certain that we have a compliant curriculum that meets the requirements of the NZ Curriculum. I look forward to having this reinforced by the likes of ERO at some stage.

Well done for your work on our term 1, integrated unit relating to Heroes. I was thrilled to know that our children can now decide for themselves who or what a hero is to them. I was also thrilled to see and be part of the myriad of learning activities that helped them reach this point. Our planning, teaching and assessment work, incorporating our new Inquiry Tools, ICT and SOLO taxonomy are becoming more powerful and effective everytime we do this.

Keep up the good work. I think your all awesome.

Neil H.

Amanda's posting

We are all busy in Room One looking at our new unit on "Bugs" we are finding this extremely interesting, but challenging as we have to tie in a science experiment into our bugs unit. We have finally finished our Heroes unit and are very proud of our projects. Come into the classroom and view these on the wall.

Room 4 Inquiry

Room 4 have been learning all about Heroes. In term one we talked about being responsible learners. To help us decide what a responsible learner is we used a Definition map. We used pictures that represent different kinds of behaviours. In groups the children talked about and sorted the pictures using a Define Map. Below are some of our children working together to get the job done. After we sorted and glued the pictures everyone wrote a definition of what they think a responsible learner is....


(pictures to come)

Room5

I think that Room 5's inquiry is going well. The children are starting to use the language of our matrix and are understanding the process of our Poroutawhao Inquiry. I am finding the presenting aspect tricky as the kids are not so independent and need a lot of teacher support. I'd like to work on the presenting side of the matrix more.