The Year to Date

Kia ora Everyone,

Apologies for not checking in sooner but with one thing or another time has just seemed to slip by. First and foremost I have to congratulate my two staff members, Amanda and Fiona, who presented our Inquiry model, the Poroutawhao Inquiry Intersection, at the Learning at Schools Conference in Rotorua back in term 1. The feedback from this to date has been outstanding and this truly represented the fact that we have taken our school to the next level in terms of Inquiry development and implentation in our school. We are now confident enough in what we are doing to share with others. Ka pai tera!

Last term I was also thrilled to be able to analyse our second set of data, based on our Term 3, 2008, Inquiry unit. This data was based on assessments taken against our Inquiry matrix, showed that the vast majority of our students, 92% in fact, were Inquiring at or above an age appropriate level.

This year it was awesome to introduce the revised inquiry assessment matrix with features being the inclusion of SOLO taxonomy within the indicators and the creation of a bank of Level 5 indicators. To date, this has been well received.

Recently I once again took the time to rove through the classrooms and talk to students about Inquiry and was thrilled to hear comments such as, "you learn so much", its makes our work so interesting", and "I always know where I am". The feeddback that I got proved to me that our children are more engaged in learning through inquiry and are therefore far more motivated. They are also far more able to describe their learning, ie what they know now and what they need to know or do to enhance learning from there.

All in all, a very rosy picture in terms of Inquiry in our school.