My Journey in Developing a School Curriculum: Part 4

The Journey.  Part 4

Ok, so a lot more than a month has passed since my last installment of the journey and I said that I was going to write about the impact on the students’ learning and how teachers and parents felt about the changes. Firstly, I will give a quick (haha) overview of the journey as a whole then discuss the impact of these changes.

Through a robust review cycle and processes we enhanced our organisational, instructional and evaluative capabilities to be able to self-manage our educational outcomes. Over the 3 years we had completely reviewed and redesigned our curriculum delivery documentation to align with the new curriculum framework, effective pedagogical practices and the National Standards.

Our curriculum was designed by thinking outside the box and then redesigning it. The Board Of Trustees, Principal (me :), Staff and community spent a long time working to get  the curriculum, charter, policies and procedures to complement each other, as well as to the point where they could be used as living documents. We had created highly effective and professional documentation that ensured the curriculum was delivered to meet the needs of the learner. These documents were not made in isolation of each other. If you change one you had to look closely at all the others to reflect these changes. This required us to develop a new way to self review; the old ways just wouldn’t give us the flexibility or coverage of all documents. This saw us develop a dynamic new curriculum with a self-review process that was  highly effective and highly efficient.

Documentation

To support these documents we created innovative documents for teaching and learning in Literacy, Numeracy and Inquiry Learning in an Integrated Curriculum. These documents showed clear pathways for our teachers, and in turn our students and parents, so that they are aware of the individual learning needs of each student. As such, they enable the students and teachers to develop individualised, personalised pathways in all curriculum areas.

Programmes

The programmes that were used had been ‘selected’ during our curriculum design and redevelopment phase. These programmes and the planning had been evaluated to provide the best opportunity for the child. There was a personalised and individualised learning process for each child and the individual needs guided the programme not the other way around.

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Achievement Progress booklets

Achievement Progress booklets had been developed over the two years that allowed each child to keep track of their own progress in relation to their own year level and their own next steps to learning at each year level in reading, writing, numeracy and the Key Competencies. These booklets were used in conjunction with our reporting to parents in writing and  interviews, to show where the child was, next steps and how they could help at home.

Reporting to parents

Our ‘reporting to parents’ documents were reviewed and aligned to the National Standards. This includes the Achievement Progress Booklets and the written reports that are given twice a year in conjunction with parent interviews. These documents all show the teacher, student and parent the progress of the student, where to next and how parents can help at home.  

Inquiry Learning

A comprehensive Inquiry Learning document had been developed that reflected the school’s needs and community goals.  The inquiry process focused on the student developing independent learning skills and learning how to learn. The topics that are the focus for each term are chosen by the children at the end of each year through a consultative process with the children, asking what they want to know locally, nationally and internationally as well as their concerns and interests. This gives the topic studied a real context and a student centred focus to learning.

Consultants

To ensure that the process was lead effectively and efficiently we employed a consultant to assist  Myself and the  Deputy Principal to develop our leadership capabilities. This helped to focus our leadership team on improving our teaching staff and student achievement.   

Teaching As Inquiry

The 3 years saw all staff continually inquiring into our teaching practice. Through review of our teaching programmes and the use of student data we identified focus areas for our teaching as inquiry process to improve and maintain our high standard of student achievement and improvement. This was done as a whole staff focus on identified needs. Again a consultant was involved in developing a Teaching as Inquiry model for our whole staff with the focus on ‘How can we effectively ensure that Literacy and Numeracy skills are being applied by students in our Inquiry Learning topic studies’. This saw the teachers becoming more aware of how we make these links in a real context, which in turn shows the students the reasons for reading, writing and maths and giving relevance and meaning to their learning.

Our Teacher Reflective Practice (appraisal) process was reviewed  and redesigned to reflect the teaching dimensions, effective pedagogy and the principles of the curriculum. This Reflective Practice process is robust and promotes the improvement of teaching and learning at our school. These documents show areas of strength and needs and allow the teacher to plan next steps for professional development.

 

The impact

Using the Achievement Progress Booklets allowed teachers and students to co-construct the learning. With the students knowing exactly where they were and what their next steps were, they could work with the teacher to plan their own learning.  Teachers were commenting on how this made their teaching so much easier. They knew exactly where each child was for all subject areas on a daily basis. Planning was for individual children. In the senior classes the teacher would hold workshops that the children would book into depending on their individual needs. Children were saying, ‘I need you to teach me this or that for my next steps’. This also made report writing a breeze as the Achievement Progress Booklets held all the up-to-date (real time) information with reference to evidence and next steps to learning. The parent, teacher, student interviews were able to be held by the students as they were able to speak about their learning and the reasons why they were where they were and how they were going to achieve their learning goals.

The students were now becoming self directed in their learning, They could take responsibility for their learning and the progress that they made. As a principal, when I had parents come in to discuss their child for any particular reason, I could just slip down to the class pick up the Achievement Progress Booklet for that child and have an up-to-date record of where that child was on that day!

Why not have it digital I hear you say ?!! At the time that this was happening it was before broadband, N4L and all the other fast internet options. At school the internet and intranet were patchy and prone to breakdowns. So to get it off the ground and embedded in the culture of the school, we went with the paper option so the children could have it sitting next to them for easy access. The next steps of digitizing the process was underway.

The ‘Teacher Reflective Practice’ (we called it this to get away from the bad connotations that  ‘APPRAISAL’ held) was now owned by the teacher. It was a document that was used as a reflective tool and not just something we dragged out at the beginning and end of year.  Teaching As Inquiry was used to guide this process and had relevance to the teacher and their needs.

My own goals and inquiries were also shared with staff. Having an open and professional relationship with staff that allowed for reflective practice and teamwork, I think helped considerably in getting to where we were.

Finally 

So I guess if we think back to Part 1 and the educational puck that I was talking about, I think that we have developed a school curriculum that is responsive to the needs of the learner and will allow us to prepare the learners for the future. As I mentioned before Maharey in his foreword for the Enabling the 21st Century Learner (Ministry of Education, 2006) suggested that  “...the answer lies in reorienting the system.. away from the organisation, to the learner... to connect schools and communities and to support evidence-based decision-making and practices in schools” (p. 3). I don't think that the job is finished, not by a long shot. Things are changing rapidly and we are always reflecting and transforming our practices. But through having robust systems, reflective practices, being innovative and adaptive, I think we can stay ahead of the game and get those learners in line to receive that old puck.