Celebrations that shape culture
In his book Professional Learning Communities at Work, Rick DuFour shares, “One of the most important and effective strategies for shaping the culture of any organization is celebration.”
How and what do you celebrate in your school?
Celebrating Students
Most of us will be able to name a variety of ways we celebrate our students - we reward effort, progress, achievement, in some cases attendance. We celebrate academic progress, academic achievement, values, and competencies, and these celebrations take many forms. In schools today we see celebration through rewards - certificates, trophies, shields. Assemblies and prize-givings were missed during the pandemic, and have been welcomed back now too. A personal favourite of mine has been the introduction of celebrations or exhibitions of learning. It makes my heart sing to see students be so excited to share their learning with an authentic (often adoring) audience, and also the insights and partnerships that can be developed with whānau and friends too.
Of course, there will be debate and challenges to these processes e.g. during lockdowns we had to rethink how we celebrated our students. Another common debate is the intrinsic vs extrinsic rewards discussion. When we step back though - who doesn’t love a good celebration - even our shyest of learners can benefit when it is done through a thoughtful process!
Celebrating our Staff and Community
School leaders also know that to shape culture within a school we celebrate not only our students but our staff and members of our community also. Maybe we need to crowdsource our ideas, and collectively strengthen our ketes - with the goal of creating awesome Professional Learning Communities… imagine a smorgasbord of ideas that have been tried and worked in a variety of contexts. Wouldn’t that help to keep our school leaders supported with ideas for how we celebrate staff and whānau? This could also be shared with staff, as we ensure that while we have the overall responsibility, the culture within a school is a collective responsibility.
It is important to celebrate a journey within a school. A wise person once told me that “a school is like a book - and as school leaders, we are all but a chapter… and the school will go on once we are gone”. I think that analogy is helpful to remember, however, most leaders I know are intrinsically motivated (consciously or not) by ensuring their added value - their legacy. The All Blacks refer to it as ‘leaving the jersey in a better place’. Whatever the context or motivation, celebrating a school or kura’s journey acknowledges, and honours the mahi that has built the legacy of the school, the one you inherit. The work that you do in your ‘chapter’, and sets the path for the future.
What are our ‘best practices’ for:
Celebrating Staff
Celebrating Whānau
Celebrating Our School’s Journey?
Rochelle Inwood
Professional Learning Facilitator
Momentum Learning Ltd
Literacy across the curriculum - NCEA
Reading and writing skills need to be actively and systematically taught across the curriculum. But what might this look like? How might it be done in all/any subject area? How can all subject teachers contribute to essential literacy learning outcomes?
Reading and writing skills need to be actively and systematically taught across the curriculum. But what might this look like? How might it be done in all/any subject area? How can all subject teachers contribute to essential literacy learning outcomes?
The following six literacy strategies can be used across the curriculum to activate and embed reading decoding strategies. These could be used as ‘peppered in’ mini activities within existing units, used as a daily dose of literacy targeting, as a starting/plenary activity or even activated as a main activity to decode texts together.
ACTIVE NOTICING AND COMMENT CODES
Use ‘active noticing’ when reading. Students could use colour to colour-code or add comment codes along the margin to practice being active readers. Comment codes could be ‘I’ for interesting, ‘W’ for wonder or ‘X’ for connecting to a previous concept or idea. The comment codes can be individualised or designed as a class.
Use Immersive Reader plugin - this web-based plugin can be activated by highlighting text in a browser and clicking ‘read to me’. You can hear the text while reading, focus on one line at a time or even activate the features that highlight nouns, verbs and adjectives (word classes) to drill down on word selection and inference. There is even a translation tool to click on words and find a translation in another language to assist learners to access patterns and noticings with language.
Use Visuwords to define new words - type the word into visuwords and discuss the ways that word families appear. Make connections between the words and the definitions. Click around the vocabulary and make new connections with language as other more familiar words or definitions bring clarity to the original word.
ONE PAGER WITH TRIGGERS
Use ‘one pager’ capture pages to capture understanding. Provide text boxes to capture learning as a result of reading. You can guide the student to notice and question by activating specific reactions with subheadings. ‘Something interesting’, ‘Something surprising’. ‘Something I’m not sure about’, ‘Something ambiguous’.
Use question dice to ask questions about the text. You could use digital dice to come up with questions that prompt questions that correspond to each number. Clarify, repeat, rephrase, so what, what next, why not, what if? You can co-design the questions with students to match the text type and create awareness about text types, audience and purpose.
Use rewordify.com to gain clarity and reword complex texts into more simple versions. Compare and contrast the versions. What would happen if it had to be rewritten with a character limit? Provide a twitter challenge to process and rewrite texts in class or online.
These are just a few simple strategies to trial with your ākonga. How else might you target literacy in your kura? Get in touch with us to explore more fun and engaging ways to embed literacy skills into your planning and preparation for literacy in the junior curriculum as well as for NCEA changes.
Ministry of Education Priorities for professional development