Socio economic status
Our school is a state funded school catering for new
entrants to Year 6 children. We are a decile 6 school with a roll that
ranges between 210 -250. Our children are predominantly European (78%) and
Maori (16%) with the remaining children from other ethnic backgrounds
including; Pasifika, Japanese, Chinese. The school is located in northern Christchurch and
most children are from the immediate area around the school. We receive strong and positive parental support
from our community and this is reflected in the commitment shown by our Parent
Teachers Association (PTA) and our Board of Trustees (BOT).
Stoll (1998) talks about a school's culture reflecting the people in it, the surroundings and context and also the history of the school. We are lucky in our context that education is viewed as an active
partnership between home and school, with families and teachers working together
for the benefit of children's learning and development. This team approach (parents, teachers, children) helps to nurture our caring family atmosphere.
Stoll (1998, P.9) ) also says that culture "defines reality for those within a social organisation, gives them support and identity and creates a framework for occupational learning". Our school lives by and through its Child Goals (Resilience, Communicator, Caring Citizen and Thinker) , Values (Respect, Personal Best, Curiosity and Honesty) and our Vision. Visitors coming into our environment often comment on how these are evident amongst the staff and children.
Our school vision was created as a meaningful pathway to our students learning and life journey, "Kimihia te ara tōtika – seek the right path". This vision, I believe links well to Stoll and Fink's (1996) cultural norm of "lifelong learners" as we are teaching our children that learning is a journey along a pathway an we are all learning together. As a staff, we often refer to our role and responsibility of "walking the talk" to ensure that we are living and breathing our child Goals and Values to encourage and expect the same from our students and parents. They are interwoven into what we do both in and out of the classroom.
Organisational Structure
We have recently undergone a major restructuring where our single cell classrooms have now been transformed into modern dual teaching spaces. This has led to our school being set up in teaching 'Pods' of two teachers and classrooms. We are involved in an ongoing process of change as we adapt to the collaborative nature of the spaces and new ways of teaching. The impact of this change has been immense. It has required us to adapt to changes in team size, to embrace team teaching in a positive way, to support the children in these new larger environments (for whom many find it difficult) and also to support our school community through this immense change.
Professional Environment
Our team is dedicated, proactive and focused on our own professional learning. It makes our school a great place to be. It is made up of a mixture of staff who have been there for over 20 years and new staff in their first year of teaching. We are very lucky that quality professional development is seen as a high priority and we have been involved with and guided by many outside experts over the last few years in the areas of mathematics and literacy. We have high quality expectations of our staff and children and with all the change we have undergone we have all had to really embrace a growth mindset.
I think one of the biggest barriers that impacts on my practice would be time. As a staff we are constantly asking ourselves how to best manage our time effectively in our new teaching environments as we find we need to make time to meet as a whole staff, in our Junior and Senior teams, in our teaching Pods, have time to do our own planning, preparation and planning and also time to try new ways of doing things.
To cope with this, this year we are refining our meeting schedules and undertaking the Spirals of Inquiry as a school which we are hoping will help to guide us into more reflective practice and improve student outcomes. We are trying to be more effective with our meeting times by reducing some to one day a fortnight and making our Pod meetings a priority. We are also using Google Docs and email to share information that doesn't necessarily need a 'meeting'. This is so we can meet with our teaching partner to reflect on our classroom practice which we see as a priority. "Risk Taking" is another important cultural norm (Stoll and Fink, 1996) and in our environment we a living and breathing this as our staff and students learn to work in our new open environments and take risks trying new ways of learning and doing things.
My teaching partner and I can also relate to some of the "cultural norms" that Stoll and Fink (1996) refer to. In particular we use 'celebration and humour' in our Pod as we celebrate success and mistakes and use humour in many situations. This links well with our child goal of resilience as we model being able to make mistakes to our children and seeing it as a positive step in our learning.
As a school, I feel it is important for us to keep improving the depth of our reflective practice, to continue to manage our time effectively without increasing pressure on staff and to keep in mind how we, as a school, are developing 21st century skills in our students as we cope with a multitude of change.
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