Ramblings of a year 7/8 teacher

Activity 7  Week 31 What is the observed impact after the ‘Take Action’ phase? At the beginning of the inquiry, I was a little overwhelmed by the length of the Spiral of Inquiry process, as we had carried them out at school before but not as in depth as I did this time in the past they often lost momentum.  I found by sticking with the process and going through each step thoroughly, it has really paid off. This inquiry has impacted on my classroom in a very positive way. We now have parents engaging with the learning and sharing their ideas and thoughts with us on a regular basis. The students love having their parents more involved with what they are up to at school and like having discussions at home with their parents about their latest results and goals that they have set in class. The impact on my teaching has been really positive as well as I have found that my students are motivated and and eager to complete work to a really high standard so that we can share...

Activity 6 Week 30 Reflection on your evidence At the start of this inquiry my group wanted to know, what we could do as a school to get our parents engaging with us and sharing their thinking and ideas about their child’s learning. We wanted to strengthen our connections with whanau. So we sent out an anonymous survey and completed some face-to-face interviews where we could. The results we got were completely different to what we anticipated. We had initially thought that parents didn’t come to our learning events because we didn’t have strong enough relationships with them or that they didn’t feel comfortable coming in. However, that was not the case at all, our parents would love to come in and interact with us (teacher/student) but they simply don’t have the time. So we needed to change our approach. So since we gathered that data we reached out to colleagues at other schools to see what digital platforms they were using to communicate with parents and what was really ...

Activity 5 Week 29 My Audience The audience that my inquiry focused on was mainly my parents and students at the early stage. As an Associate Principal of my school, it is part of my job to find ways to improve our communication with parents and find ways to get our community engaging with us about their children's learning. This has proven difficult in the past as we would always see the same parents at any event we put on, so through carrying out this inquiry it has led us to see that the way we communicate with whanau needs to change, because society has changed and our parents just don’t have the time to come into school for a hui. Analyse the audience perspective One challenge I have had is finding the best digital platform for my parents to interact with. I have had some parents prefer Facebook as it is easy for them to access and posts come up on their newsfeed when they log on. But then I have parents who prefer Seesaw, because they like the fact that they can ...

Week 28 Activity 4 What: During the survey data collection we were very aware of the importance to keep parents identity anonymous, so that if anyone was to know any names it would remain with the 3 inquiring teachers. However, during the analysing stage some parents made negative comments about certain teachers within our school. This brought up the ethical dilemma of do we share this information with the school principal or do we just let it go? So what: So we discussed this as a team and decided that our first priority was to ensure that the identity of our parents and students was kept private as we had stated and made that very clear in the beginning that it would be. We also felt that it was our duty to inform the Principal of the comments that arose, because she needs to be fully advised of any matter that could arise in the future and she is very proactive in ensuring the well being of our tamariki and whanau members as well as her staff. By doing this, it took...

Week 27 Activity 3 Toitū te kupu, toitū te mana, toitū te whenua Without language, without mana, without land, the essence of being Māori would be lost What: Our senior leadership team have been looking for ways to improve parent engagement for some time now, the things we have put in place have never really improved the problem. We made the assumption that, that was down to the fact that parents didn't feel comfortable to come into school and work alongside us. We really kept thrashing a dead horse, because we didn't look outside the box, we just kept having parent hui, home-school-partnership evenings and things similar to that, with very little parent turn out. In recent discussions we have been discussing setting up a school website that parents can download onto their devices and get updates on the go. This has been put on the shelf at the moment while our I.T team look into it at a later date. The Mindlab group that I have been a part of have decided that we can...

Week 26 Activity 2 Inquiry topic To what extent does parent engagement in digital hangarau impact on student success for Year 7 and 8 students at Clendon Park School? Parent engagement is an issue that we have at our school. We have found through research that we need to ensure that parents feel valued and respected to make strong relationships. When this happens, parents feel more comfortable to come in to school and interact with their child’s learning. We are wanting parents to come into school and participate in digital hangarau sessions, so that they have a clear understanding of what this curriculum consists of and how they can support their tamariki at home. Joyce Epstein (2001) describes this stage as decision making and collaborating with community. We believe that this stage will bring many benefits not only for students but for parents and teachers. What: The significant thing that has come out of our inquiry is that we initially thought our parents were intim...