Ramblings of a year 7/8 teacher

Activity 8  Week 32 Problem Identification The problem that I identified was that our parents did not engage with their child’s learning and we really struggled to get our parents in to school events that we put on regardless of time. So because of this we knew we needed to do something different, we needed to look at the way we approach things as a school. This inquiry/journey has led us to understand our parents more and has built stronger connections. This would not have occurred without this inquiry. Observation and Analysis As a group we were initially going to just survey the parents from our classes, but because we are a part of the management team we decided to take it out to the whole school. We put together a survey asking parents a range of questions about how involved in their child’s learning they currently are. Do they receive enough information from the school? What ways good we improve as a school to make connections with whanau? We also took time to int...

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 ...