Mentoring New Teachers

Digital Intensive 2 I can't believe that a week has passed since the last digital intensive. Today we were looking at Google Forms, Google Sheets and Google maps. We began this session with the history of Manaiakalani around Learning and the pedagogy of "Learn, Create, Share". Research underpinning this came from John Hattie's constructivist and metacognitive approach, Russell Bishop's culturally responsive pedagogy, the global study for the Ministry of Education that showed acceleration can be achieved through inquiry driven exploration and the use of the Google platform. We learned how to set up a Google form with many available options that would give us data that we can analyse either as baseline data, feedback data or exit data. I created a Google form with questions around the new Education Council standards and sent it out to 10 teachers - have had 3 responses so will send again. I had recently attended a workshop on these and will be using th...

Tamaki College has been working with Ngahuia Lott over a period of years and she has been running workshops for us this year. This diagram shows the extent and meaning of what we have been learning. At the beginning of each year we need to build relationships with those we are working with including students. This comes under the heading of whanaungatanga. What is whanaunagatanga? For myself it is developing relationships with each of the teachers I work with. These are mainly beginning teachers who I will be supporting over several years but also in my role as the SCT I work with other teachers who would like support. I am lucky that I have been given time to do this important role and although I am not teaching in the classroom, I have had years of experience teaching in low decile and high decile schools and also with Team Solutions, University ofAuckland. Being able to work in-depth in one school is a privilege as one can work at a deeper level. Each of the beginning teachers...

I was fortunate to be asked to go on the the 4 day trip to Rawhiti Marae in November. I went with about 20 Māori students from Kata O'Donnell's tutor class and 3 other teachers. The purpose of the trip was to familiarise the students with Māori tikanga in a remote settlement on Māori land which is quite different from what they are accustomed to. Activities were run by WaiNot Tourism and featured a forest walk, snorkelling, fishing with nets, cooking pippis on the beach, swimming and jet ski riding. The students were kept busy from 7.45am until about 10pm at night. It was a great way for them to bond together well away from school and to have new experiences learning new skills. What did I learn from This? I learned more about ways of working with Māori students,the importance of tikanga, eating, sleeping and working together. It was fascinating to be in such a remote untouched environment and to see how the students behaved and related differently fro...

    One of our Teach First teachers is Māori and ran a great session for the PCTs (Provisionally Certificated Teachers) on how they could introduce biculturalism into their teaching. Criteria 3 of the Practising Teacher Criteria says that fully registered teachers " demonstrate commitment to bicultural partnership in Aotearoa NZ by demonstrating respect for the heritages, languages & cultures of both partners of the Treaty of Waitangi". The question is how can teachers reflect this in their work? The best way to start is to make sure that Maori names are pronounced correctly. He showed us a chart that we could use to practise pronounciation and took us through the process of repeating the words after him. There is a version of this here with audio that anyone can use. This teacher had demonstrated the meaning of a treaty by creating a class treaty based on the RISE values of the school. The students put their own statements into the treaty using their thoughts ...

The advantage of working with trainee teachers (Teach First teachers) when you have been teaching for a long time is that it takes you back to the beginnings of things like classroom management 1.01 and behaviour management basics. Building Relationships and Expectations are crucial in the first few weeks.  Tamaki College has a set of values called RISE (Respect, Integrity, Success, Responsibility) which are embedded into the vision and ways of working in the school. The students are familiar with these and they work well. The teacher will also set other expectations to do with behaviour, work, tools, listening and following instructions. These will all enable the development of positive relationships between teacher and students and so make the teaching and learning more productive. See building relationships with Pasifika students here  and with Māori students here . Setting up a routine and sticking to it is also crucial to developing a good and safe physical and e...