How do we ensure that learning is progressing for every student?  Perhaps the most important thing that I have learned in my 10+ years of teaching is that more teaching doesn't mean more learning. More explanations at the front of the class doesn't mean more learning is happening. More worksheets and more tasks don't mean students are making progress. So what does make a difference? In my opinion, it is those three fundamental questions from John Hattie, how are you going, where are you going, where to next. If students do not know what they are supposed to learn, how they are supposed to ..read more

There are four questions I urge you to go and investigate in your school...  If I struggled to read and write, how much of the learning in your year 9 and 10 programmes would be accessible to me? How many of the scientists who are acknowledged in your school's science curriculum are women? Māori? Pasifika? BIPOC?  How many Māori and Pasifika students graduate from your school with 3 UE STEM subjects?  How many Māori and Pasifika students from your school go on to a science pathway? I am a science teacher. I enjoy science. But the more I learn about culturally sustaining p ..read more

October of this year marked my 10 year anniversary at Hobsonville Point Secondary School (HPSS) where I started as a foundation staff member. Much has changed since those early days before we had any students and we dreamed up a school that would be better at meeting student needs. A lot will keep changing, particularly with an all-new senior leadership now at the helm in 2024.  With so much change on the horizon, I have found myself thinking a lot about the areas of our school where I am reluctant to see major change, as well as the areas in our school where I would like to see more chan ..read more

Where does your best professional learning happen these days?  One of the ongoing challenges with professional learning can sometimes be that the more you know, the harder it is to find professional learning that challenges you at the right level. As a PLD junkie in my early years of teaching, I have found on more than one occasion that many of the PLD opportunities out there have become a lot of the same ideas, just recycled into a new PowerPoint. Maybe I sound cynical, but it is hard to ignore that our refreshed curriculum's essential pedagogies are based on the professional learning wo ..read more

Today's post is a screenshot from one of my Google Classroom's grade books (student names removed). This year I have really focused on using this function to help students track their progress in my courses more effectively. There are a number of ways I have done this: Using the grade book effectively makes it easier to see if a student is not turning in work on a consistent basis. Eg. at a glance you can see that student 5 has some major concerns below.  Any tasks that I use to make my overall judgment for their grade at the end of the term are signposted. This way students know which ..read more

Today's photo is a screenshot from one of the documents we used in our kāhui ako this year. We encouraged all our schools to use the NITS framework that we created to help guide their inquiry practice this year. NITS  N - What NEED are you addressing? I - What IMPACT are you intending to have? T - What actions will you take in which TIMEFRAME? S - SO WHAT? What did you learn through your action?  Getting everyone to use the same framework means that we could more easily help the twelve schools we work with communicate with each other about where they were at in their inquiries, and ..read more

Wikipedia describes Guerilla warfare as "a form of irregular warfare in which small groups of combatants ... fight a larger and less-mobile traditional military". Due to their size, they tend to avoid head-on confrontations, focusing instead on very targeted attacks including sabotage, ambushes, and hit-and-run tactics.  I often wonder about guerilla warfare as a metaphor in education...  When education attempts to make large-scale shifts, such as by introducing more Mātauranga Māori in the curriculum, there are those people who hide in the shadows and staunchly defend thei ..read more

Hobsonville Point Secondary School (HPSS) uses an advisory model for pastoral care (informed by the work of  Dennis Littky and Eliot Levine). We call these pastoral groups hubs. The young people in this photo are my responsibility for their time here at HPSS. I work to help them succeed in whatever goals they set. I work hard to help them feel like they have a place here at school where they feel they belong, and where there is an adult who will always have their back while having high expectations of them. Or in the words of Rita Pierson; "every kid needs a champion". And tha ..read more

Today's photo is of a takahē on Tiritiri Matangi, the bird sanctuary which is located in the Hauraki Gulf of New Zealand, 3.4 km east of the Whangaparaoa Peninsula in the North Island and 30 km northeast of Auckland. Earlier this year I visited the island sanctuary with my level 2 biology class. This photo is a reminder that experiencing learning with all your sense is always powerful. But where the deep learning happens is where that experience is then used to inspire deeper inquiry.  ("It's been a little while since I've blogged regularly so to get back in the habit, I thought I would ..read more

One of the things that frustrate me about our current education system is that it has a bias toward using writing as a means to represent learning. Students are asked to write essays, write reports, write an email, write a letter, write a story. In science, this is particularly evident through the prioritisation of exams, tests, and reports that remain fixed as one of the primary means to assess students (not in all contexts but in many). I have a hunch that this bias contributes to the lack of cultural and gender diversity represented in science fields. In response, I wanted to spend some ..read more