Week 26 - APC - Professional Contexts of Practice 

My Professional Community

Ehara toku toa i te toa takitahi
Engari he toa takimano
My strength is not that of n individual
but that of the collective
Maori Proverb

The Organisational Culture (Collective Values / Principles) that underpins our practice:

Within our PIMP (Pasifik Island Manurewa Principals) community of practice our shared values have evolved as we ourselves have strengthened our relational trust with one another. Building strong relationships with high trust is important within our community, so all members are valued and feel they are supported to share, to challenge, have a difference of opinion and still walk away with their mana intact. As previously stated, "Te Kaupapa Maori Principles" are our guiding values of how we treat and respect one another in every place and space, no matter the platform we use.

Fostering a Positive Professional Environment:

Stoll (1998) defines school culture as three dimensions, the relationship among its members; the organisational structure including the physical environment and management system; and the learning nature.  Some internal and external factors that shape a school culture include the school history, the student socio-economical background, external contexts such as national educational policies, and societal changes (Stoll, 1998).

Stoll and Fink (cited in Stoll, 1998) identified 10 influencing cultural norms of school improvement including:

• “1. Shared goals - “we know where we’re going”
  2. Responsibility for success - “we must succeed”
  3. Collegiality - “we’re working on this together”
  4. Continuous improvement - “we can get better”
  5. Lifelong learning - “learning is for everyone”
  6. Risk taking - “we learn by trying something new”
  7. Support - “there’s always someone there to help”
  8. Mutual respect - “everyone has something to offer”
  9. Openness - “we can discuss our differences”
  10. Celebration and humour - “we feel good about ourselves”” (p.10)

Our PIMP community are currently participating in the Relationship-Based Learning and Culture Counts PLD with Cognition Education, facilitated by Laurayne Tafa, helping our staff to understand the Impact of their thoughts and actions.  

This PLD provides opportunities for staff to critically reflect on:

• teaching practices needed to transform classrooms, so that they are more conducive to educational success for priority and minoritised learners
• factors of the optimal learning partnership with family  to improve student outcomes
• leadership practices required to transform systems, schools, classrooms for  educational success for priority and minoritised learners.   

Laurayne has enabled us to reflect on the following key questions:

• Why do we think the way we do? 
• What informs our values and principles? 
• How do we see student achievement? Are our values and principles aligned to our schools? 

This PLD is helping our 3 schools look at the "Culture" of practice and how we think about our practice and do the things we do. We call this the BIG C (our school / classroom culture) and LITTLE C (what we bring / prior experiences / knowledge / understanding)

At Homai, everyone brings their individual culture with them ( Little C culture -  our strengths / weaknesses, ethnicity, whanau values, etc). The BIG C is cultivated through our collaborative relationships, building a cultural norm of what it looks, sounds, feels like at Homai. It is the expected values and vision we collectively agree upon and strive to live up to. Just like any whanau-context (family) there are ups and downs, not everyone are on the same page, but together we seek understanding and tomorrow is a new day - clean start!!

We have a strong belief that if we increased relationships for learning from 20% to 50% we would have a huge improvement in student achievement. Shared goals - “we know where we’re going” Stoll and Fink (cited in Stoll, 1998)

As instructional leaders of our schools our expectations are that our teachers are not to just be good but be great! 

Relationships-based learners profile

A family-like context for learning	Interacting with the learning context
1. Rejecting deficit explanations for students’ learning Agentic talk articulated, students are encouraged as they succeed.	1.Prior learning Using activities that require learners to activate what they know already, what they may need help with, what they want to learn.  Teachers use this information and other assessment data with students explicitly to inform the learning intentions  and the pace of the learning.
2. Caring for and nurturing the learner,  including their language and culture Students can bring their own cultural experiences to the learning. There are culturally appropriate learning contexts. Students’ prior learning is  utilised.	2. Formative assessment: Feedback Feedback, Learners are able to practise their learning and request feedback as they learn. They can articulate where they need support. 3. Formative assessment: Feedforward The teacher is able to give feed forward – precise responses that guide  the learner to their next steps in the task and indicate what might help them  to check that they have been successful. 4. Co-construction Teachers provide models and exemplars of successful learning that support  learners to deconstruct tasks and to co-construct success criteria. Learning tasks involve the learner bringing their understandings and perspectives  to the learning in order to make sense of their learning.
3. Voicing and demonstrating high Expectations There are high expectations of student  learning and behaviour. The classroom interactions include talk about student  capability to reach short- and long-term  goals.	5. Power-sharing Students work co-operatively to learn. Teachers and students have  opportunities to learn with and from each other. This helps create a  non-dominating relationship between students and teachers.

4. Ensuring that all learners can  learn in a well-managed environment The lesson is well organised with  clear routines for students to  interact and learn individually and  as a group.
5. Knowing what students need to  learn The teachers know their subject knowledge. There are models and exemplars to support learners to  know what success looks like.	Checking in with student engagement:               What are you learning?               How do you know your learning that?               What are your next steps?

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Our community of practice is a means to share best practice, seek feedback and feed forward and delving into data and authentic voices. We have started to share videos of best practice of  our senior teachers (Impact Coaches) and looked at the evidence around learning conversations. Our impact coaches were a bit whakama (shy) at first to share their practice via video, but the kaupapa maori principle of whanau, set the scene of safety and respect within the group. Support - “there’s always someone there to help” Stoll and Fink (cited in Stoll, 1998)

Shifting from Deficit to Agentic Discourses!

It was transparent across our 3 schools that staff openly shared deficit discussions and conversations about underachieving students, lack of whanau and or leadership input or support, and the list goes on. The challenge was getting our staff to shift their conversations from deficit to a more agentic discourse. Through our PLD with Cognition Education, we have all discovered that many of our deficit thinking comes from a sense of helplessness (not knowing what we don't know) and if not taught any differently, we keep doing the same old thing. So we are going through re-educating ourselves, our practices and our pedagogy. The has strengthened our community of practice as we all become learners to have a stronger impact on our learners in the classroom.

Deficit thinking is not deliberate but based on practice and long time beliefs. Risk taking - “we learn by trying something new” Stoll and Fink (cited in Stoll, 1998).

To date our staff approach toward student learning and achievement is definitely an agentic approach. Are we there yet? absolutely not, we still have many mountains to climb, but as we climb them together (Te Kotahitanga - Collegiality) we succeed together. Collegiality - "we're working on this together" Stoll and Fink (cited in Stoll, 1998).

Reference:
1. Stoll (1998). School Culture. School Improvement Network’s Bulletin 9. Institute of Education, University of London. Retrieved from http://www.educationalleaders.govt.nz/Culture/Understanding-school-cultures/School-Culture