We had a Staff Only Day yesterday to ensure we were prepared for off-site learning with a shared common understanding of what we meant by off-site learning. Last week we had scheduled it for Wednesday, but on Sunday night we made the decision to move it to Tuesday. In the middle of planning for it on Monday we stopped to listen to the PM's announcement about school closure. In a few short days we had moved from some planning around a possibility to suddenly a certainty.
We had held several Pop Up Hui with interested staff over the preceding 10 days and spent a lot of time agreeing on principles and then expectations based on them, before we started looking at tools and how. Our principles could be best summed up as:
- Getting the balance between supporting students to continue learning while off-site and the expectations on staff coping with school closure and the particular demands that that places on their own whanau.
All of the planning work has been done by our colleagues who have brought the full range of perspectives and curriculum foci along with a diverse set of personal circumstances to guide us to this stage. I thank them for that - it was a privilege to be part of that thinking and decision-making.
This was our plan for the day:
To support students and parents to have some sort of structure to their day we are having an outward facing ‘timetable’ as follows:
- 9 30am Hub Check-in
- 10 00 - 10 45 Block 1
- 11 00 - 11 45 Block 2
- 12 45 - 1 30 Block 3
- 1 45 - 2 30 Block 4
We fully understand that some schools reject the idea of any formal structure but I was motivated by Karen Spencer's Blog and the need to be thinking at this point in time of those less confident in managing themselves through this. I made it clear to staff that it was an outward facing structure in which we, and many of our students, would operate flexibly according to our own circumstances.
Key points I made to the staff at the start of the day were
- While your status will be “working from home” there is no expectation that you will be engaging with learners and ‘delivering’ for the 45 minutes of each of your timetabled blocks
- What we are proposing now will need adjusting as the plane-that-we-are-flying-while-building travels a bit further and we learn from our experience
- We have agreed on what tools we will use (very few) so that it is not too complicated from the student/parent facing end and how and who will communicate with students and parents
- Staff communication with students/whanau via GC, email only. No sharing of staff personal phone numbers or use of personal social media accounts. Safe and professional cyber practices are even more important when we are remote from each other and our students.
- Concerns around student engagement, ‘presence’ and progress will be channelled through Coaches using a uniform process
- We have kept a strong focus on the well-being of all. Now that we are faced with a school closure, it is vital that we maintain the strong connections and sense of whanau that exist among us. One of the things we will do is explore the best way to run an as full staff as possible meet up once a week. This will be important if any school closure goes on for a long period.
- One of the things we have set up that will operate from the start of any closure is a process for a staff hauora check once a week with their SLT member.
The following visual captures our expectations of staff:
This ABC for staff aligns with our current learning design practice and has connections and whanaungatanga at its core. There's a daily Hub Check-in at 9 30 (via the completion of a Offsite Planner for the day and a weekly Google Meet with the whole Hub.
We completed a set of expectations for students
The ABC for students aligns with our normal school expectations and is built around our 10 Hobsonville Habits.
The large part of the rest of the day was developing staff expertise on the tools we would all be using. The day before we had worked with our Kaiārahi (Head Students) as part of our SOD Planning Team and we tested our set of expectations for staff and students with them and they created the following to make very clear the tools we would be using and why.
We created 2 key documents/processes to ensure a focus on Hauora. The first was to help us focus on student hauora and support them in their daily planning. Our expectation is that when off-site learning kicks off next term on 15 April students will do a daily check in to Hub and complete this plan.
As well, to ensure we were also having a regular focus on staff hauora we created a document/process for staff. Once a week they complete the document and is shared with their relevant SLT member.
There's no doubt that we'll end up changing the way we will operate, especially if the closures go on for a while, but we reckon we've got a strong foundation.
It was an absolute privilege having our awesome Kaiārahi working with us in the lead up and during the day. I'm excited about their plans to keep leading the student body during this closure period.
See you on the other side of this bit of time.
