Powerful Partnerships

I am often asked what I think are the most important aspects of our curriculum and pedagogy model at HPSS. I'm sure I've given lots of different answers but for the moment I've settled on the two that support our principle of powerful partnerships: authentic learning and collaborative teaching.

The power of authentic learning was made clearest to me at our first Big Project exhibition when the students presented their banners on our Hobsonville Habits to AV Jennings and the Hobsonville Land Company. The quality of the finished products and the way in which our students were able to talk about their learning was very impressive.

Big Projects this term have once again created an authentic context for our learners. We have partnered up with Auckland Council and half the school are working on creating an original show with original music that portrays Auckland 2025 through the eyes of young people.

Drama improvisation activities to prepare for show

The other half of the school are working on ways to heighten awareness for the local environment as we have discovered a site in our vicinity heavily polluted with nursery plant bags which is also the site of one of NZ's most threatened plants.

Students exploring the affected sites

Our students also experienced another authentic learning situation when they hosted candidates from the local Upper Harbour electorate at school where they questioned them on topics ranging from youth issues to child abuse to Auckland's transport problems.

Questions being posed

Paula Bennett replies while candidates wait their turn

All of these will need to keep their day job!

I spend a lot of my time viewing learning in action. This is because I'm either taking visiting groups, observing staff or just out and about. As a result of doing this I have realised the power of collaborative teaching.

As we move through the year teachers are trying different ways of making the most of collaboration. Sometimes one teacher will be addressing the whole group while other times each of the teachers in the team will be taking different groups and at other times they are all facilitating throughout the class.

I had the privilege of Steve and Danielle last week. While Danielle collected a group around her mobile classroom (a whiteboard) and provided scaffolds for their learning, Steve moved around the other groups of students and kept them focused by asking tem challenging questions.

Danielle in the background in her mobile classroom

while Steve works with a group

Cindy and Megan working together to support learning

Jill including Annette, our Business Manager, as students pitch their projects

However, the most heart warming authentic learning and collaborative teaching I witnessed last week when I came across 2 of our students, Angus and Josh, running a workshop where they had been supporting 6 year olds to create electrical circuits.

I am firmly of the opinion that it is these two things schools need to find ways to incorporate in their curriculum and pedagogy, no matter what context they operate in or what structures either enable or restrict them so that schooling is relevant and engaging for our students.

Try to make learning authentic for the learners and try to enable collaboration in planning and teaching for the teachers.

HPSS - a High Viz School

Right from when we first started preparing to establish our school we were very purposeful about being visible - visible to anyone who wanted to see what was going on. DP, Claire Amos, was already a practicising blogger when she came on board while my own blogging had gone on a bit of a vacation. Inspired by the connections Claire was making throughout the world I launched back into it. When Steve arrived he brought another level and showed how we could all be comfortable sharing our successes, challenges and times of confusion and indecision. His approach was inspirational. Many other staff have joined in with varying degrees of regularity. You can see their blogs on my right hand side bar (any staff who are regularly blogging and are not present there please email me your blog address and I'll get it there).

I have found the blogging to be a great way to process thinking, reflect on our progress, and wonder about the future. I am particularly proud of the fact that we have all been comfortable with sharing the warts and all of our journey. The power of the feedback we receive cannot be underestimated. I reckon we might be the first school in New Zealand to have its establishment journey so openly and widely shared and documented.

One of the things I first noticed after my shift to Auckland was the high level of competition between schools and the over-riding motivation for schools to protect their patch, while at the same time raiding the patches of other schools in the region. This is a practice and driving force that I cannot get my head around! Schools and leaders with this mindset would simply not allow the widespread and open sharing that flows out of HPSS - makes me proud of the environment and culture we are creating!

These three paragraphs have served as a long-winded introduction to my thoughts of the wonderful edchatNZ Conference we have just hosted and which has exposed us to another level of visibility. It was an absolute brainwave on Danielle's part to have it begin on a Friday so that not only could participants attend workshops run by the outstanding list of presenters we had but they could also just sit in on our normal classes which were running throughout the day. They were encouraged to take part in lessons and talk with the students about their learning. On the Saturday they then had the opportunity to attend workshops run by our staff to further explore the practice and models they had observed the day before.

There were three stars of the conference in my eyes.

The first was obviously Danielle who is the instigator and driving force behind the fortnightly twitter conversation known as EdChat. So many good discussions have emerged from that event so she decided to have a conference which anyone could afford ($20!) and which would bring together those who had already connected on a regular basis through EdChat. The conference was outstanding and a huge credit to Danielle. The best way to check it out if you missed this great opportunity check out the #edchatnz stream on twitter. This particular stream was out trending Telecom and Spark on the day of their launch!

The second was the staff of HPSS. I have already been impressed with their courage - firstly for leaping on board with us on this journey to revolutionise the traditional model of secondary school and secondly for sharing their journey as I described above. But it is their courage in going a step further with making their practice so visible. Last Friday 300 teachers - not your average, run-of-the-mill teacher, but 300 teachers whose thinking about teaching and learning is also at the cutting edge - observed their practice all day, participated in their lessons, asked questions and talked with our students! I spent the day observing them calmly going about their normal practice as throngs of strangers moved around them. Watching how they came across (calm, confident, knowledgeable, expert, open) was almost the highlight, for me, of the conference.

But the real stars were our students.

Our students just carried on as normal and coped with many visitors not only participating in their lessons but also questioning them on topics ranging from, "How do you think this will work with NCEA?" (imagine asking this of 13 year olds 23 weeks into their secondary schooling!) to, "How do you know you are learning?" Of course, this was meat and veg for our kids (see my previous post).

To see how well this question was answered check out Matt Nicoll's post which includes him naming one of our students, Sheena, as one of the people he connected with and learned from (see below)

Who are 3 people that you connected with and what did you learn from them?

Reid Walker: he is even funnier in person and one of the few people at #edchatNZ with a worse "filter" than me.

Nanogirl/Michelle Dickinson: I was already an unashamed "fan boy" but I was unaware how much of her own time and money she puts into spreading her passion and talent. I really hope we can host her when she visits Christchurch.

Sheena, a Year 9 HPSS student: The discussion we had about "How do you know you are learning?" was inspiring. You are an articulate young lady and further evidence that young people are indeed self-aware and self-driven. I loved your statements about the differences between learning and assessment, and the arbitrary labels we put on things in education. Thank you for connecting with me!

And then on Saturday one of the several students who turned up was Josh Hardy, who attended Pam Hook's session on SOLO thinking alongside his Learning Coach, Danielle, so he could learn more about this thinking taxonomy!

Wherever, I turned on Friday students were talking openly, confidently, knowingly and expertly on their learning. It was all summed up for me by a teacher from the conference who talked of the 'eloquence' with which students talked about their learning. I promptly shared this via Twitter.

I'm the first to acknowledge that we have so much more to do, sometimes it seems so overwhelming, but consistent student voice, in all its forms, led me to say to our Board Chair, Alan Curtis, who attended the full conference, that I think we might be on the verge of creating something special.

His response was something like, "There's no might about it!"

To any EdChatters out there who came to our conference read this post please stay connected with each other. Let's keep all of our practices visible and let's challenge all of those who seek to keep things covered up. By openly sharing our practice we can challenge those who protect their patch while raiding the patch of others.

"Follow the revolution!"

"I can't believe how much she has learned!"

Student Voice is a rallying call as one of the key elements in a relevant, student-centred learning environment. Often, if student voice is present at all, it is merely confined to co-constructing contexts and activities for learning. At HPSS we certainly include student voice at this stage. Near the end of last term students took part in a workshop where they explored out Term III concept of citizenship and then brainstormed the contexts which they would like to explore as they increase their understanding of citizenship. In the following week teachers met in teams to design Modules based on this student voice and following that students then selected the Modules, with the support of their Learning Coach, which interested them.

But it is our students'ability to talk openly, confidently and knowledgeably about their own learning and learning progressions that has impressed me, made me even more confident about our vision and model and motivated me to tell parents at our recent Open Evening that the learning that has occurred at our school has exceeded my expectations.

The quotation in this post's title was made by a mother of one of our students after a 30 minute Individual Education Meeting where the student, supported by her Learning Coach, shared her learning and her progress towards achieving her learning goals. All day and into the evening I saw and heard the full range of our students talking about their learning and observed parents beaming with pride and increasing understanding of what our school is about: learning, not subjects and confident, informed young people who can do more than regurgitate facts and formulas.

Later in the week staff were invited to share their IEM experiences. Comments that stood out for me were:
"I like the feeling that kids see meas on their side."
"I am reminded of the power of conversations."
"It was heartening to see the change in parents. Many spoke of how they now saw their children in a different light."

It reminded me of last term's Big Project evening which featured in my last post where our students engaged parents and visitors in discussions about their Big Project and the learning. I knew then that something special was happening.

At HPSS we are enjoying showing hospitality to many visiting groups every week. So far they have come from Australia, Singapore, USA and all around NZ. The visitors are free to interact with our students in the learning environment and spend a lot of time talking with students about their learning. I feel really privileged to witness these discussions. Students, all of them, are able to clearly describe what they are doing, what the Learning Areas are and why they are carrying out this learning. Visitors often walk away from these conversations disbelieving that our kids are 13 - 14 years old only.

Visitors get to see students collaborating in their learning

TVNZ's Seven Sharp spent 4 hours filming at our school a couple of weeks ago as they were preparing a 4 minute piece on how learning can now look with a focus on our school and Mindlab. After watching a little of the filming from the sidelines and hearing our students respond to some quite challenging questions from the reporter I was confident that despite any spin that might be put on the topic that our kids, speaking confidently about their learning, would shine through.

And they did! Check out the clip here. One of our DPs, Claire Amos, facilitated the shoot and has written a neat reflection on the article which fleshes out the points covered.

Right at the end of last term we also surveyed our students and parents on how they were feeling about certain aspects of the school and for their overall impressions.

What students said about quality of relationships between students

What students said about the quality of relationships between students and teachers

How students described their overall view of HPSS

How Parents described their overall view of HPSS

I can't believe how much we are all learning!

Big Projects

We use Specialised Learning Modules, Learning Hub, MyTime and Big Projects to enable students to experience the NewZealand Curriculum in a variety of packages rather than just the single subject, single class, single teacher model that is part of the paradigm of one.

Big Projects are a major part of our curriculum. This YouTube clip has our project leader, Sarah Wakeford, explaining the intent of Big Projects and how they work.

Our first Big Project concentrated on Building our Culture and aligned with our Term I big concept of identity and our Term II big concept of Space and Place. This web page explains how students were supported to contribute.

The culmination of this first Big Project occurred on the evening of June 26 when students presented the results of their work to the community. Students positioned themselves beneath the relevant banner that detailed the Hobsonville Habit disposition that was evident in their project work. They talked about their project and answered questions from their parents.

Watching these students talk so confidently about their learning, with their work displayed as if in a gallery with parents wandering around with their souvenir programme it was important to remind ourselves that we were dealing with 13 year olds who had spent merely 3 hours one day a week for 15 weeks to get to this point.

After this viewing session we were treated to poetry recital, orchestral music, dance, drama and modern music from our wonderfully talented students.

This was our mission of Innovate Engage Inspire in action. As a result of forming a powerful partnership with the Hobsonville Land Company our students were inspired to produce high quality work which impressed the audience and the HLC. I am convinced the authenticity of the learning context drove accountability and rigour so that high quality work was produced and high quality learning took place.

Mock ups of some of the banners on display in our auditorium

The following is a selection of photos taken at the event:

Seems like we're ready to launch into the next Big Project which will result in a school show!

Leading At The Edge of Chaos

My colleague, Claire Amos, wrote in a recent post about Teaching on the Edge of Chaos a concept that we both heard Sugata Mitra talk about at the recent EduTech Conference in Brisbane. It appears to have resonated with her and it certainly has with me. At the same conference, Ewan McIntosh also introduced me to the concept of agile leadership.

I have come to think of these two concepts as the two sides of a coin or weights on a balance keeping everything in synch. When I think about being on the edge of chaos the only way to survive and develop is by being agile. I reckon agility is an important trait for a leader in a future-focused school not only because it makes dealing with uncertainty and rapid change more likely to be successful but also because it puts the leader in the position of role modelling this trait, not only for all members of the teams, but more importantly for our students whose world is going to require them to be very agile.

One of my personal goals against Principal Professional Standards in the area of Community and Networks is to not only blog my personal leadership journey but also to get out of my comfort zone and present or run workshops to a wide range of audiences. While there has been a bit of a break since my last blog (largely because a lot of my time has recently been focused on the presenting aspect for the last few weeks) I reckon I'm posting more than the average bear (in this case secondary school principals).

In the last few weeks I have been ale to present/workshop at a ChallengEd day in Auckland, 2 Emerging Leaders Conferences (Christchurch and Auckland), a Restorative Practices workshop in Auckland, the Wellington Secondary Schools Principals Association, the Central North Island DP Association in Taupo and had the privilege of spending a day workshopping with staff and students from Lincoln High School in Christchurch.

Selfie with Yr 9 students from Lincoln

Looking back over the themes of these workshops the common theme seems to have been convincing others that we are on the edge of chaos and that strong, agile leadership is required to navigate in this environment.

What do we mean by the edge of chaos?
Surely this description is a huge exaggeration. Some of us don't think so.

In the 1970s our employers expected our graduates to be strong in the three R's of Reading, Riting and Rithmetic and schools concentrated on these. There was, therefore, a close alignment between employer expectations and school delivery. I was a secondary school student in the 1970s and certainly felt as if I was being prepared for the world I was about to move into.

What about now? The three key skills employers want now are team work, problem-solving and inter-personal skills. The question we have to ask is does the alignment exist. My argument that schools still concentrate their teaching, assessment and reporting on the original 3 R's and do little about the 3 21st Century skills identified above. That could lead to a bit of chaos!

As well, employment opportunities are also changing rapidly. We have already seen agriculture plummet from 40% of the employment market to less than 2% and we're fully aware of the decline in employment in the range of manufacturing and processing industries. Even the service industries which have resisted the downward trend, but even that is now starting to occur. It is the creative sector which is on the rise, currently at 35% across the developed world and likely to be at 50% by 2018. Are schools positioning themselves for this employment environment or are they, as many of us suspect, reducing concentration on the creative learning areas to maintain a firm concentration on the 3 's and STEM subjects (all of which have their place, but not to the exclusion of the creative sector). This could be chaos, especially when linked to the bit of chaos above!

Let's not forget Moore's Law. With the power of the computer chip doubling every year and the price halving every year it means that by 2022 the equivalent of today's mobile device will hold the total sum of all human knowledge retrievable in a few seconds and will only cost a few dollars.

I see this as hugely exciting for the human race. In a few short years, for the first time in our history every citizen on the earth will have full access to all knowledge. This is true liberation as we wont be held ransom to those who control knowledge and it's sharing out.

But it will contribute to the sense of chaos for schools if we don't reposition ourselves in this environment. Schools and teachers have been key players in rationing knowledge (because you are this age we're going to share this bit with you) and preventing access to knowledge (high fees, exclusions, narrow curricula). We will no longer be required if we merely dispense knowledge.

If we wish to remain on the edge of chaos (more comfortable than up to our knees in it!) we need to be the place where we assist young people to search discernibly for knowledge, critically analyse this knowledge and then use this knowledge, wisely, to solve our big problems and to improve our world. Employers, and wider society, will want people who know how to use knowledge.

The MOE 2012 Report on Future Focused Education recognises the misalignment that now exists and ERO has pointed out in it's 2012 Report on Priority Learners that schools have to be more agile......

If we think about the changing employment environment, the impact of Moore's Law and the urgings from MOE and ERO how should leaders in schools respond?

I have found comfort in Dweck's work on Mindset and have come to believe that what is required is not a skill set but more of a mind set.

To support my ability to lead at the edge of chaos I keep reflecting where I am on a continuum in relation to each of the 5 aspects identified above. I encourage others to include some aspect of growth mindset within their own teaching or learning inquiry.

My own leadership inquiry, which is also central within my performance appraisal, is concentrating on getting the right balance between Warm and Demanding which is a construct many of us at HPSS are exploring when we think about teaching, learning, leading and schooling.

 I have begun to determine what makes up aspects of being Warm and Demanding, firstly as a teacher

and then as a leader......

I'm keen to develop this a lot further and also do some thinking in relation to what do we mean by Warm and Demanding Learning and what it means to be a Warm and Demanding School. I'm going to try to think how I might do this in a way which draws on the knowledge and experience that exists with you.