Collaboration

Collaboration is a word quite often loosely used in the education sector. As teachers, we are expected to collaborate often but what does professional collaboration look like in practice.

I have been in my role as Across School Leader for the past 4 months and it has been an incredible learning journey already. This role requires professional collaboration at many levels. Gina Benade (Principal at Sancta Maria Primary  School) describes this concisely in her sabbatical report.

Collaboration is dependent on relational trust. To know that you are within a professionally safe space can be empowering for professionals to engage with the learning and inquiry process. It is further dependent on collective responsibility, clear purpose, time, communication and collective inquiry.

To be an educator in NZ often means that time is not your best friend. Rather than erring on the deficit Sharrat and Planche, 2016 suggest the reconstruction of the time on hand. This would lead to inquiring into school systems and best practice.

Collaboration has become even more important now to ensure that professionals work collectively to raise student achievement which leads to the formulation of a collective goal. The end results would be envisioned as having a bigger impact than what could have been achieved individually (Brown & Stoll, 2014).

An exciting learning journey lies ahead as I work with my team of within-school leaders to impact student holistic achievement within our Kahui Ako.

 

Kahui Ako

Kahui Ako  also known as Communities of Learning was introduced over a couple of years ago with the aim to bring communities together to provide support to students to reach their full potential based on their needs.

As an educator, I am privileged to be part of the South Eastern Kahui Ako which comprises of 6 schools. This has been an 18-month journey in the making with conversations and relationship building between key stakeholders.

We recently had our first Kahui Ako Day which brought together all teaching staff from the different schools, leaders and expert partner, Dr. Brian Annan from Infinity and keynote speaker Dr. Howard Youngs.

Candles representing each school

Kahui Ako candle

 

Key leaders

Schools originally operated in silos and we have seen the shift from individual to collaborative learning with time. Informal connections amongst educators provided a support system but were only as good as the connections made. The future of NZ schooling has an exciting concept emerging from Kahui Ako which has allowed communities to work deliberately together to learn from each other and be a means of support.

Kahui Ako’s now allow for deliberate within school communication and across school communication to improve student outcomes as explained by Brian Annan. Learning will become messier but in an ever-changing educational landscape, the ability to learn, unlearn and learn again will be a key skill required of educators.

 

It was encouraging to hear Dr. Annan mention about the need for letting go of the unnecessary to allow room for the necessary (what will enable us to become better educators for our students and for them to achieve).

The keynote speaker for the day was Dr. Howard Youngs  who touched on the importance of empathy within the school environment. Our Kahui Ako is privileged to have partnered with schools coming from a faith background which makes it distinct in its own way. A commonly shared value provides for a common umbrella of faith to operate under.

In 2016 I had the privilege to attend  Microsoft’s E2 Global Educator Exchange which brought the world’s most innovative and passionate educators together to share, collaborate and create solutions to address real-world classroom problems. The steepest learning for me during this amazing few days of exchange was the situation of collaborating with educators from around the world who came from different cultural backgrounds together with limited ability to speak English. On a daily basis as an educator, I interact with students who will be able to identify with this where language together with cultural differences makes it challenging to not only connect but learn. Recent TEDX by Louka Parry further magnified this for me.

I took away from this keynote session that increasingly it is important to make the heart connection before the head is engaged.  We are educating a global community who leave our schools one day and will need these key soft skills to be able to interact and be thriving members of society.

I am excited for what our Kahui Ako will be able to achieve and with such a neat group of educators I look forward to making a change in my little village