Teacher Only Day 3/11/08

Our staff chose to meet again on this day and finish later in the year to ensure we had our Inquiry Model in place with plenty of time to ensure all staff were ready to start the new year. We looked back on what we had achieved on Friday and made a few little changes to represent the thinking that has taken place over the weekend. We then went through and made a set of students notes to go with the teacher notes. After a much needed drink at morning tea time we continued with the appendices that we needed to add. This included different thinking tools, stratgies, graphic organisers, skills to be taught, etc.

This day produced some differing opinions on how this document was to go together. After further discussions as well as disagreements, we compromised on a solution that all agreed on.

We also worked on a planning sheet for all teaching staff to use. This also produced discussion on what needed to be included. We drafted a model for all staff to use. We decided that all staff needed to have input as all will be using but we now have a starting point. .

Teacher Only Day 31/10/08

Today our staff met to look at the new curriculum document on the day the Ministry set aside. We chose not to meet up with other Levin schools and to spend the time as a staff to organise and write our own inquiry learning document. We split into two teams with one team looking at Literacy, Numeracy, PE & Health, and The Arts with the other team looking at Inquiry. We were both on the Inquiry Team. We started by looking at a Inquiry Learning Policy for our school. We looked at Coley Street's model as well as other schools and developed our own rationale, purpose and guidelines. We then used this to develop our model. We had a range of models which we took information off and developed our own to introduce next year. We also had Michael Pohls books on hand. One of the staff came up with "Stars" as icons and the galaxy. We liked the 5 cornered star so fit our Inquiry Model into 5 steps to fit Ohau School. We then added the tails to link them together. We also wrote up a set of definitions for each stage and a set of teachers notes to go with these. It was a very profitable day with interesting discussions and points of interests.

Staff Meeting

We held a staff meeting today and were looking at possible overarching ideas for next year. We came up with a few different ones but decided that
"Its a small, small world" with a Social Studies major first, then science and lastly technology. We decided on having 3 Inquiries over the year bridging terms and two mini units with a focus on The Arts as well as Health/PE-PA at the start and the end of the year. This enables us to include the students in our planning as well as finish our inquiries before reporting to parents. It also means we have time at the start of each term to organise and take on board the Inquiry topics more fully.

U-Learn Conference - 7th - 10th October 2008

After our proposed shopping day before the conference was to start was cut short due to the weather and late departure from Wellington, we arrived in Christchurch to bright sunshine and warm weather. We made our way to our motel and registered at the Convention Centre in due course. The conference was opened on the Wednesday by Chris Carter with a view from the Government. Will Richardson and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach followed with some inspirational ideas. Bruce McIntyre responded on behalf of the business sector amid yawns and quiet chatter. He was not the most inspirational of speakers. Following the opening, we went to our first two breakouts. The first was on using ICT in the classroom from a school in Auckland. We got to converse with students from his class online but got the impression all was not as it seems. Our second breakout was listening to two young teachers from a Christchurch School talking about the Inquiry Process in their classrooms. This was interesting and provided guidelines ideas for us to take back to our school. The Keynote speaker on Thursday was Steven Carden. He spoke for over an hour with no notes and spoke from the heart. Very enjoyable and inspirational. Further breakouts that we went to followed the same lines. We will look at attending breakouts from keynote speakers when we go to Learning at Schools in February. This way we may achieve more value on our learnings. Overall the conference was enjoyable but not as inspirational as we wanted. We got back and produced a photostory of our journey which we shared with others at school as well as some ideas to shape to our school requirements.

Michael Pohl Workshop

KTB, Col and J9 attended the full day workshop with Michael Pohl at Coley Street. All other staff went to the afterschool workshop at the Events Centre. This way all staff had the same exposure with regards to Michael's thoughts and ideas. We looked at creating a culture of thinking in the classroom, developing a whole school scope and sequence thinking tools, practical aspects of thinking in the classroom, and questioning. We came away with some good resources (thanks KTB for encouraging us to purchase his books and CD's!!) and lots of ideas and inspiration for classroom practice. His enthusiasism and well grounded approaches to learning are infectious.

Jan Thomas Visit

Jan came for a visit yesterday. We discussed a range of ideas - here is some of them:
Develop a draft model by end of Term 3
Create a support book for the model with staff by the end of Term 4
Major focus for Term 4 is preparing for Inquiry in Term 1 09
Choose overarching big idea for 09
Choose a schoolwide set of thinking tools in order to develop a common language throughout the school.
Ulearn 08 - select appropriate workshops to help with all this
Planning template to be designed before the end of Term 4 in draft format - once trialled we can then have this loaded on to ETap.

Cluster visit to Muratai School

Wow !! What an inspirational school. We were greeted by a well organised and confident team of students in a powhiri. Ani and Neil did our cluster proud with their response. The students confidently escorted us to our destinations and all students that we spoke to over the day had a reasonably clear understanding of the Inquiry process and could articulate excellent responses to our questions. Students were used as panels of presenters whom we were then able to question after each presentation on different aspects of their individual inquirys. We did get the impression that the school's students had a large proportion of good internet access at home and a good proportion of the inquiry was completed at home with the emphasis in class on learning the skills necessary. We came back to school inspired with some new ideas and approaches to consider for our school.