Milestone 4 VLN Reflective Summary

National Goal 3               Cluster Goal 3                   Success Criteria

Welcome, Nau mai ! Haere Mai !

The Education Review Office described our school as "an effective learning institution where Board & staff work diligently to provide students with high quality learning opportunities".

At Malfroy School we recognise that parents, extended families and caregivers are of fundamental importance to children's learning. This support is especially important in learning early literacy and numeracy skills.

Features at Malfroy School Include: 

• A known and practiced mission statement "We strive to do our personal best to help make a happy, caring school", proudly reflecting our cornerstone values.
• Teaching staff who model the values of our mission statement and who focus on children's individual learning needs.
• Teaching and support staff providing special needs, remedial and extension programmes.
• A strong positive behaviour programme focussing on student well-being and restorative practices.
• A functional library and ICT Centre that provides opportunities for students to think, create and learn with the future in mind.
• An Enviroschool working towards a healthy, peaceful and sustainable environment.
• A community minded school that offers mainstream, bilingual, and Montessori classes from Year 1-6 age groups.
• An after school programme 'Kids After Three' and a pre-school transition class complete the learning experiences offered to our community.

Malfroy School Demographics:

• 271 Maori students
• 9 Cook Islands Maori
• 5 Fijian
• 4 Indian
• 50 NZ Eurpoean / Pakeha
• 1 Niuean
• 4 Other nationality
• 8 Other Asian
• 16 Other European
• 1 Other Pacifica
• 1 Samoan
• 3 Tokelauan
• 3 Tongan

A warm welcome is assured at Malfroy School where the uniqueness of each student is valued and nurtured.

Where do we start?

In order to empower students, teachers need to feel empowered. We began our journey with a staff survey which provided a snapshot of current confidence and ability levels. Below is a presentation of the outcomes over 2010 and 2011 reflecting a marked improvement accross the staff in both areas of confidence and ability. An Exel template file is provided for your own use at the end of this summary.

View examples from our Teacher Survey Data here:

So what?

Following our initial staff survey and informal discussions with staff it became apparent that in-house training, in addition to cluster workshops was required. A mentor programme was established where competent ICT users were/are buddied with less competent peers who could then seek advice and understanding in a non-threatening and on a 'anytime' basis.

Key personnel indicated a desire to deliver 'in-house' PD for staff with ICT 'gaps'. This gave birth to the e-learning achievement book which provided the staff with information of what they should/need to know and a check list for monitoring their progress ("I can sheets"). It also provided feedback to the 'in-house tutors' as to the 'gaps' which they needed to cater for.

 Document pages for the e-learning achievement book are attached at the end of this summary.

What we did / what we're doing...

The staff were initially presented with the Staff Survey so that they/we could gauge the current ability and confidence level of the staff and monitor progress over time. After collation of the data, the results were presented to the staff and the e-Learning achievement books were issued. Staff embraced the 'notebooks', using them for note-taking and for recording classroom usernames and passwords during workshops. The 'notebooks' were collated to assertain the 'gaps' in knowledge and workshops were established based on these findings.

Thus... Workshops with Wendy was born - workshops with wendy.pub

Where we're going...

Workshops with Wendy (as such) have ceased for the present, with the intention to begin again in Term 1 of 2012. Currently. Instead, staff are currently able to tap into one-on-one assistance with a 'mentor' who is rostered on various afternoons. These one-to-one sessions are 'short and sweet' and extremely helpful and purposeful to those seeking guidance and scaffolding.

Those on staff that now feel confident in certain areas of ICT or within certain applications or tools are now offering workshops themselves and this 'in-house' resource will be 'tapped' into beginning 2012. Some staff are now presenting to their teams during Team Meetings and others are meeting over coffee in the weekends etc to 'tidy-up' loose ends in their understanding and ability. Like a snowball, our collective knowledge is growing daily and not even the 'weeds' can escape.