Giving Children a Voice
This article was published in the Education Gazette
In early August this year, the US federal government funded a New Zealand delegation of the Cognition Institute principal consultant Nicola Meek, Juanita and Albany Senior high School teacher Alec Solomon (see story this page) to present at the Ohio Innovative Learning Environments conference............
GIVING CHILDREN A VOICE
JUANITA GARDEN reports on her Manaiakalani Schooling Improvement Cluster and her recent trip to discuss the initiative with teachers in the United States.
Pt England School is a primary school in Glen Innes, Auckland. It is largely made up of students from minority communities and lower socio-economic backgrounds. The school has made a commitment to improve the educational outcomes for the children in this suburb.When the majority of children start at Pt England School, they often have low English literacy levels. By the time these children are in year 6, they exceed the national median for literacy. Something amazing is happening at Pt England School.
Teacher Juanita Garden is one part of a successful programme delivering outstanding results in the New Zealand educational sector. It is an innovation driven by being focussed on the needs of the students and their community and finding out how the individual learns best.
Pt England School is one of seven in the Manaiakalani Cluster of local primary and secondary schools. Juanita is a Pt England representative.
What Juanita has discovered is that using focused teaching practices alongside engaging technologies gives students a personal voice. It makes students the creators of content, not merely consumers. This freedom to express – combined with the school providing support to allow the students to be responsible digital citizens who contribute to their community in a positive way – has seen the students thrive.
One way that Juanita gives her students a voice is by posting their stories and other work on her Pt England School class blog. A student may have their story posted online and then they are videoed reading the story out loud. Juanita and the teachers within the Manaiakalani cluster have learned through innovation that this special type of online forum helps the students engage, both in their written work and in the technological component. Though she does not consider herself a digital expert, Juanita has learned how technology can excite young students and improve literacy.
Juanita has been teaching for 17 years, mainly in schools in low socio-economic communities, including London’s East End. Now she leads a team of teachers at Pt England, where she is also a curriculum leader.
In early August this year, the US federal government funded a New Zealand delegation of the Cognition Institute principal consultant Nicola Meek, Juanita and Albany Senior high School teacher Alec Solomon (see story this page) to present at the Ohio Innovative Learning Environments conference. As well as presenting on Pt England’s successes, Juanita took the opportunity to learn what was working overseas and is now helping to implement some of their ideas at Pt England.
Juanita believes the current New Zealand curriculum is successful because it’s very broad, and places value on ‘learning to learn’, not just content knowledge.
“New Zealand teachers teach the best we can because we have a culture and belief that we are responsible, not just accountable, for our children’s learning and well-being” said Juanita.
“I found that in Ohio, teachers are kept accountable for every part of their learning and assessment programme and this stifles their ability to respond to what each child really needs. They don’t seem to have the freedom to innovate in ways that use new technologies to make learning real for students.”
It is this freedom to innovate and really focus on what their students want and need that has seen Juanita take an historically struggling group of children, and helped them to fly.
Manaiakalani
Growing the mindware as we transform Tamaki: living local, learning global.