Values are important. They are our moral code, our guide to how to act when we are not sure how to act. And I'd bet my bottom dollar that every school has a set of values at its heart.
Our Hornby High School values are Commitment, Achievement, Resilience, and Respect, our view of the values that are spelt out in the front of our national curriculum. There is however so much in them that they still require some degree of unpacking. In 2018 I began unpacking resilience and respect with two very simple messages: manaaki and aroha, kindness and love. I rarely miss an opportunity to encourage everyone to use these as their bench marks.
Navigating our way through life is perhaps much like the colossal undertaking that faced Kupe and his crews as they set out to navigate their way across the vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean. Their bravery puts European navigation into an interesting context. These brave Polynesian navigators set out to find the land that the signs suggested was there, navigating by the winds, the tides, the signs of bird and fish life, and the pole star.
Navigating life requires our own pole star, our values. This makes our task as whānau and as kura very important because we are perhaps potentially the most powerful influence son ur rangatahi's ability to find their own set of values. Without those values we are lost.
In schools we look for signs that we may be helping our tamariki to develop those values. We watch the way they behave, I watch for signs of kindness and love amongst them, and we have seen those signs very much in abundance over the time since the awful events in Christchurch. At the memorial last week, older students comforted younger students by putting arms around the shoulders of those younger students as they cried.
This week I was presented with another beautiful sign, when a Year 7 boy came to find me with a gift. It was this 'drawing' that he had produced.
In case you can't read the yellow lettering at the bottom, it finishes with the words "A school that loves".
This morning I accompanied a group of our tamariki, and staff, as we visited the 'memorial wall' of flowers at the front of the Christchurch Botanic Gardens this morning
It was an emotional time for us all. The students took a range of flowers, cards, and tributes, which they laid amongst the thousands upon thousands of other tributes. They also took their aroha, their love. The compassion and dignity that our students showed were frankly inspirational. I was proud to stand amongst them. They (we) all stared, mostly watery eyed, at the tributes, at the words, and it was clear to see the simple sorrow with which everyone was overwhelmed. Small groups of student spontaneously broke into waiata, quiet, understated, and from the heart. The nurtured and comforted each other, younger and older students. I can't recall seeing such leadership amongst and by students. Several times I took my phone out to take photographs, and each time I put it away. It was not right to interrupt, to capture, that raw emotion in that way. It deserved the sanctity and peace of the moment.
Young people like these can change the world. Young people like these WIILL change the world. They will (I hope) be uncompromising in their demands for a better world, a world that is more caring, more compassionate, more filled with love and understanding. One Muslim woman walked amongst them, moved by the emotion to offer hugs to students, thanking them for caring. I overheard her tell one of our young people that their actions there, this morning, were important, that they made a difference. It was hard to walk away from that place, silent as it was despite being in the centre of the city.
These experiences show the true values that our children hold, the values of decent people. Those values were there for the whole world to see.
None of us would ever wish for such things to be the stuff of education, but the lessons and the affirmation that I saw this morning left me in tears. As I said earlier, I was proud to stand amongst our amazing rangatahi. As a community we should all be proud to know that we are nurturing such love, compassion, and caring.
In the wake of Friday's dreadful events here in Christchurch, there is much to be said. It will take us a long time as communities and as a nation to say everything that is in our hearts and minds. I wanted toishare with you my message to today's junior assembly.
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Ki te kuru te Huruhuru Ao o Horomaka - tena koe
‘Mā te huruhuru, ka rere te manu’
‘Feathers enable the bird to fly’
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.
What is Aroha? What is love? What is manaaki? What is kindness? I speak of these things often, and as we think about those awful events of last Friday, I (along with many others) am saying that the answers lie in love and kindness. But what is love? I’ve just read you one writer's take on it.. Shakespeare's famous sonnet #116.
But English is a confusing language. In English that one word has many meanings: love between man and woman whether sexual love or not, between man and man, between mother and child, between brother and sister, between fellow soldiers.. The list goes on. In Greek there are at least four, if not six, different words for love. I’m not a Greek scholar so I was unable to critically evaluate the different Google responses to that question.
Yet every single use of the word has something in common: the ability to empathise (to understand another person's feelings), the ability to care, the desire to support, nurture and protect another person. Built into the word love is the value of respect, which is of course one of our four values here at Hornby High School. I defy you to show me an example of love in which respect is not present. Not real love anyway.
You might even like to describe aroha as an absence of hate, although I think love is much much more than that.
What we can say for certain in our current world is that we don’t have enough of it. Back in the 1960s the Beatles wrote/recorded a song titled ‘All you need is love’, and never has that been more true than now.
Listen to this:
Your generation can make a difference. YOU can make a difference.
Already this week we have seen students your age, and younger and older, making a very clear statement, first about climate change, and now about the atrocities, the obscenities, that were the brutal shootings last week.
Your latest minor squabble with the person sitting next to you in class frankly is just so unimportant. The need for more love and kindness, for more aroha and manaaki, in the world is a cause worth fighting for. This is big! Do you want to change the world? If you want to make that positive change in the world, change THIS. BE the change you want to see. Don’t wait, do it now. Show love and kindness, tolerance and acceptance.
Our differences are something worth celebrating, not something to be afraid of. Every one of you is a beautiful person, and you deserve aroha and manaaki. If there is a God in your life, then thank God that we are all different, because our differences give us a richness in life that we would not find any other way. If you have no God in your life, then simply be thankful for our humanity as it gives us the difference, the richness, in which we can bathe. There is no judgement about you for your beliefs. Support each other, be kind to each other. Spread the message of love for our fellow human beings. Please!!!
Just…. be… KIND.
It was Martin Luther King, Jr who said “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
He aha te mea nui o te ao. He tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata
What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people.
Authentic learning is a holy grail of education. What does it mean? What would it look like if it were happening? We have had an extraordinary example at Hornby High School this past week. What's more, this is an example of the true power of our 'Learn Create Share' pedagogy, of the amplification that is possible in the digital age, the 'affordances of the digital technology', of the impact of putting a Chromebook in the hands of learners.
I write recently of the work of Mr Rees and his Year 9 Maths class who decided to look at some of the maths behind sun dials. Mr Rees then put on his technology hat, and has class members making their own sundials. To 'cap it off', these students then proceeded to teach a Year 7 & 8 class what they had learned in one of those magical moments of tuakana teina. The students shared their blogs with the class, and these younger students have since been commenting on those blogs. The engagement is outstanding.
But it hasn't ended there. Members of the class emailed Dr Frank King, global expert on sun dials. They sent him photos of their work, and commentary on what they had learned. On Dr King:
Dr King who is the university bellringer at Cambridge and the keeper of the sundial on Great St Mary’s Church, said those with sundial expertise could design spaceships and power driverless cars - because the mathematical insight is akin to the one used for GPS technology.
“Whilst we can live without sundials, I’m worried we cannot live without communication satellites and someone needs to have the knowhow to do that,” he said.
“I don’t think education coming through schools these days is satisfactory to replenish people writing code for communication satellites or driverless cars or the rest of it.”
He replied. A global expert, communicating with Year 9 students.. this is truly outstanding. Here's what he said to them:
Dear Austin, Brielle, Faith, Jhermaine, Michael, Paige, Rykin, Shawn, Sophie and anyone I have missed out,
Thank you very much for the most interesting photographs and blogs about sundials. You have all learnt lots about sundials. Perhaps, one day you will make some other designs that other people can enjoy.
I attach a photograph of a sundial that I designed for someone in Saudi Arabia.
Can you see that the numbers go round the 'wrong' way for New Zealand? Why do you think that is?
Very best wishes Frank King Chairman, British Sundial Society
This is authentic learning. This is an authentic audience. Mr Rees tells us the class is working on a response to Dr King. This is creative excellence in the teacher's design of the learning, creative excellence in the students risk taking, their application of 'Learn Create Share', and their engagement with community. And it is another wonderful illustration of the impact of the Manaiakalani pedagogy and the use of Chromebooks on learners.
This is one view of what authentic learning can look like. It is yet another view of what 'Learn Create Share' looks like, and it is certainly a view of what 'creative excellence' could look like.
If you are asking what does 'Learn Create Share' looks like, sounds like, feels like in a school? If you are asking what creative excellence' look like, then you need look no further than these two outstanding examples form Te Huruhuru Ao o Horomaka this week.
Mr Rees, Technology and Maths teacher, was doing some work with a Year 9 maths class. He decided they would look at sundials. However he went much much further than this. He decided the class members would each make a sundial, using his own skills as a technologist as well. And so they did. They researched the devices, their history, and the maths behind their workings, and then they made one each. All along they blogged about their work, explaining what they were doing and why.
However Mr Rees went one step further. His class then visited one of our Year 7 & 8 classes, the students demonstrating their sundials, explaining what they were doing and what they had learned. Here are some photos of the day.
The interactions were exciting, and outstanding. The conclusion to the whole learning experience will see the Year 7s and 8s commenting on the blogs of the Year 9s. This is tuakana teina at its best. This is 'Learn Create Share' as it can look. This is 'creative excellence.
And then this...
Our new Year 7 & 8 curriculum includes 'Modules' of learning that combine homeroom classes with their homeroom teachers and a specialist teacher. Each module is expected to meet not only the curriculum requirements of the specialist area, but also literacy and/or numeracy requirements.
One of those modules saw Mrs Clemence (HoD Art) working with two classes on 'claymotion'. Students delved into the world of creativity and art to create clay models, from which they will then make 'claymotion' movies. Here is one example from two Year 7 boys. Their clay modelling is outstanding.
This yet again is 'Learn Create Share' at its best. This is 'creative excellence'.
The levels of engagement from the students was outstanding. The rooms were filled with that purposeful working buzz. Everyone was so focussed they hardly noticed me wandering through the rooms. It's one of those times when as a Principal I loved being ignored.
And all of this comes about because we have staff who see our vision for our kura as 'a centre of creative excellence' as central to not only what they deliver, but also to their key tasks of learning design. These tasks have been set up to focus on creativity, to deepen learning in meaningful ways, ways that revolve entirely around 'Learn Create Share'.
In doing this, staff have taken big risks, they have modelled being responsible risk takers. The risks have paid off in a massive way, and our learners have been big winners, and so too have ur staff. I see their confidence rising in the same way as that of our learners. Our leaners have been given agency over their learning, they have used digital tools to do some things they couldn't otherwise have done (the claymotion, in particular) while also modelling and developing their soft skills in collaboration, and tuakana teina, in self management, in commitment, resilience, resilience, and respect. And it is also enabled by our use of an underlying pedagogy to drive all of our learning, our pedagogy of 'Learn Create Share'. This is the gift of "manaiakalani' and the use of digital devices (Chromebooks) form our learners.
This is powerful stuff. This is the liberation we talk about. And it happens when we empower staff and learners, when we trust them, and when we allow and encourage them all to take risks.
Frankly I couldn't be prouder of our staff and our students.
Here we are four weeks into the term, four weeks into the first new year occupying the first of our new buildings. Just as significantly here we are two weeks into the engagement of children in Years 7 & 8 from our client schools, coming to us for their 'dose of technology' education.
In 2018, lead by then Deputy Principal Mr Jon Rogers, our teachers (from across the curriculum areas) worked hard to re-imagine what that technology experience might look like. They took themselves a long way outside their comfort zones, they took risks that they had possibly never considered taking before (my surmise, not their statement). The end result is currently one in which students begin their time with us by undertaking a small dose of 'Connect class' in which they work with a specialist teacher in the sciences, the arts, or the digital technologies, on work that is designed to complement the main technology activity that they will undertake. They do this while working amongst our own Hornby High School students (from across a range of age groups) who are engaged in their own explorations of the sciences, the arts, technologies, or foods, in the same spaces.
Amongst other things, children have been undertaking 'Connect' activities as diverse as experimenting with the colour wheel, and learning some simply coding with Spheros.
Early observations are encouraging and exciting. Here are some of the things we have seen.
A younger Year 7 student from a client school pushing the behavioural boundaries, and a senior Hornby student calmly and positively walking over and saying 'We don't behave like that here.'
A Year 8 student in an Art Connect class struggling with a small piece of work, and again a senior student reaching across and offering some advice and a helping hand.
These things are absolute gold, they are things you could never plan for, they are 'tuakana teina'.
Despite the relative openness of the spaces, there is a calmness and a quietness about proceedings. Noise levels are relatively low, and the work focus is high, despite the fact that there is often a lot of 'hands-on' work going on. This speaks highly to the skill of the architectural designers, and to the rangatahi working within the spaces.
This also says a lot about the professionalism of our amazing staff, and about the culture amongst our students. I have said to the staff that what we are doing here is all new, no-one has done this before. When planning it we often didn't even know what questions to ask, let alone what the answers would be.
Staff have captured our 'Learn Create Share' pedagogy in their own work. Activating prior knowledge, and coming up with new and innovative approaches to how we cause learning, are very clear to me. We share the thinking and the progress in many ways, this blog is just one of them.
The Manaiakalani pedagogy not only needs to permeate all areas of student learning. Student learning is strengthened when it permeates our own professional thinking as educators. I believe this makes the learning deeper, the engagement stronger. I believe that if we have the pedagogy more deeply embedded in every aspect of our work we are more likely to develop the types of engaging curriculum that our learners need.
This really is all about 'liberation' for our learners, and also maybe about liberation for our staff as well.
What if we could figure out how to take learners who were well behind their peers nationally, and accelerate their learning to the point that they exceeded the statistical average of achievement growth for all learners? What if we could figure out how to reduce the inequities that run through our society such that all learners were able to learn and be the best they could be, regardless of gender or ethnicity?
Would we be interested? Would we want to embrace those processes?
Well, within our Uru Mānuka cluster (and in fact all Manaiakalani clusters) we know how, and here is some of the latest evidence.
Hornby High School and the Uru Mānuka cluster have been a part of the Manaiakalani Outreach since 2015. The efficacy, the impact, of the pedagogy and the digital devices is tracked carefully and independently by Woolf Fisher Research Centre (Auckland University) to verify the truthfulness of claims as to its effectiveness. WFRC uses the nationally determined and normed assessment tools e-asTTle, and PATs, to measure progress in writing, reading, and numeracy.
This is no laboratory controlled experiment, ethically we cannot deliberately have some children in our kura experience the impact of 'Learn Create Share' and digital devices, and some not. We can however measure the impact of the work that we do against children nationally, the vast majority of whom do not experience the pedagogy.
So last week we had our first sight of three years worth of achievement data tracking learners at Horny High School, and the Uru Mānuka cluster.
The improvements in writing are frankly nothing short of spectacular, gobsmacking, exciting .. choose your own superlative.
The following graphs track achievement as measured at the beginning and the end of the year in writing, using the e-asTTle writing tools. They track the same students and their achievement across three years, beginning of year 2016 to end of year 2018. The gray line on each graph is the progress measured for all students across the entire country of that age. Acceleration . we define as progress at a rate faster than that national progress.
The best way to look at these graphs is to look at where they begin at the very start (Fenruary 2016) in comparison with the grey line, and where they have ended up at the end of 2018.
What do you notice?
Hornby High School writing progress Years 7 - 10 by gender
All of the groups have shifted form well below the national grey line,. to above the grey line. That is acceleration. In this first graph you will see that both groups of students, boys and girls, have made that shift. The dips in achievement you see are what we term the 'summer slump', the learnign that is lost over the summer break. As an aside, it is with this in mind that Manaiakalani set up and runs the Summer Learning Journey. More about that again later this year.
But it is even more powerful that that. The following graph shows shifts in achievement by ethnicity.
Hornby High School writing progress by ethnicity
Regardless of ethnicity, all students have made massively powerful shifts in their writing achievement. This is truly culturally responsive stuff, it overrides ethnicity. It enables all learners to accelerate their learning.
And this is not restricted to Hornby High School. Here is that same data across our whole cluster.
Uru Mānuka cluster writing progress by gender
I began this blog post by asking this question: "What if we could figure out how to take learners who were well behind their peers nationally, and accelerate their learning to the point that they exceeded the statistical average of achievement growth for all learners?"
WE KNOW!! We KNOW how to do this. We do this by using the 'Learn Create Share' pedagogy of Manaiakalani, and by magnifying the impact of that pedagogy by using digital devices (Chromebooks).
This is LIFE CHANGING stuff. This is TRANSFORMATIVE stuff, transforming lives before our very eyes.
Now in all honesty our own progress in reading and mathematics isn't as spectacular. We knew that and so in 2018 we experimented with several new strategies that showed great promise, and so we will be rolling these strategies out in 2019, sitting alongside and supporting the work that takes place under the Manaiakalani banner.
I am brought back to the wonderful cartoon used by Mr Pat Sneddon:
What we see unfolding before our eyes is true liberation.
The critical success factors are:
Teaching staff who are well versed in and committed to 'Learn Create Share', and the use of digital devices, and
All students with access to Chromebooks
This week we released details of the new finance and purchase options that have now become available to whānau as a result of the work of our wonderful Uru Mānuka Education Trust, connecting with the Manaiakalani Education Trust in Auckland.
We KNOW how to accelerate learning. Sadly as kura we are not resourced sufficiently well to provide Chromebooks for all learners. However, we are able to address the financial obstacle that stands in the way of so many. We KNOW how to do this. Providing a Chromebook for your child is, after your love and time, the next best investment you can make in your child's future. Join with us. Together we are unstoppable.
