Language limits our world: the proposed Hornby library, aquatic centre, and service centre

It was philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who said "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."  According to Wikipedia this has also been translated as "The limits of my language stand for the limits of my world", and "The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for."

I reckon that this is true, and I think it is easy to imagine that this is big in our thinking on what we do in schools.

It is also why I support the City Council proposal to build the new Hornby community library, swimming pool, and service centre, on the Kyle Park site immediately cross the road from our kura.

The site sits within 5 minutes walk of approximately 1200 students from four schools, and immediately across the road from nearly 1000 of those. Hornby High School itself is projected to grow to 800 students within 5 years and is master planned out to 1200 students.

Few schools can provide sufficiently broad learning resources (books especially) to meet the full needs of their community, yet those books and other text based resources help us to expand our language and so expand the limits of our worlds. Ready access to top class library facilities will supplement in-school services. Access to civic library facilities so close to the school would support more ubiquitous learning, helping to cement that learning into the fabric of the community. The synergies that develop when such facilities are located close to schools are in evidence elsewhere in the city, the Riccarton Library is a great example. There are several delightful pieces of jargon that I hear around government circles to describe this, and I can't resist sharing these with you. The 'powers that be' talk about 'functional adjacencies', or the 'synergies of juxtaposition'. I love that jargon.

The facilities that we provide withinTe Pai Rewa and Te Pai Tūhura were designed to offer our own 'functional adjacencies'.  That is, access across a range of learning resources form text based resources to technology and design resources allows each to support the other. The whole is more than the sum of the parts. To then supplement these with the resources that now typify a forward looking and forward thinking civic library service is an exciting prospect. It offers a real shot not just at equity, but at real 'liberation' for our community.

This is the mantra of our work with the Manaiakalani Education Trust, and the Manaiakalani pedagogy 'Learn Create Share'. This is all about 'liberating' our young people, by accelerating their learning, by making their learning visible. This is THE way to give rangatahi and whānau options in life, and if nothing else, education is about giving people options.

And modern libraries are not what they used to be. The Councils' own new central library 'Turanga' is an outstanding example of this evolution, with traditional book resources and other text, maker spaces, collaborative spaces, and much much ore. I think that modern libraries of this sort are a great support for our 'Learn Create Share' pedagogy. You could even argue that they represent an ideal resource to support 'Learn Create Share'.

In addition, Hornby High School students have no easy access to aquatic facilities, meaning that they have little or no opportunity to access water safety learning. The new facility would provide access to a swimming pool for most of the 11 to 18 year olds in the community.

This is a life changing (and arguably life saving) investment in its own right.

You could be very clinical in your thinking and simply see this as making sure that the children of Hornby will emerge from our kura as fully functional 'economic units', competent workers ready to fit into the flourishing Hornby economy. That would be true. I prefer to think if this as allowing children in the Hornby community to find their true humanity, to see an expanded world, to lift some of the self imposed limits that we all have so that the world can more truly benefit from their amazing array of talents.

Our Hornby community is delightfully diverse, but included in that diversity are pockets of deprivation, and large numbers who have been come to be called the working poor: whānau who often have two adults working solid honest jobs but still unable to provide for their children simply because of the exorbitantly high costs of housing compared with low minimum wages. Education for children is a powerful way to break that cycle, and supporting formal schooling with educational connection into libraries, the world of words, and the world of 'Learn Create Share', is perhaps the most important enabler of that.

My final plea to the Hornby Halswell Community Board was: 'please don't heap deprivation on top of deprivation'. By that I meant, please don't deprive this community of this amazing resource. By placing it so close to these four kura, the Council would be making a strategic investment that leverages off the $30m investment made by the Ministry of Education. It would be adding much more significantly to the social capital of the community. This would be smart, clever in fact!!

'The whole is more than the sum of the parts'. Our language limits our world.

"We shape our buildings ... "

It's my favourite Churchill quote again: "We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us."

We began our Year 7 to 10 passion projects this past week. The passion projects are our third iteration of what began in 2016 as project based learning with Year 10 students. This evolved in 2017 to include Year 9s and 10s. This year we have attempted a new iteration that embodies what we have learned from the previous two years, but we have also incorporated what we learned from an inspirational visit to Campion College in Gisborne.

Students identified things they are passionate about. Staff did likewise. We then put these two lists together and produced a list that offered students many of their choices, run by staff who shared similar passions. All of that in itself is pretty amazing, and reflects fantastic creative thinking and commitment from staff.

What is also really gratifying are the comments from one colleague who observed the following. Students in our new building were 'working the building'. So, they might sit in a collaborative area researching aspects of their proposal. Already they have been seen to transition to science labs, creative arts spaces, and technology spaces, as they investigate and work on different aspects of their projects, perhaps seeing the different spaces that enable them to complete different aspects of their projects.

Now to me that looks very much like the real world, and it also looks very much like what we describe as the 'connected curriculum', where subject silos have been subsumed by the project. That is, it's not about the science, or the technology, or any other individual subject, but about how these 'subjects' merely reflect the skills and tools that they are in the world of work.  We all learn things when we see the need to do so. The projects are creating the 'desire to learn' as they reflect the need to learn specific skills and knowledge.

The building spaces we designed are enablers. Single cell rooms would act as limiting factors in allowing these connections to occur, but the adjoining spaces we now live and work in allow knowledge and skills to be seen, and learned, in context rather than isolation, and for a 'flow' to easily develop between these areas.

And perhaps most powerfully of all, we are seeing our 'Learn Create Share' pedagogy fully enabled by the spaces. In many cases, I think students begin with the act of creation. They are then finding that there are skills and knowledge that they need to learn. On a daily basis students are sharing their thinking and their progress on their blogs. And their ultimate act of sharing will take place on our 'Exhibition Day' on Thursday 6th December.

Even after the first week the levels of student engagement are clear and visible to anyone who cares to look. In term 4, when life for Year 9 and 10 students can become wearisome, when students are beginning to enter 'holiday mode', we are seeing students actively engaged in their own learning.

Manaiakalani (as I understand it) translates as 'Hook from Heaven'. Perhaps it might also be taken to mean 'Gift from Heaven', because it certainly is, and our buildings are enabling the pedagogy that IS Manaiakalani.

Big open spaces don't enhance or improve learning if we continue to do things as we have for the past 150 years. They do however enhance or improve learning when we, as educators, change our own paradigm, when we change our pedagogy, when we change the way we do things.

Our strategic plan for our kura has set our vision to be 'a centre of creative excellence'. That vision is an aspiration, it is our 'pole star' by which we navigate, in much the same way that our original Polynesian navigators shaped their journeys. And like them we know that we are taking risks. One of our strategic goals is to develop innovative risk taking leadership, because we know that the best in creativity requires us to take risks. Our staff team is proving to be magnificent in taking those risks, and I suggest that they are inspiring our rangatahi to do the same. Another staff member observed that several rangatahi commented that they saw staff as learners too.

We also seek to develop individualised pathways for our learners. When you are following your passion, that is exactly what you are doing. And we believe that that is enabled by Manaiakalani and our 'Learn Create Share' pedagogy. This is.

I could not be more excited. I could not be more inspired, as I watch our staff team, and our amazing rangatahi, develop their own risk taking, as they pursue their own passions, as they venture forth yet again on our quest for creative excellence.

Strong pedagogy. Amazing spaces. Risk taking staff and students. All combining to propel us towards that vision: 'a centre of creative excellence'.

Ka mau te wehi!!!

Principal's Prize Giving address

Tihei Mauri Ora!

Mā te huruhuru, ka rere te manu
‘Feathers enable the bird to fly’

Board Chair, Mrs Kaye Banks, fellow Board of Trustees members, Te Taumutu runanga, The Hon Dr Megan Woods, honoured guests, colleagues, parents and friends, ladies and gentlemen, students of Hornby High School  - welcome to this 44th senior prize giving of Hornby High School.

Kaye Banks, Jonty Ward, Donna Sullivan, Rochelle Jackson and Penny Devine have served on the Board this past year. George Wharerau was elected as the new student representative in September 2017. George relinquished his position part way through the year and was replaced by Shardey Harris who completed the term. In the 2018 student election we welcomed Crystal Edminstin to the Board as student representative. Thank you to you all for for your time, work and wisdom.

The year has seen a number of staff movements. Mrs Helen Boothby left us to work in the United Kingdom early in term 3, and was replaced by Mr Daniel Reizinger. Mrs Jane Turner (History) left on maternity leave, and was replaced by Miss Nicole Eastwick and Mr Sam Stokes.

Mrs Janette Merrin left us for a position with the Ministry of Education, and Miss Alex Aitken gained permanent appointment as HOD Health. Mrs Carla Gibson left us after 4 and a half years to pursue a career in the hospitality industry as a small business owner.

At the beginning of the year we were joined by Tracey Allen, Chelsea Birtch, Raewyn Davis, Aaron Heath, Abbie Keene and Sam Tisch. At the end of term one Ms Keene took maternity leave for terms 2 and 3, and was replaced by Mr Michael Collins.

Mrs Laurie Tafau left us for one year to take up a fixed term position as Assistant Principal at Avonside Girls’ High School, and was replaced by Ms Annabelle Simpson. We also received the resignation of Mr John Minto as he prepares for a well earned retirement. John, I have to say I cannot for a single instant imagine you resting, I cannot picture you sitting still. Thank you for your powerful contribution to our kura, and for your powerful ambition for our rangatahi.

Mr John Simons who has lead the Hornby Technical Centre of Hornby High School since 2014 announced his departure from the end of the year. Thank you John for your sizeable contribution to the learning and development of tamariki from across and outside our cluster.

We also received the resignation of Mr Jon Rogers who looks forward to retirement from 2019. He was replaced by Mr Jack Goodfellow who joins us from Lincoln High School at the beginning of 2019. I will have more to say about Jon later in our prizegiving.

Much of our attention over this past year has been occupied with our school rebuild. Stage 1 of the  rebuild was completed at the end of term 2, and we moved into those buildings for the beginning of term 3. Everything about the design of those buildings was deliberate, and once more i’d like to express our gratitude to the architects Del Love, Abbie Whangaparita, and Simon Richmond, from Stephenson and Turner for their wonderful work turning our vision for curriculum adaptation and change into our physical reality. I’d also like to place on record our thanks to our project managers from OCTA, and Mr Robert Lyall from the Ministry of education, and to the team from Leighs Construction for their wonderful work in helping us to realise our vision.

But a school is more than it’s buildings:

He aha te mea nui o te ao
He tangata, he tangata, he tangata

What is the most important thing in the world?
It is the people, it is the people, it is the people

To our wonderful staff, thank you. You have taken on board a huge workload, you have embraced change, you have been prepared to try different ways of doing things. As I mentioned in an assembly address to the junior school just last week, if we are to realise our vision as ‘a centre of creative excellence’, we must all be prepared to take risks, and your responses to our new environment have shown your willingness to do that, with project based learning, and passion projects, with collaboration and the acceptance that classrooms don’t always need walls and closed doors (although sometimes they do).

And to our wonderful rangatahi, well done. I’d like to read a poem that I also read to the junior school last week. It is one of my favourites, it is a poem that well describes the need to take risks, the need to push boundaries, the drive to find new paths.


The Road Not Taken
BY ROBERT FROST
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

You too must take risks, you too must be prepared to look at the world with fresh eyes. You too need to see things in ways that have perhaps never been imagined before. Your academic and sporting achievements which we celebrate here tonight continue to ascend the heights of excellence as you push your own personal boundaries.

One thing I can say, one thing you as students may not realise, is that our new buildings have changed you. They have changed you in a profound way. Parents and whānau, you need to know that at school your children have changed. They are still wonderful human beings. But they are also now ever more respectful, they are now ever more confident, they are now ever more willing to take those calculated risks that are essential to growth and to creativity.

Over this past year we have witnessed perhaps the most powerful force for change, the force of student passion and desire. It is you, our rangatahi, who said “Hey, stop deriding our school”. It is your, our rangatahi, who said “We are good enough”. It is you, our rangatahi, who said “We are proud of our school.” It is you, our rangatahi, who began our #manahoromaka, our #hornbypride, campaign. And it is you, our rangatahi, who have pushed that campaign out to the remainder of the school. Well done .. ka mau te wehi.

Let me tell you a short story. At the beginning of this term we began our interviews with new whānau and their children prior to them entering our kura at the start of next year. I was interviewing a father and son, both of whom were new to the school. The father said “You are proud of this school, aren’t you”. I replied ‘Yes we are”. He then said “When I dropped our enrolment forms off at reception, I could see it in your kids.”

There is one area of change at Hornby High School that does not represent risk, but rather an evidence based shift in teaching and learning that is more powerful than any other I have seen in my 40 years in education, and that is the Manaiakalani philosophy on which everything we do is founded.

The evidence base for the efficacy, the power, the impact, of ‘Learn Create Share’ grows month by month, year by year. The evidence is robust and authentic, the impact of the pedagogy so huge that it accelerates learning by up to twice national averages as measured by standardised nationally normed tests. This is not some piece of fanciful educational hope. This is real, palpable, and world changing.

To parents and whānau I make this plea. The Manaiakalani evidence offers the same conclusions as a much wider range of robust evidence: your connection with your child’s learning has a massive impact on her or his learning. All students across our kura are expected to be active bloggers. A blog is a way of making learning highly visible and accessible to the world, and we know that visibility promotes clearer thinking and active learning. Whānau - your engagement with those blogs is vital. Every child feels a huge sense of achievement and engagement when parents and whānau make comment on their blogs. Please Please please get involved. To paraphrase that wonderful African saying says ‘It takes a village to raise a child’, I would say “it takes a community to educate a child”. Your presence in your child’s education is a great present, a great gift, for your children. Get involved, get commenting.

And in that regard I want to acknowledge the support and confidence of the Greater Christchurch Schools Network who have given a significant grant from their innovation fund to support our innovative initiative to employ members of the community to work with you in your homes, one to one, giving you (we hope) the skills and confidence to get involved with your child’s learning. Being ‘A centre of creative excellence’ requires us to take risks, to try new things. This is new, this is a creative way of helping to improve learning outcomes for our rangatahi. GCSN - thank you.

This all leads me to repeat my words from last year: To the originators and principle drivers of Manaiakalani itself - Mr Pat Sneddon, Mrs Dorothy Burt, and Mr Russell Burt. Your work that has gone before us has truly created a hook for heaven, a force for educational change and improvement that addresses the issue not only of equity, but as you often remind us, of liberation for our learners in New Zealand in a powerful and compelling way. If I may take your words, Manaiakalani does more than remove barriers to our learners watching the game, it places our learners squarely on the playing field of their learning. Again, as I said last year, you are trailblazers in what at times can feel like a bleak landscape. Keep your lanterns lit, keep your voices strong, keep that spring in your step. Tamariki across New Zealand need you.

To my fellow Principals and teaching colleagues across our cluster, thank you for the amazing work you do. The ways in which you enable work across our cluster, the ways in which you practise and model collaboration, are a powerful force for our tamariki, and by doing so you create a rich educational landscape in which our tamariki can thrive and prosper.

To my wonderful colleagues at Hornby High School, regardless of whether you are teaching or non teaching staff, you all do a wonderful job. Teaching staff cause the learning, but that is not possible without all of the many support functions that sit alongside them: grounds and maintenance, security, administration and accounts, community and pastoral support, all completed by wonderful people. Thank you.

I would again like to acknowledge and thank the trustees of our Uru Mānuka Educational Trust: Mr Garry Moore, Chair, Mrs Janine Morrell-Gunn, Mrs Rose Crossland, Mr Jason Marsden, Mrs Daisy Laveo-Timo and Mrs Jane Ross.  You have all seen the potential for change that is Manaiakalani, and have freely and willingly given of your time to make the world a better place. Yet again Mr Gary Roberts, Principal of Hornby Primary School, is deserving of special mention for the drive and passion that he has brought to the pursuit of this amazing educational vision. Thank you. Thank you for your energy, your passion, your commitment, and your support.

To our many supporting organisations, thank you. As always, a special mention of the Hub, The Hornby Rotary Club, and Hornby Working Men’s Club as long term supporters of our wonderful tamariki. Actions speak louder than words. By your actions you demonstrate your understanding of the desirability of investing in your local community and our collective futures by supporting our tamariki. Please be assured that you do make a positive difference.
Thank you to our many supporters:

CERT Trust
Mainland Foundation
CSG Konica Minolta Limited
ISS Facilities Services
Westpac Trust - Hornby Branch
GCSN - the Greater Christchurch Schools Network
Orica Chemicals
Couplands
Hornby Residents Association

Finally, to our prize winners, well done. Tonight we acknowledge and celebrate your attitude, your persistence and your achievement. The prizes we award acknowledge only one part of the wonderful achievement represented here tonight, and throughout the school.

To our 2018 Prefects, thank you for your leadership and your commitment to the school, and to all of our leavers - please know that you take with you our best wishes, and the knowledge that at Hornby High School you have your turangawaewae, your place to stand. You are an outstanding group of young men and women. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Noreira tena koutou tena koutou tena koutou katoa

Collaboration ousts competition

Last week I was privileged to attend the annual Manaiakalani wananga, hosted by the Manaiakalani Education Trust. Representatives from every Manaiakalani cluster in the country are invited, and this year our Uru Mānuka cluster had not only our seven principals, but also other senior leaders, and leaders of learning, from our seven schools.

These wanaga begin with some inspiration, and some update, on the progress of MK across the country, and then include some fantastic examples of progress that has been shown to accelerate learning at different schools across the country. These 'slams' are always informative, the presenters humble. One of the many foundations for the success of Manaiakalani is the identification of what works using robust data, and the sharing of this with other participating schools.

This sharing represents the best in collaboration. No school keeps good practice a secret, good ideas are freely shared. This is refreshing as we (hopefully) emerge from an era of competition. The market model has failed children in their tens of thousands. In particular the market model has failed children who are not European, and who are not from middle and high income households. The result is that we have one of the longest tails of 'under achievement' in the OECD, a tail dominated by our Māori and Pasifika children. We ought to be ashamed that we have allowed this to happen, and I look despairingly at the political right that still thinks that competition amongst schools is an ideal to which we should aspire. Our children are NOT economic units to be consigned to this pile or that based upon standardised testing.

On the day following the wananga all of the members of the Uru Mānuka cluster who had attended stayed on for the day and sat together planning cluster goals, focii, and events, for 2019.
As we worked, I stepped aside and took this photo. I know that what I was seeing was the best in collaboration. One of the things that makes this 'the best' is something that is missing from this photo. What is NOT at the table here as we worked? What are you not seeing?

It's very simple: there is no 'ego'. Every individual 'at the table' was focussed on what we need to do next to improve learning outcomes for our children, and to improve the lives of our children and whānau. There was in 'I' in the conversation. There was plenty of 'we'. NO-ONE said 'my school' at any stage. Everyone was focussed on the children in the cluster.

This level of care and concern doesn't happen in an environment riddled with competition. Our children can only flourish in a climate of collaboration.

Manaiakalani not only supports the 'liberation' of our children as learners by magnifying a common pedagogy using digital devices, it also liberates our children as learners by ensuring that choices are made, resources allocated, in  the best interests of the children, not in the best interests of the school, or its Principal. Manaiakalani is a collaborative, a culturally responsive, approach to liberating ALL children as learners, to allow those children to reach their potential.

There was no ego there. Collaboration will oust competition. EVERY TIME!!!!

Passion projects, risk taking, and creativity

This is the text from my address to the junior school in assembly this morning.

******

Ki te kura te Huruhuru Ao o Horomaka - tena koe

‘Mā te huruhuru, ka rere te manu’
‘Feathers enable the bird to fly’

I’m maybe not much of a poetry person. My university creative writing work saw my lower marks in writing poetry, and higher marks writing short stories. However I have a number of fave poems, and I thought I’d read done of these to you today. For staff present here today, my apologies because you will hear this in my prize giving speech too..  ao be warned.

The Road Not Taken
BY ROBERT FROST
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

You may remember me talking to you last term about how learning is changing. I’ve talked about the kinds of skills we need for our future. Teachers are still your guides, they are still a source of knowledge, but they are no longer the only source of knowledge, as they were thought to be fifty or a hundred years ago.

I’ve also talked many times about our vision as a school, to be ‘a centre of creative excellence’. In thinking about what it takes to become that centre of creative excellence, we decided that being prepared to take risks was really important. That suggestion, by the way, came from the student rep on the Board of Trustees at the time. Whenever we try to be creative we have to take risks. We all put ourselves up there in front of others in a way that invites comment, and maybe criticism.

And creativity is really important to our way of causing learning at Hornby High School: our ‘Learn Create Share’ approach to learning. In educational jargon, we talk about ‘student engagement’. This is our way of talking about how interested in your work you are, about how connected to your learning you are, about how enthusiastic you are about your learning. And when we are following our passions, we are more likely to be engaged with what we are doing.

Where am I going with all of this?

Over the coming weeks you will be challenged in quite a different way, as we introduce something entirely new to Hornby High School: ‘passion projects’. These are projects devised as a result of asking you what you would like to do, asking staff what they would like to do, and then putting the two together.  The projects invite you to “follow your passion”, to attempt something that you find really interesting, something about which you (hopefully) have a passion. Why? Because when we are passionate about something we are more likely to take risks, we are more likely to be creative.

For us as a staff, this represents a big risk, because it’s not the way we have done things before. Similarly, for you it represents a risk because it’s not the way you have done things in school before. Our own journey to these passion projects begana couple of years ago when Mr Aitken asked us to take risks by trying a concept called Project based Learning. We didn’t flinch. He didn’t flinch. And neither should you.

And let’s not forget that when we take risks, that means that sometimes we fail. But failure is useful, as it tells us what didn’t work, and therefore gives us an insight into what might work better next time. There’s that famous Thomas Edison quote. Edison was inventor of a huge number of different things we take for granted, amongst which was the first lightbulb. The myth says that he tried 10000 different ways before he was successful, and of that he said:

“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”


We all need to draw upon our school values as we take these risks, we all need to show Commitment, Achievement,. Resilience, and Respect, in the face of either success or failure. You may fail. Be resilient - get back up and try again. Be committed to your end goal, stay the course, don’t flinch in the face of challenge.

This commitment to taking risks, takes us a little closer to our vision as ‘a centre of creative excellence’.

‘Mā te huruhuru, ka rere te manu’

Robin Sutton

Principal

Content, Knowledge, and 'Learn Create Share'

In 2005 Jane Gilbert redefined 'knowledge'.

Previously we had thought of knowledge as facts, as 'knowing stuff'. How many millilitres in a litre? How to decline french verbs? Solve a quadratic equation? Most of us have our memories of what 'knowledge' was meant to be.

But in 2005, in her book 'Catching the knowledge wave', Jane Gilbert redefined knowledge. No longer was it just knowing stuff, it now incorporated the idea of doing something with that stuff. In her words, 'knowledge' became a 'verb'. This was a fundamental ground shift in the educational landscape. I like this precis of the book:

If this book were a film, it would be rated M—with a caution that "some viewers may be disturbed by some scenes." In Catching the Knowledge Wave? Jane Gilbert takes apart many long-held ideas about knowledge and education. She says that knowledge is now a verb, not a noun—something we do rather than something we have—and explores the ways our schools need to change to prepare people to participate in the knowledge-based societies of the future.

Source: https://www.nzcer.org.nz/nzcerpress/catching-knowledge-wave-knowledge-society-and-future-education

I was prompted to set out my thinking by a recent blog post from American educator Eric Shenninger, titled 'The Purpose of content'.  Eric's post also makes it clear that we are not devaluing knowledge, in fact far from it.

The New Zealand curriculum lays out its foundations with its five key competencies :

• Thinking
• Relating to others
• Using language, symbols, and texts
• Managing self 
• Participating and contributing

All three are important. We know from the work of others that soft skills are vital to our future.  My focus here though is 'Thinking', specifically critical and creative thinking. Having taught economics in the NCEA framework between 2002 and 2016, my professional opinion is that thinking is the key to the work that I did in class, and the foundation of excellence in the qualification.

But there are those critics who say that NCEA devalues knowledge, that we no longer teach 'stuff' to pupils. Let's go back to Jane Gilbert's 2005 work: knowledge is no longer just facts and skills.

You can't think in  a vacuum, you can't think without knowledge and skills. So it's not that content doesn't matter any more, it's that content is no longer enough. Modern society now needs and demands so much more from people than it did fifty years ago. Paraphrasing Jane Gilbert, today we need to 'know stuff', AND we need to be able to 'do something with that stuff'.

And here we are back again to our hardy annual theme: 'Learn Create Share'. Create means doing something with what you have learned. The value of that is the sharing with others. And all too often there is an assumption that 'Learn Create Share' is a strictly linear process. It is not. In a previous blog post I made the point that it is a messy business. As students engage in  'Learn Create Share' they are 'all over the place'. That is, these three components of learning may happen in any order. It may be that we begin with the act of creation, and sharing, and then on the basis of that sharing with an authentic audience and the associated feedback we learn something new. It could indeed be that we learn something new, and on the basis of that, we create and share. We could equally share some thinking, learn something new from the real world feedback, from which we create something which for us is quite new.

'Learn Create Share' gives us a practical pedagogical framework with which to address Gilbert's redefinition of knowledge.

One thing is for sure, content as in facts and skills is still as important as it ever was. But it's just no longer enough. If as a kura we are to make real progress towards our vision as 'A centre of creative excellence', then we need to embrace the new concept of 'knowledge', we need to accept that knowledge is a 'verb', not  a'noun'.

A complex messy business

Education is a complex messy business.

(Source: Creative commons https://pxhere.com/en/photo/968503)

It has always been so. We all have that desire to think back to former days with the belief that those were simpler times, easier times, happier times. And in education speak, there is a tendency to believe that we had it better in those earlier times.

Frankly we did not. We had a system that taught to those with specific academic talents. It left a large proportion of the population disenfranchised. The old school certificate system until its final days consigned 50% of the population to failure. Where is the justice in that? Where is the economic sanity in consigning half of our pool of human talent to a sense of failure because they don't hurdle a specific and narrowly defined academic barrier?

So it is that we push to evolve education. The evolution is driven by a number of things:

• There are the economic drivers whereby business wants more productive units of human capital, or where the economy rewards innovation, new ideas
• There are the social drivers as we see unemployment delivering a range of social evils
• The moral imperative whereby we seek to create greater human happiness through education which, we hope, will create human beings who simply reach for that sense of fulfilment (perhaps Maslow was right)
• The political imperative whereby successive generations of politicians would have us believe that our system is failing to perform, and so needs constant reform. Strangely, that reform pattern seems to be tied to our three year political cycle. Who knew?

Regardless of the drivers, education is a complex and messy business, much like creativity. For Hornby High School our driver is that moral imperative, that desire to see that our students and our whānau are as well served as they can be to lead fulfilling lives.

Our search for that continual improvement means that we have multiple 'work streams' on the go at any one point in time. In fact, if you wanted a visual image, you might think of our educational journey as being much like one of Canterbury's braided rivers, making education that complex messy business.

(Sources: https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/89196579/environment-canterbury-licences-11000-hectares-of-public-land-to-farmers)

The most obvious is our work shifting into the new spaces that we have. The planning has taken long hours, and the shift in itself has been a complex business. Staff have worked hard, and been pushed well outside their personal and professional comfort zones. That we are where we are today is testament to their professionalism and their resilience.

Then there is the work to reform the curriculum, to make the curriculum fit for purpose. This seems likely to see a curriculum that is more contextual, a curriculum in which learning takes place against real world problems and issues, learning that is driven by student passion, and goodness knows we see plenty of that.

Alongside that we are working on continuous improvement in our student reporting. Early efforts so far this year have been driven by two initial desires: to get us through a period of significant staff stress as we relocate the entire school, and the desire to report more often, and more effectively. Professor John Hattie's ground breaking work tells us that feedback is one of the most significant impacts on student learning and achievement.

This work on reporting is connected with our ongoing staff professional learning on how to more effectively engage in inquiry into how to improve student learning, and on how to make better use of data to do just that.

Student reading and writing skills have been a big focus for our work. We continue to accelerate writing at twice the national rates of improvement. Reading proves a little more problematic, and so we are trialling reading interventions that are already proving to have positive impact on reading levels. When a reluctant reader improves reading speed by 40% while holding 80% comprehension in just two months, you know something important is going on.

And then there is the issue of our graduate profiles, those specifications of what we think our learners should look like at Year 8 and at Year 10. It is our intention to develop a Year 13 graduate profile too.

Finally all of this is underpinned by our work to grow our understanding of our 'Learn Create Share' pedagogy. We want creativity to be our most critical driver, and we want the 'Learn Create Share' pedagogy to drive everything that we do.

There is a lot of work going on to make sure that 'Learn Create Share' is at the forefront of our minds and our work. And that is why our vision, our aspiration, is the be 'A centre of creative excellence He puna auaha".

Some might think that this work, under the Manaiakalani umbrella is a digital devices programme. But it is not. As the literature on digital learning often seems to suggest, place digital devices in the hands of learners without changing the way teachers teach and learners learn, and you achieve nothing. Change that pedagogy and the sky is the limit.

And in this regard student blogging continues to be the most important thing. The evidence that we have from the Woolf Fisher Research Centre (Auckland University) tells us that the 'Manaiakalani medicine' must be taken three times per week. That is, if a student writes three blog posts a week, then we will have this huge effect on writing, and on engagement and learning.

Excellence is what we seek. Last week's news that our senior girls basketball team won their division one final spoke volumes for the levels of student commitment to excellence in what they do, and to their search for creative excellence.

But for all that, I come back to my original comment: Education is a complex messy business.