Monday, October 21, 2013

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

It was 2.07pm on Monday 21 October in a Learning Commons 8 cave when Kylee and Steve and I agreed that we had created a timetable structure that looks as if it could deliver on the exciting vision for our school. Of course, it wasn't created by us three, but we had certainly pulled together ideas shared between Claire, Di, Lea and I over several months, ideas discussed at length by all of the SLLs and feedback from all of the LOLs.

We left confident that we had a structure that would go a long way to supporting our goal of truly personalising learning with lots of opportunity for flexibility and responsiveness for both teachers and learners. I believe it to be a very innovative solution and one which will contribute to the growing level of excitement amongst our team. We've still got a little bit of work to do on it and still need to test it with the rest of our team. I'm looking forward to moving through that process and then sharing it more widely.

The day started with a great rendition of Folsom Prison Blues on the ukes and during the Kitchen Table session (which we start every day with) Sally ran a great session on introducing the key elements of effective coaching and mentoring which got all of us to draw on our personal experiences.

After this the SLLs ran a session describing the processes they went through in their previous cave as they deconstructed the NZC so as to design what learning will look like at HPSS. Staff were asked to identify one of the most important sentences in the NZC document which they agreed was:

"All learning should make use of the natural connections that exist between learning areas and that link learning areas to the values and key competencies"

I had to be out of the room for a bit completing an enrolment and when I returned I spent time sitting and observing what was happening in the room. The two things I saw were great collaborative leadership from the group of SLLs who were relishing the opportunity to lead, as all the LOLs have been doing, and a group of 20 people listening respectfully, allowing others to contribute and being able to contribute themselves.

Steve sharing the SLL journey

We then formed teams to begin the truly excellent process of budget planning for 2014!

Yeehah. Timetabling and budgetting in the same day! Hence the title of this post inspired by Kanye West.

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