This week we ran our first online nationwide Share staff meeting involving over 500 participants. There was a lot of sharing and rich conversations about our inquiries. Key topics were focused around students' well being, culturally responsive pedagogy, reading, writing, maths and leadership. We worked in small online groups, giving everyone an opportunity to have their say and to share their ideas.
My group was made up of secondary school teachers from Ōtaki College and Tamaki College. Our chosen topic was Culturally Responsive Pedagogy.
A colleague of mine for several years Ruth Hills from Bay of Islands College is highly regarded for her knowledge in this area. Just last year, Ruth gave an online presentation at one of our Secondary Connects, titled Blogging through a culturally responsive pedagogical lens. Ruth shared with us how she had managed to extend students' writing ability through the use of the shared class blog for senior Year 12 PE students. These students were responding to Ruth's provocations on leadership, take a look here at the blog post titled Evaluating your leadership strategies and you'll see there are 44 comments from her students. These are well thought out comments, and as Ruth refers to her in her recorded presentation, it's clear that students were learning from one another.
I really enjoyed having online staff meetings. It was a bit of a lottery in terms of who you were teamed up with, but I thought this was a real positive because you got to meet people who may not have ordinarily come together. Manaiakalani are planning to run this again next year in term 3.
