Mindblown

Mark Twain said he never let his schooling interfere with his education.
Now I reckon that’s good advice. Personal experience proves that the messy lessons learned from interacting with the world tend to differ (often drastically) from the nicetidyrows of theory provided in our traditional institutions of learning. We’ve always needed exposure to the real stuff and the right people (at key points along the way) to make the best connections.
And that’s where that old adage comes in … ” it takes a village to raise a child -and a community to educate it”. I believe we should be actively seeking more opportunities for doing just that.

Community Responsibility
Our kids (most of em) need more scaffolded opportunities to become VALUED, ACTIVE and VISIBLE members of our communities – and as communities that’s exactly what we want for them. Responsibility, A Sense of Belonging, Citizenship, Contribution etc. Our schools are asked to teach our students essential values and key competencies . They’re doing their absolute best to do this but surely these essential social ’skills’ can be taught, applied and reinforced more effectively in a wider social environment.
We need to provide more opportunities for our students to collaborate and learn the ‘important stuff’ with valued community members by tapping into our people resources and creating conditions that will keep our students safely engaged as they interact and learn.

Partners in Learning
We’ve gathered some great ideas from an online survey we conducted with community members (wider community).We intend to use these ideas and begin exploring possibilities that may help develop effective partnerships.
This video explains what we’re thinking, what we believe we need and why. We would love you to watch it and start talking about HOW we can involve our students as more active community members.We made it to take out to our local industry, businesses, services and the wider community – in the hope that we can provoke discussion and start talking together about becoming REAL partners in learning. The second half of the video is an invitation from our students for our community to join us. Lyrics and actions by students of the College Kapahaka group.
We’d all love some feedback !
(Thanks to Jordan who did a great job of the narration and a huge thanks to Mike Graham, Gerelle Emery and our kids in the College Kapa Haka Group – who make us proud
Video is about 6 mins.

Let’s Talk

We won’t involve people effectively in decision making until we’ve helped them become equally well informed SO… as we’ve ALL said before, the first step is to begin informing our communities about what’s happening, and engaging them in discussion about how we can best prepare to meet our children’s needs. How better to do this than to engage our students in an authentic learning task and … make this our student’s project.

Splice Project
I’ve been working with groups of students aged 10 – 17 in my local learning community. Last year I applied for and received funding for the community from the Microsoft Innovative Schools Pilot Project. The funding allowed us to work on an information project with students from the six local schools.
Our objectives were to:
· Inform their community about the changes in schooling needed for 21st century learners,
· To determine how and to what degree the community would like to engage with their schools, and
· To determine how community stakeholders (businesses, services, professions and community members) believe they are able to support school initiatives and learning in authentic contexts … and begin working together to establish partnerships and support for community/ school learning projects.

We call it the SPLICE project.- Supporting Personalised Learning in Interative Community Environments (yep -the world could use another acronym . You can see more of the student’s work at our Spliceproject blog.

The following video is a collaborative effort. Year 6 –8 students, representing each school in the area, scripted ,filmed and edited their own videos to convey their ideas. Parts of all their work have been used to build a collaborative video, representing ideas from the whole learning community. It’s intended to use to this video to help inform our community about changes in schooling for our 21st century learners. We’re posting it in our local Community Website and hope to play it in local shops and businesses, as well as at parent meetings and meetings with community members. I think it’s pretty darn good – but then I’m horribly biased (about 9 mins). What do you think ?

SPLICE Survey Results – What the Community Think
We’ve been experimenting with community consultation. We put together an online community survey to try and gather information from our extended whanau -members of the community who do not have students presently at school. The response wasn’t high (about 50), but these were 50 people we would not have heard from previously. We had some interesting results; 89% said they cared “a LOT” about education in our community. That’s very encouraging.

What information and where do we want it?
Only 29% said they were satisfied with the information schools were providing to the community. They said their preference was to get information from the local Newspaper, our local Community Website and School sites. They were particularly interested in what we know now about how human beings really learn, what student’s were expected to learn about in the different learning areas, what the ‘Key Competencies” are and how they’re expected to develop these, and more importantly – what projects students/schools were involved in. 70% of them said they would visit school online sites to become better informed about class activities and student progress.

This is interesting …
An overwhelming 94% said representatives of local management industry, businesses, services and community should meet with local education groups and student groups. They said that local schools should come up with projects and approach the community for help. They offered lots of advice and ideas …

So …we’re listening and we’re trying some things differently.
Students from our local schools have collaborated on two information spreads in the local Newspaper. They worked with their learning facilitators, the editor of the Newspaper, a graphic artist and their local Principals (at the local Newspaper Office,to really experience the process of producing work for a large audience.) Both the editor and the graphic artist happily gave up more of their time when they saw the obvious interest and engagement of the students.

So now what…
As a direct result we’ve had emails of support, ideas for community projects, and invitations to come out to local service clubs and community organisations, to give presentations about what’s happening in our schools. Just what we’d hoped for !
We’re also noticing some shifting perceptions….Community members are starting to see changes as being part of an overall process, not just relevant to individual schools. They’re beginning to regard the schools in our area as a combined entity and part of our overall community… and student voice has been the catalyst for this. We need to continue providing relevant information and opportunities for discussion.
Shift Happens – Informing our community about changes to Schooling

“Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.” Andre Gide

Effective listening is big. My definition isn’t comprehensive but it sure involves; inviting, hearing, noting , acknowledging (and eventually acting on) the voiced thoughts, concerns, ideas, moans, whines, shy observations, table-thumping-opinions and sane/insane, innovative/regressive suggestions of all parties involved in, and affected by, the system or structure we’re considering making some changes in.

In education we’re always ‘consulting’. Whenever some new ministry document emerges, or we change a word in some school policy, we wave a handful of A4s under parent noses and ‘consult’. We’re expected to and we’ve been doing it that way for years. However, (brace yourselves for a startlingly insightful observation.) here it is:) simply because we attempt to do it often, doesn’t mean we do it well. It doesn’t even mean we attempt to do it well. Unfortunately… effort does not always equate with effectiveness” (a useful report card comment).

Let’s consider a few seat–squirming examples of our common consultation processes …

1.Send out a Survey. Compose a few questions during staff meeting (spend an hour arguing semantics) and attach ‘survey’ to this week’s newsletter.
Survey Rules :
Not too many questions (we don’t want to confuse anyone),
Multiple choice or Tick Boxes (we don’t want to risk getting answers we weren’t expecting).
Yes of course, we’d like some comments (in the 3 cm generously allowed at the bottom of the sheet).
We’ll also provide class checklists, so we know exactly who’s returned their response (and, thus who really cares) or, we make responses anonymous (and then compare handwriting samples – yes, teachers are often so starved for feedback that we need to know who said what).
Results: After daily reminders, thinly veiled threats, and some pleading at assembly 30 -85% of forms are rummaged for, peeled off fridges and returned. Management teams spend hours after school sifting responses into generic piles and decoding eg. “– can’t read this, make it a ‘No”. Someone makes a table and reports results statistically to staff and BOT. Done. File results away until next ERO visit.

2. Hold a Parent Meeting. Popularly Wednesday or Thursday night, just after any Class/Camp meeting. 7 pm start, in the library (optimists tend to use the hall – although the staff toilet is often a large enough venue).
Parent Meeting Rules:
1.Essential to have more staff than parents present (Note: teachers -to- parents ratio is often better than EOTC guidelines).
2. Some kind of powerpoint must be endured.
3. Every syndicate/department leader must say something, whether they have something to say or not.
Parent Meeting Results: A week’s extra work and anxiety for every syndicate/department leader. One parent holds the floor with discomforting questions & a handful of weary parents suffer in saintly silence, comforted by the knowledge that they’re exceedingly virtuous for just turning up, and if they can just wait this out , the kids should be asleep by the time they get home.
The effectiveness of the meeting is often measured in numbers present, or ,when numbers are embarrassingly small, that affirming comment from Mrs Someone who likes what we’re doing. Tick box and breathe sigh of relief.

Aww heck.
The above examples are corny and trite but the bottom line is we can do this better. If we want to gather useful information about the systems we labour within, we need to provoke open and honest dialogue. We need to provide real and rich opportunities to listen to, and confer with, ALL parties affected. That’s everyone –Not just mum and dad, but the entire community ie. everyone in our community that is affected by the outcomes of our education system. Categorise them if you must, but I can’t think of anyone that that doesn’t affect …and accepting embarrassingly small representations of each group doesn’t count as effective.

So … let’s try doing it differently.
Let’s provide richer opportunities for those involved to;
1. Carefully consider the issues involved,
2. Access information relevant to informed discussion about those issues,
3. Convey their honest opinions without fear of censure, or judgment about the perceived quality of their response; their age, education, employment or personal standing in the community,
4. Be heard by those who intend to truly identify, analyse, evaluate and act on their expressed concerns.
5. Be actively involved in the identification, analysis and evaluation of the information.
6. Be actively engaged, as partners in learning, in strategic planning designed to implement ideas.
7. Be actively engaged in ongoing evaluation and review programmes.

If we discount professional arrogance and ‘hidden-agendas’, as reasons for our somewhat superficial consultative processes (although these have been hinted at… . What are we left with?
Apathy ? – “Why do we bother, we just get predictable responses from the same ones .
Ignorance? “So what’s the point of asking them anyway?”
Expediency? “Let’s just get it over with quickly, tick the boxes and move on to some kind of action”.

Oh dear. We question the relevance of consultation, struggle with it’s implementation and criticize the appropriateness of it’s outcomes. But … done well, effective consultation can lead to more community ownership, commitment to vision and implementation, and sustained involvement over time – which is exactly what we’re after !

We need to develop “a strategic, integrated and more personally involving approach to consultation and participation”. The best models seem to come from local government, and although schools can’t afford to pay for consultants, we can certainly begin to experiment and follow more widely accepted principles of community consultation.