Claire Amos

This afternoon my co-DPs and I had the opportunity to share our curriculum structures at EdChallenge (a PLG for senior leadership teams organised by the Albany Senior High School - thank you for including us!). It was awesome and terrifying to have an opportunity to attempt to articulate a year's thinking in a little over 20 minutes. A few things struck me. For one, we have done A LOT of thinking and we have come along way. It was great to hear Di and Lea share their journey with their teams in developing and realising visions for our Learning Design and Learning Relationships respectively. Their leadership has resulted in some incredibly deep thinking.  Interestingly, we have remained true to our original thinking in Term One and indeed Maurie's and the BOTs vision from the year prior. However, on closer inspection, we have absolutely grown and built on these initial plans as we have welcomed on more and more of our team on board. There was a real sense of collabora...

Warning - this is long! It was originally written for my Organisational Development paper. Introduction “The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn't need to be reformed - it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardise education, but to personalise it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.” (Robinson, 2009, p. 238) Currently many schools can still be described as fitting the so-called ‘factory model’. These schools were born out of the industrial era and for the most part have failed to adapt to the needs of learners who exist in what can be defined as the knowledge or creative age. There are a number of areas that schools can develop so as to better meet the demands of the 21st century learner. But as Ken Robinson states it is not simply a matter of subtle...

Here is my rather earnest *cue serious voice* overview of the what the future holds and how we need to adapt our education models to suit.

Today we did an exercise with our Learning Team Leaders which got us to reflect on a key mentor or coach who had made an impact on us. We then had to reflect on the qualities of that mentor, then compared our lists with others to come up with a top 5. It was clear that a pattern was forming. Lots of mentions of powerful relationships, passion, high expectations, support/guidance and the celebration and recognition of success. This was a great intro into what qualities we would be looking to develop as Learning Coaches.  It was through this process of reflecting on people who have influenced, coached and mentored us that I had an incredibly revelation - it would appear that I am a mentor whore.  Okay, that might sound less than positive. Maybe I am a mentor collector. A mentor magnet. Maybe I am just lucky, because if I look back over the last twenty years (from when I knew I wanted to be a teacher) I have a whole lot of people who I consider as mentors, people who hav...

NB. This was first written as a position paper for Waikato University, hence the 'novel-esque' lengths.  Source: http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/Curriculum-documents/The-New-Zealand-Curriculum/Effective-pedagogy Issue An important leadership issue that exists at a micro (school) and macro (systemic/national) level is that school-based, episodic and initiative-focused professional development does not support meaningful and manageable pedagogical change to occur. Context This is particularly important as many New Zealand schools have been expected to design and implement a school curriculum based on the New Zealand Curriculum from 2010 and Te Mauratanga from 2011, whilst also introducing National standards from 2010 and the newly aligned NCEA standards from 2011. At the same time a number of schools have also been working on implementing e-learning across the curriculum. Position My position is that pedagogical change can and must occur. With the ‘right tools’ scho...

A couple of months ago I was pondering the BIG question - to LMS or not to LMS ? For those of you who are not down with the edu lingo, LMS stands for learning management system, which is a term for an online environment or platform that is used as a means for managing learning online...funny that. Well, ponder I did, and still do, asking myself if we are actually in a post-LMS world. Part of me was convinced we are, that the concept of a LMS was singular and restrictive and quite frankly a bit 'yesterday'. But then, mid-ponder it struck me. I was asking the wrong question. It was not a question of 'To LMS or not to LMS?' It should have actually been the question - 'How do you we evolve the LMS to best meet the changing needs of schools and learners? It was not a matter of 'throwing the baby out with the bath water', it was more about teaching that baby to swim! So how is the LMS evolving (or does it need to evolve)? The evolution for me is that it i...

Hobsonville Point Secondary School are looking for an innovative Library Leader for our future-focused school - sound like you or someone you know?? This will be an amazing opportunity for someone to develop their dream library for our school in state-of-the-art facilities and with a fabulous team of educators.  Are you: ●       passionate about future-focused pedagogy ●       committed to supporting student and teacher inquiry ●       collaborative ●       optimistic ●       innovative Role Description                                                    ...