Claire Amos

These school holidays marked the end of my third term at Albany Senior High School. I am absolutely loving my role as Principal at ASHS and I am still pinching myself when I think about how good of a fit it feels for me (and hopefully vice versa as well). It is incredible to think about how much has happened in such a short time. At this point I really do want to give my senior leadership team and all the staff at ASHS a massive warm and fuzzy shout out for the way they have jumped in boots and all! Below is a bit of an overview and update of the exciting things going on at ASHS. Much of which links directly back to the our trusty annual plan. Link to the 2019 Annual Plan Specialist Subjects working on providing visible, deep and inclusive learning. Part of this year’s annual plan is focusing squarely on how we can ensure we are working towards all learning being visible, deep and inclusive. Under the fabulous leadership of Associate Principal Miranda Makin and DP Cristina...

It was an interesting process pulling together my first annual plan as Principal at Albany Senior High School. School Charters and Annual Plans are interesting beasts. To be honest, they appear to be box ticking waffle and weasel words which gather cyber dust in some virtual filing system. My belief was that a plan can be bloody useful, but only if it was actually designed to be useful. For that reason, I set about researching and reading as many as I could lay my hands on. What I found, for the most part, was (I thought) unnecessarily long winded and either attempted to capture so much in so much detail that they seemed insurmountable or so vague they read like paraphrased business as usual. In the end, the easiest approach was to go to The University of Auckland Centre for Educational Leadership to look at their resources and templates and have a crack of building something from scratch. The following is my attempt to craft an Annual Plan (this obviously doesn't include the br...

If there is one thing I am pretty adamant about, it is that the Principal's primary role is to be the 'leader of learning'. To that end one of my real focus areas in my first term as Principal is to observe as much learning as I can in action. As many of you will know, at Albany Senior High School (ASHS) we have three strands to our curriculum - Tutorials, Specialist Subjects and Impact Projects. You can read explanations of each part of the curriculum here: Tutorials:  http://ashs.school.nz/curriculum/tutorials Specialist Subjects:  http://ashs.school.nz/curriculum/specialist-subjects Impact Projects:  http://ashs.school.nz/curriculum/impact-projects I came into the school knowing that I loved the curriculum design and the way that the time allocations clearly signalled the value of each element. What I did not know was how well each element (in their current form) was meeting the needs of each and every learner. And as in every school there is often a bit of a di...