What's the ELEPHANT in your room?

We had another stand out day at the Manaiakalani PLG at Summerville Special school.  I always come out of these meetings regenerated and excited about what we're doing in our Cluster.  Today we were given photocopies of elephants and asked what 'elephants' were revealed through the data and feedback we were given from the researchers of the Manaiakalani programme from 2014.  It was a great experience sharing our thoughts and ideas around what the data revealed and as a group this activity gave us an opportunity to reflect deeply on what our challenges were and what solutions we could produce to meet them.  It was also wonderful to see that we all recognised the same 'elephants' and were very keen to listen to the ideas shared around these challenges.

The year 7-10 dip was an area I chose to initially focus on and the group I was in during this discussion was thoughtful, considerate and highly motivated.  The ideas, questions and light bulb moments shared were brilliant and then when we shared our elephant with the whole group we could see common threads between all the elephants in the room - this was excellent.
What will I be taking back to my school after today?

• Looking ahead - further develop our relationship with the college to ensure our teachers know what our students need, what the expectations are the next level up, what their next teachers want them to be able to do when they get there.
• Raise our own expectations - don't just teach what they need at their own levels but look beyond and teach up (don't limit students with boundaries set by levels - give them a go!).  
• Teachers MUST be "Life Long Learners" - Pedagogical content knowledge and curriculum knowlege is never ending.  Keep learning, keep developing, keep implementing....
• LEARN, CREATE, SHARE - for teachers in their own learning...the ethos works for EVERYONE!!!
• Consistency across the school - taxonomies, curriculum language, PLD - keeps everyone on the same page, on the same track, striving for 'school wide' goals.

So we looked at the elephants identified across the cluster.  You may think this approach would be like opening 'a can of worms'...but with collegiality and collaboration, what we ended up doing was changing those elephants into mice!