Within schools, it is assumed that everyone is on the same page and moving towards the same goals, guided by the vision. The vision is guided through a statement that is often ubiquitous and general in its intentions. Our school vision is "To Grow Learning-Empowered and Empathic Children". As a Principal, new to my position, I needed to gain a swift picture in my mind of what this statement meant to the teachers, students, and whanau I work with - at the same time clarify what it means to me. When you are not part of the process of developing guiding vision statements, it's important to be able to connect and share the ideas of others. Having spent the best part of a term familiarising myself with the community, the school's strategic plan, vision, values, analysing data, having formal and informal conversations across the school - an understanding of what the vision meant to the community began to grow in my mind. There has been a number of pathways that have opened through the process and I am in a position to build on what is already in place.
Starting with students and whanau I have developed a 'Learning Framework' that I have shared with staff on TOD. The purpose behind the framework is to clarify what learning looks like at our school - where it starts, how we do it, how we grow it, and most importantly why we do it (connecting strongly to our vision). You may do a double take at 'how we do it' and 'how we grow it'? How we grow it is reflective practice, how we do it is pedagogy. It's important that we reflect on how we do things in order to grow what we do. Through my getting to know the structures, processes, programmes and people there were a couple of things that came to the surface giving me aspects of the vision to build on. The writing focus we have had for the past few years is still relevant, but it was apparent that we had come to the end of our PLD contract and there was still more to be done in increasing student achievement in this area.
The introduction of digital learning was in its infancy within the school. There were pockets of work being done by teachers, but most had done very little in the classroom with their learners in the digital space. With the big picture of education moving into the digital space, I had to make this part of our vision going forward. Combining writing and the move into digital learning was a natural evolution. The big part is gaining teacher buy-in. It's a lot to learn when managing a classroom and digital learning has to be done 'on the job' by all involved. We have engaged PLD facilitators to implement google suite into our school, we've introduced class blogs and begun the task of purchasing chrome books and ipads to boost the number of devices across the school. The Board of Trustees have been supportive in this move to digital learning and are excited to see it grow across the school.
