Planning for the year ahead

With the students now starting to enjoy their summer break, we as a team are reflecting on the learning from 2021 and planning for the academic year of 2022. We as the senior school teaching team have reflected on our teaching practice individually and as a team have have made a list of non negotiables which we are implementing and strengthening for the upcoming year. 

Being in the planning meetings was a great opportunity for me to share my experiences as a Manaiakalani CoL teacher. I shared templates for our team to use in their planning and teaching, resources from the Woolf Fisher Research Centre as well as other Manaiakalani Resources which our team can use in their planning. I strongly encouraged our teachers to use the integrated literacy approach as well as the T Shaped literacy. I have also encouraged our team to analyse the blogs of their students and take notes on the type of create activities the students were blogging because that is a reflection of our own teaching practice. We have set a goal to have the students blog SISOMO blog posts where they are able to discuss their learning through recordings and using more interactive presentations. 

I strongly emphasised the importance of exposing students to different texts to add to their knowledge and also challenge what they already know. We also discussed the value of dialogic discussions. That is another goal our team identified for our learning and teaching for 2022. We have been trying to implement having dialogic discussions in our classes for many years but there is still work needed to be done for this to be effectively happening in our classes. 

As I participated our planning meeting, I could not help but feel excited for the changes we will be making in our teaching next year. I look forward to seeing the teachers in our team implement what we have planned in their teaching practice and most of all, I look forward to our tamariki accelerating their learning through their learning experiences.