Week 31: Indigenous knowledge and cultural responsiveness in my practice

-

Step 1 (What):
Cultural responsiveness is having high expectations for all student’s ability to achieve.  It is not finding barriers to make up excuses for a child not making progress, it is about looking at yourself, what do I need to change in my teaching and learning approach to support the child’s learning.

School wide activities and events is an aspect we are beginning to strengthen.  Our events have parent’s involvement.  During culture weeks, parents lead singing, dance and craft lessons for students.  For other school events, parents are welcome and encouraged to take part.

Planning and assessment is an area I would like our school to focus on.  When planning an inquiry topic, parents could be asked to come in and share their expertise and knowledge.  Parents could become apart of the planning, teaching and learning with the teacher and the class. 

Step 2 (So what):
I will use the action continuum to evaluate where I believe our school is at regarding cultural responsiveness (CORE Education, 2017).  I consider our school to be at the purple stage because some language and cultural content takes place and we consult with the community.  I do not feel like it is embedded in everything we do yet.  I like how this action continuum has asked to place individual teachers on the continuum and I can identify one at every stage. It would be an interesting to get staff to identify firstly what they believe culturally responsive, indigenous knowledge and deficit thinking means and where they think they are in the continuum and create and action plan to get to red.  I believe that this is a collective vision that all staff need to work towards for Māori students to be authentically achieving ‘as Māori’.



Step 3 (What next) What might you or your school need to consider or take action on to move up to the next level of cultural responsiveness? What are the next steps?
As a school we need to engage parents in learning at school and perhaps more learning at home will follow (New Zealand Government).  To do this we have to be approachable to parents and not intimidating. There are so many ways to communicate with parents now.  We have a school website; Facebook and some classes have blogs.  Now that reporting has changed, we will look at online learning portfolios for parents to access at anytime and see their child’s learning.

References
CORE Education.(2017, 17 October). Dr Ann Milne, Colouring in the white spaces: Reclaiming cultural identity in whitestream schools.[video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cTvi5qxqp4&feature=em-subs_digest

New Zealand Government. (n.d). Home-school partnerships. Retrieved from http://elearning.tki.org.nz/Beyond-the-classroom/Engaging-with-the-community/Home-school-partnerships/?tab=js-tabcontainer-1-tab-2

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mind Lab Post Grad: Week 17 - My Reflective Practice

-
Image
Using Jay and Johnson's Reflective Model Step 1 - Descriptive In my current reflective practice, I believe that critically reflecting is not criticising your own or others practice.  Critical reflection challenges the status quo and actively making changes to your approach improve practice and knowledge.  Critical reflection gains insight from existing assumptions and reliable sources.  This should include reading relevant sources to find evidence to support the challenges.  However, I feel this is an element in my own practice that needs to improve so that the outcome of my critical reflection is evidence based. I always reflect on my own and with colleagues during informal conversations and this helps me make decisions on the run.  However, I rarely write my reflections and share with others and ask for their opinions.  I always reflect on my practice on the immediate, ongoing, automatic action and making decisions to change behaviours in response to stu
Read more

Mind Lab Post Grad: Week 18 - Reflecting on changes in my future oriented teaching practice

-
Image
Using Gibbs Model for Reflection I led a change initiative and coached alongside teachers in their class to embed a writing programme throughout the school that has previously been successful with accelerated student achievement, especially for boys.   I have chosen to reflect on the theme ‘a culture of continuous learning for teachers and educational leaders’ (Bolstad, Gilbert, McDowall, Bull, Boyd & Hipkins, 2012). When the changes were made I felt nervous about attending to each teacher’s individual needs, especially those who were reluctant to change.   Afterwards I could see the shift in my relationships with staff.   In changing my approach for each person, I became an approachable resource towards their professional development.   Perhaps my feelings of confrontation were unnecessary. There were mixed reactions to the changes for teachers.   The early adopters were used to influence the reluctant staff.   Some of the changes I made should have been introdu
Read more

Mind Lab Post Grad: Week 29: Using social online networks in teaching or professional development

-
Image
In this blog post I will reflect on how I use social online networks in my professional development using Jay and Johnson’s reflective model. Step 1 (Descriptive stage): In my professional development I have used Yammer, Facebook, Google +, blogs and videos.   Yammer is used as a sharing platform at school.   On Facebook I follow several teaching pages.   I am a member of several Google + communities from a range of long term courses that I have been on.   They were supportive during the course and were a valuable resource to refer to.   While at university I wrote a blog and could see myself develop as a teacher.   I have recently restarted reflecting using a blog.   I use YouTube to find videos to support my professional development as I find these are often more engaging than reading long articles. Step 2 (Comparative stage): The most popular social media platforms that the group has used to help with our own professional development are the personal social media, social
Read more