Last week as I picked my son up from childcare, his teacher called out, “I must tell you about something that happened today . . . ” Of course I naturally assumed the worst and prepared to give my son my best ‘patient but stern telling off face’! In this situation I’m never sure whether it’s better to be the ‘teacher who is the parent of the naughty child’ or the ‘teacher who has to talk to the teacher who is the parent of the naughty child’ – having been in both situations at various times they are equally excruciating. Anyway on this occasion, miraculously it was good news! She told me that earlier two of the younger children had been having an argument over a toy car – the teacher went over to ask if they needed help to decide what to do – they told her that my son could help them. So, over he went, armed with the wisdom of an almost 5 yr old Solomon, he gave the car to the boy who had it first and took the second boy, Olly, to the construction box and helped him to make an even better car. I told Manu how proud I was that he was being such a great tuakana and looking after the teina. The emphasis his Kohanga Reo places on the tuakana (literally older sibling) of being a kind and supportive role model to those who are younger clearly benefits both parties. However, lest I become too effusive in my maternal pride, I must tell you that 5 minutes later when an older boy tried to take the car he had made from Olly, Manu picked it up and bashed him firmly on the knuckles with it before handing it back – so there may be some work to do on his peer relationships! Over the last term I have been continuing to reflect on the subject of mentoring and – embracing the risk of sounding like an education workshop facilitator – I have been surprised by the areas of our school lives that can be usefully viewed through a mentoring lens. A recent workshop on fostering equity in education held at Massey has had me thinking about IES in the context of mentoring. Now, I realise opinions from my countrymen are starkly divided on the attributes of Palmerston North – with Jeremy Clarkson waxing lyrically and irreverently on our beloved God’s own, “If you were God and you were all-powerful, you wouldn’t select Bethlehem as a suitable birthplace for your only child because it’s a horrible place . . . What you’d actually do is choose New Zealand.” If God had got it right, he wrote, ‘children at Christmas time today would be singing “Oh little town of Wellington” and people would not cease from mental fight until Jerusalem had been built in Auckland’s green and pleasant land. Jesus would have been from Palmerston North,’ he continued – in stark contrast to the slating the city received from another famous Briton, John Cleese, in 2006, when he said, “if you wish to kill yourself but lack the courage to, I think a visit to Palmerston North will do the trick”. Despite the fact that John Cleese has a better track record in the ‘Not bashing your producer’ department, perhaps since it is
my chosen place of work, I prefer to side with Jeremy and extol Palmerston’s virtues – particularly when it comes to the benefit of having Massey University on our doorstep with the access to speakers and experts this provides. Last week, a colleague and I attended a workshop run by Prof. Mel Ainscow from the University of Manchester where he has the interesting job title of Co-Director of the Centre for Equity in Education. On the basis that school systems which focus on both excellence and equity result in the highest performance, he firmly believes that when it comes to improving school systems and increasing equity, the knowledge already exists within schools and hence the school system about how to do this – it is simply a matter of moving that knowledge around. He spoke about his work on the Greater Manchester Challenge a project which followed on from the City Challenge in London led by Prof. Tim Brighouse. When a group of Principals whose schools were performing well were set the task of improving schools throughout the Greater Manchester area, their solution was to pair schools up to develop what I saw as a mentoring, tuakana/teina relationships. They set up a “dating agency” to partner schools to develop projects that valued schools’ local context and the areas they were successful in as well as focussing on the need for improvement. The resulting partnerships were sometimes surprising, he talked about the high achieving, high decile Girls’ School and the low decile co-ed with a falling roll and the small wealthy Jewish Boys’ primary and the large neighbouring Muslim school. Significantly, both partners were changed and improved through the partnerships – in the Jewish school teachers began to focus more on the creative arts they saw modelled in the curriculum at their partner school and student achievement improved at both schools. In the schools where improvement was shown, the keys to the project’s success were the fact that the partnered schools were not in competition for students, the compatibility between the 2 principals and the focus on collaboration with a critical edge ie the willingness to share achievement data and ask the hard questions. As feedback begins to come in about the first IES partnerships and as schools in our area meet to discuss possible collaboration, I wonder whether the kind of collaboration that IES is producing will result in relationships with a critical edge and improvement across the New Zealand system or whether we need to look more critically at the elements of school collaboration that create improvement and how we can implement those ideas in a uniquely New Zealand context. Towards Self Improving School Systems: Lessons from a City Challenge. Mel Ainscow 2015 http://www.3news.co.nz/entertainment/top-gear-host-raves-about-nzin-column-2013031708#ixzz3gCX4iVX9
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