Many Rivers to Cross: Week 31 - PRACTICE - Professional Context - Crossing Boundaries

Breaking out of the National Standard silo's has been on the school to-do list for a few years now. We aren't seeing the changes in achievement that we would like, no matter how much we put in. A time for a re-think.
This year we have allowed our Inquiry Learning to include our Literacy programmes...to have the morning and afternoon parts of the school day work together, and build off each other. Small step, but so far so real strength has been seen (and a few weaknesses). The Ross Spiral curriculum seen in the video describes what we know learning could be like...exciting, personalised and challenging, and it also nicely shows what we can't get to with this relentless focus on reading, writing and maths.

My connections map shows the various people. groups and types of learning that I interact with. As I shift into Principalship I've noticed that the job I have been doing, and about to do, is quite different from classroom practice...and the people/ideas that I will be interacting with are different also. In many ways I will be taking all of these disparate threads, and trying to find alignment between them...alignment between the schools vision, beliefs, actions in the class, and how the community and various agencies can best support the learning of the children.

Community of Learning
In my final weeks of being AP, the Masterton schools had their final meetings about commiting to setup a community of learning. The (then) principal took me along to these...but so i could have my voice, and so I could see the lie of the land. A CoL will be the very embodiment of interdisciplinary connections...as the story of a learner from ECE through to tretiary will need to be considered and enhanced.

While these meetings at their very infancy, a lot of planning and idea sharing has happened already. The ACRLog (2015) suggests that successful interdisciplinary collaboration requires a synergy of Qualities/Attitudes, Workplace Conditions, and Common Goals. It was interesting reading about this in light of the steps towards a CoL...getting the mix right, how will that look? The Primary cluster have been working on some shared learner qualities for several years now, so this could be the start of one piece. Setting an achievement challenge as a group will help determine some common goals. But it is the Workplace conditions, the way we will operate together...that will be a real challenge I believe. Keeping communication effective between many organisations, of varying sizes and complexities...keeping the functional elements of all...almost hurts the head just thinking about it.

It will be a challenge, but we aren't the first...so learning from established CoL's about what worked for them, and adapting those ideas to suit our context will be important going forward.


References

ACRLog. (2015). A Conceptual Model for Interdisciplinary Collaboration. Retrieved from http://acrlog.org/2015/05/14/a-conceptual-model-for-interdisciplinary-collaboration

Ross Institute. (2015, July 5). Ross Spiral Curriculum: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Science. [video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHZhkB0FJik