A professional development journey and its link to student success

KERRY DELANEY ARTICLE: 12 July 2013. Ministry of Education, Education Gazette, in print 25 Feb 2013.

When junior literacy achievement results weren’t looking too good, Titahi Bay School decided to do something about it. School principal KERRY DELANEY reflects on their learning journey.

At the start of 2010 the teachers in the junior syndicate at Titahi Bay School began a learning journey.

In 2008 and 2009, we found that our new entrant children were not achieving the literacy results we expected or wanted.

As a team we thought about [reading educator researcher] Marie Clay’s comment that if children are apparently unable to learn, we should assume that we have not found the right way to teach them. We spent a lot of time in our team meetings discussing what is effective practice and sharing ideas and strategies. However, this still didn’t have the impact we wanted.
In term 3, 2009, we invited literacy facilitator Joy Allcock to help us examine these issues. We looked at our children’s results, at their writing books, and at our planning and expectations. We analysed in detail what might be happening and where the gaps might be. As a result of our discussion, we decided that we needed to know more about our teachers’ knowledge of literacy acquisition.

We also began a self-review, using our student assessment results. We decided to critique our teaching programmes to ask ourselves what we were teaching and why. We wanted to know why we were using particular resources and programmes and how effective they were.

Please read the full PDF article here.

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