Teamwork makes the dream work!

By Mel Noble, Deputy Principal Year 0-3

How can you run successful inquiry learning within a team environment? Every term, we have a shared inquiry statement, along with a question we are answering. This statement and question must be accessible across every year level, whānau and classroom. The idea is launched at a full staff meeting, to get the entire school on the same page. Staff are invited to question, provide input, tweak ideas, reflect on barriers. We have a set of inquiry learning progressions and a long term plan that guides the whole school. Each whānau group approaches this in a way that suits them. In the junior school (Year 0-3) we meet regularly to korero - we reflect on where we are, share ideas of what is working in our classes and the direction the learning is taking. We share success and pitfalls. We use this information to plan inquiry for the next week or two. We work very collaboratively, you can walk into any class and see consistency across them.

In 2015, our school mantra was ‘Ngā ākoranga o mua, hei ārahi ā mua. Learning from the past to lead the future’. In term 3 we looked at inequality using the statement and question: ‘It's worth the fight for equal rights! How can we act to make a dramatic impact?’ Each team chose an aspect of inequality to focus on, it culminated in an end of term production to showcase our learning across the team and school. The junior school chose to explore women’s rights using Kate Shepard and NZ being the first country to allow women to vote. We did our learning separately in our classes, then once we got to the part of the term where we started to create our performance - we gave students a choice of which part of our production they wanted to work on - we had props specialists, costume designers, actors, script writers, background makers, videographers. Each teacher took a different group and focused on that aspect of the production. We had to meet regularly to ensure we were all on the same page, aiming for the same outcome at the same time. We did our planning together, we talked through barriers, we celebrated successes. It worked really well and once we got to the rehearsals, everything came together - the costumes, props, backgrounds, actors, script all flowed seamlessly as though they had been produced in the same room.