Sally Avern's Professional Journey

Retrieved from: http://www.katoa.net.nz/kaupapa-maori What relevance does the topic of interest have to your Māori students? Have you taken into account the ways your students think, understand, interact and interpret the topic of interest? How would you know? The intervention principles in the context of my research.  Tino Rangatiratanga I believe students need to have meaningful control over what they are doing.  Cultural well-being amongst my students will come in the form of choice of collaboration. Traditional ideals of learning and achievement of Kaupapa Maori are that the achievements of the group are shared by all. If they choose to collaborate in their work, they will all benefit. It cannot be meaningful control though if I just throw them all in the deep end to begin with. I must be able to slowly help them be comfortable with the idea of having everone in the class critique theri work. This will be a challenge. Taonga tuku iho  My stu...

To be culturally responsive is to really get to know Tataiako and Ka Hikitia. I want to know how I can meet the Cultural Competenices and so, in order to meet them, I need to really be able to think about them in the classroom and on my feet. To do this, I need to get stuck into them. I had a quick revision today, brought on by trying to work out which ones applied to my PD that I am doing. The link to Tataiako was very helful, although it will be good when it is updated to align with the new STP. Here is my shortened version of what Tataiako means that I am going to refer to when I am writing my reflections.  I will keep referring to the other doc to as I go to make sure I am getting familiar with it. 

As part of our Learning as Inquiry topic Sustainability,  The students looked into what action they could take as part of our community to help be more sustainable. Their 2 main ideas were, plant some trees and help by growing more plants/ food. The students wrote to our principal and asked for permission to go on a field trip and also if she could help with some materials. Luckily, I heard there was a planting day coming up on the weekend. With this is mind, I contacted Sustainable Coastlines and arranged the for them to go and plant some trees in Drury, close to a new subdivision where the water-ways will suffer.  We made it on a Friday though so that they could attend in school time. This was such a successful day. We planted in excess of 200 trees and the kids were all so happy and into it. It was a really encouraging thing to see, especially after a few morning comments of how 'dumb' this was going to be. :) Matrix was keen to go back and do more on t...