Reflection of the Year

The year has been primarily about teaming and learning design. Both have been a huge success for Pounamu.

The team has been through many forced changes of mentors and every time the team have coped professionally and personally, by looking after each other. Tetli's growth in teaming has been down to her determination to succeed and through the support of the team. The loss of Rachel for a term was a blow, but we fortunate to have Amy who slotted in superbly and brought her own positive energy and honesty to Pounamu. Towards the end of the year was particularly difficult with Roanna finding life at school difficult, but again the team supported personally and professionally to ensure that she settled sooner rather than later.

The creation of the BPP's on teaming and powerful learning were integral to our success. By the end of term 2 there was a genuine trust within the team which was down to myself deliberately building relationships with team members and also strategically organising mentors to work together. Although Rachel's constant coaching for me around understanding and respecting the personal side of the team was essential. Even though I have improved and I am not convinced I would be able to bring her natural ability to a new team by myself. We complimented each other really well and we respected each other's strengths and weaknesses.

We are very proud of our 'Priorities.' For lots of reasons. It took a clear vision to keep us on track, we knew if we could create this - it would be a game changer for us. The entire term 2 was building the capacities of the students and then activating all the different types of priorities so they could complete them independently. Once we were clear with the why and finally had the how sorted, the creation of the clipboard and organiser was the final piece of the puzzle. By eventually jumping in and setting up priorities from the beginning opened a climate of possibilities. We have never looked back and are still tweaking it to perfection.

Joint Accountability (as a team)

Leadership Video - Jan Robertson

Jan talks about our everyday practice as leaders helps coach others and how we develop in other people the responsibility of taking ownership of their own development. She also talks about encouraging others to take accountability and develop creative thinkers through our own leadership practice. She discusses the idea of partnership as entering a relationship where we can step into the space of someone else and model that we are willing to have our beliefs challenged by hearing other people's perspectives. Show that we are willing to learn from the people we work with. 

Jan talks about the most important part of leadership is relationship and building strong relationships around us. She discuss the importance of modelling the mindset of avoiding the status quo and asking the question of what's possible here. 

After watching the video it made me realise that coaching is not confined to the scheduled coaching sessions where we discuss our goals and whether we achieved them or not. It is the everyday modelling around taking accountability of our kaizen. This idea kind of explained why we have been so successful this year.  Even though each mentor had their own kaizen focus, they were part of our team kaizen and we all took responsibility of them all! The everyday discussions around environment, engagement and student voice ensured that mentors were permanently thinking about them and asked to talk about them in one way or another - they couldn't escape them!

As a leader/coach, if it wasn't raised by a team member (it usually was!), I would model challenging our design to ensure we were using the environment effectively or can we improve our engagement in other areas of our learning. I/we were not putting up with the status quo. What epitomised this approach was our discussion for term 4, we could have easily seen the year out as we have achieved so much, but no... Tetli spoke about engaging students with mini-mentors, Roanna spoke about designing a quiet space with the students and Rachel was still wanting to collect more voice to ensure our priorities were supporting the students from their perspective. Fantastic.