Kia ora koutou. Talofa. Kia Orana. Malo e lelei. Bula. Fakaalofa atu. Namaste. Kumusta. Haere mai ki Te Kura Huruhuru Ao o Horomaka. Warm greetings to the Hornby High School community.

Mā te huruhuru, ka rere te manu

Feathers enable the bird to fly

When I’m sitting in my dentist’s chair, amongst many things going through my mind is the expectation that he is ‘up with the play’, that he is using the latest knowledge, techniques and processes that are available. As someone of a certain age, I’d be very worried if he was using techniques and equipment from the late 1960s or 70s when I was much younger. (I hasten to add that my dentist definitely does use the latest techniques… allowing me to sit a little easier in that chair).

This is how it should be in education too. Our tamariki, our rangatahi, deserve no less, and as whānau you would (like me in the dentist’s chair) expect no less. Education is one of those areas in which, over the years, more attention has often been paid to myth, to ‘common sense’, than to evidence. Not surprisingly, common sense can be as rare in education as in other walks of life when talking about the best ways to cause learning.

There is a great example from the 1990s, and that is the ‘fad’ for ‘learning styles’. This is the idea that we are all visual, auditory or kinaesthetic learners, and that we ought to learn according to our learning style preference. I have to confess that as a classroom teacher I raced down that ‘rabbit hole’, only to find that the evidence didn’t support the idea at all. It was the typical ‘rabbit hole deadend’. What’s more, teachers and parents applied the idea in a way that wasn’t the intention of its advocates at the time. Professor Steve Wheeler from Plymouth University in the United Kingdom wrote an excellent piece debunking the learning styles myth, titled ‘A convenient Untruth’ and you can read it here.

Today, we are far better informed, with the advantage of the groundbreaking work of Professor John Hattie (Auckland University at the time, and now Melbourne University). He and a large team of other academics published a work called ‘Visible Learning’, a meta study looking at what actually does improve learning. The term ‘meta study’ just means that they took the data from many other studies and put it together so that they were talking about millions of pieces of data rather than just a few hundred or a few thousand. This makes their findings much stronger.

They continue to develop and refine this work today, and so our understandings of what causes learning are improving all the time. Here is a link to a summary of what his team currently believes. Near the top of the list is the term ‘collective teacher efficacy’, which means teachers getting together and working together for the benefit of students. We shouldn’t forget that this may well include getting students together and working together too.

This was an important part of our thinking as we sat down and designed the new spaces that we are now using, and those to be built over the next year. As I wrote this, a particular whakataukī came to mind:

Tangata ako ana i te kāenga,

Te tūranga ki te marae, tau ana

A person nurtured in the community contributes strongly to society.

Perhaps we might know this concept better from these words:

It takes a village to raise a child.

Our new spaces allow us to work more collaboratively, to better nurture and support our rangatahi. This is the way of the future, across the economy and the world of work, and across our communities.

It is vitally important for our own work. As our own school whakatauki says:

Mā te huruhuru, ka rere te manu

Feathers enable the bird to fly

Or perhaps:

Be prepared, have the right tools to achieve.

That is our purpose. As whānau we need you with us. Come in to your kura, come and feel comfortable in the space. It is YOUR space.

Finally, we all know that we have an amazing community of rangatahi, an amazingly talented community whose achievements speak very highly of their abilities. It is with huge pride and pleasure that I acknowledge the achievements of our senior girls’ basketball team, winning the Division 1 Friday night competition last week.

Ka mau te wehi!

Well done girls, we are all very proud of you.

Please make sure you follow us on Facebook for the latest and most up to date news https://www.facebook.com/hornbyhighschool/ , and on our new website www.hornby.school.nz . You can also follow my thinking on education at Hornby High School, and more generally, on my blog at https://whakataukihewakaekenoa.blogspot.co.nz/

And remember that we are all only a phone call away if you have any concerns.

Nga mihi nui

Robin Sutton