It was an honour to host this event earlier this week on behalf of Te Kahui Ako o Omaio ki Tahunanui, or the Stoke-Tahunanui Community of Learning.

The purpose of the hui was for schools to share practices around the Relationships-based Learning professional development programme provided by Cognition Education.  Teachers arrived from as far away as Auckland and Taranaki to represent seven learning clusters from around the country.

The event began formally as students from across our Kahui Ako came together to welcome our visitors with a pōwhiri. “Like always, the students and staff from our primary, intermediate and college were just amazing. It was thrilling to see this piece of history in the making!” across-school Stoke-Tahunanui Kahui Ako team member Gaye Bloomfield said. 

Nayland College's Cushla Laufkotter and across-school teachers Gaye Bloomfield, Isaac Taylor, Vanya George and Sarah Thomas opened the hui by sharing their successes around the Relationships-based Learning programme that runs in our schools. 

The next two days saw teachers from 11 schools collaborate about their biggest learnings from 2018. These learnings centred around how rewarding it was to be part of a coaching programme that gives our teachers great tools to get better.

The RbL (as it is known) coaching model helps teachers to improve in their teaching and focus on how to make the greatest impact for learning by creating a family-type atmosphere in the classroom. 

 Nayland College is at the end of its second year in the RbL programme and specialist Classroom Teacher Cushla Laufkotter presented the Nayland College story to her peers. “It was really rewarding, but challenging too, as I had to work out how to share all the exciting details of our adventure. Focusing on great student-teacher learning relationships sits at the heart of the programme and it is also why I became a teacher! So this opportunity to lead the programme here at Nayland College is really rewarding for me,” Cushla Laufkotter reflected. 

The schools that attended were Homai School, Weymouth School, Patea Area School, Hawera High School, St Joseph's Primary Hawera, Takapuna Grammar School, Waitakere College, St Dominic's Catholic College, Totara Grove School, Upper Moutere School and Ngatimoti School.