He ako whakaaweawe, he ako whakatere | Effective Teaching, Accelerated Learning

Monday the 14th of September 2020, was a momentus day for the education community in Ōtaki. We held a Teacher Only Day with over 100 teachers from across the community coming together to learn - a first for our community. Teachers from Ōtaki College, Ōtaki School, Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Te Rito, Te Kura-ā-Iwi o Whakatupuranga Rua Mano, Te Horo School and  Waitohu School.

There were two key goals for the day, the first was to support our educators in professional learning around the kaupapa of He ako whakaaweawe, he ako whakatere | Effective Teaching, Accelerated Learning. The second was to create a feeling of connectedness across our schools. Though we might be close geographically there are many of our educators who don't know each other. 

This second goal was a real challenge for us, our first scheduled date for this TOD was during the first lockdown when we were in Covid Level 4 and then this date when we ended up being in Level 2 with gatherings limited to 100 people we needed to think outside the box in terms of how we could still make this a successful day. 

One of the key things we did was to create a Google Site where all information, links and anything you'd need to know was held in one place. Everyone had the access to the content, regardless of where they were physically sitting. 

We also utilised Google Currents (formally Google +) to try and create a space for our teachers to connect with one another, to share key ideas that spoke to them, or highlights from the sessions. Before we started this TOD, we had 35 members of our Currents Community, we now have 67 and approximately 20 people used this as a place to share during the day. We also incentivised people joining and commenting by including several coffee draws throughout the day.  As always with a group of teachers these went down well! 

I hope that this Currents Community is able to be used beyond the TOD as a way for teachers to remain connected across the community. 

There was a lot of really positive feedback from our teachers and tumuaki after the day. It was a great way to see that we can connect and have professional learning opportunities even if we couldn't meet face to face on the day.