Unpacking the Tapasa document

Turu 1 is about teachers knowing and understanding that specific identities, languages and cultures of Pacific learners underpins the way they think and learn.

• Knowing and understanding of the impact it has for students
• Understanding the culture and the relevance
• Building on relationships and knowing the learners, families 
• Giving families opportunities to be involved and share their cultures to us and others. 
• For teachers to teach effectively they need to know their past and background and embracing their journey 
• Teachers being able to understand students learning processes

In practice, the teacher needs to utilise Pacific constructs to engage and collaborate in different and meaningful ways that empower Pacific learners, parents, families and communities -

• The teacher and school need to have knowledge of Pacific constructs - tikanga / ways of doing things 
• Teachers need to use resources, tools, references and conceptual models to enhance the relationships, learning, etc
• Teachers need to incorporate words, songs, activities, and artifacts in the classroom (engagement and prior knowledge)

Turu 2 alludes to the reciprocal notion of collaborative power sharing and relationships -

• The teacher and parents have a positively respectful relationship and work together - understanding and valuing what teachers are doing at school and what parents are doing at home - to empower the child to be their best, most-authentic selves

It is the schools and teachers responsibility to ensure the value of all ethnicities and that the system isn’t favouring and privileging a ‘majority’ culture and knowledge

Teachers should be reflective in their practice to ensure there is balance and power sharing is enhanced (collaborative relationships)

Turu 3 - Effective Pacific pedagogies

• Engaging in ongoing professional development and seeking support to further develop Pacific confidence(research and evidence based)
• Embedding Pacific world views,conceptual models, learning styles etc into teaching pedagogy /planning/ teaching styles
• Understanding Pacific learners as a whole adapting teaching approaches to cater to the learning needs 
• Working with Pacific learners /parents /communities seeking ideas and feedback- Making connections 

In my practice after looking into this document I feel like a goal for me in 2020 would be to make sure I give time to build on my students cultures and where they come from. Getting them to share where they are from and building those relationships at the start of the year. Giving students the opportunity to tell me who they are and what is important to them. This would set them up at the start of the year and let them know that I do care and that I am interested in what they have to say.

Te Reo Maori

This week in class we have read the story of Maui and the Battle of the Mountains. The story is about the mountains of New Zealand and how they ended up in the places they are now.
We looked at the story as a class and discussed the Maori words and meanings in the story.

We then created some art work about the mountains which we think are pretty great. Enjoy our Art as we keep learning about the Maori myths and Legends in New Zealand.

Inquiry Story Hui

Today I shared my inquiry with staff around the story hui format. I had 5 minutes to talk through my inquiry. What I have been doing at the beginning, middle and end? Giving myself a chance to reflect back on what learning is happening and what is working and not working in my inquiry.

As a reflection I got some student voice from my inquiry and asked these three questions here is some of the responses.

• What do you learn when you come and work with me? Am more focused during small group time, learn more things that we didn’t know, 
• Why is it helpful when you work with the teacher? Because sometimes you teach us something we haven’t learnt, would be hard without the teacher, teach skills and goals so we get better at our goals, we tell you the goals we need to work on and we focus on that during group time, 
• What do you think about working with me in a small group? Fantastic, do more, not distracted, so we can learn and sometimes we can learn something that we don’t know, bigger words we can learn, practise skills we didn’t know before, if we have a small group we won’t be bored it’s fun. 

I reflected back and think that I need to set up more models and vocabulary set up on the walls so that students can look back on this when they need to. 

Collaboration

What is collaboration?
Quick activity on collaboration. We had to work together with our buddy teacher to create a short presentation on what collaboration is.
Here is our presentation.

To be collaborate both of us needed to work together to achieve the same goal. We both had equal roles in this activity and were constantly discussing what was happening next. This was a fun activity as it reinforced what we needed to do to be collaborative. Our staff is beginning to work more collaboratively together and I find that I need to make the time to work with my buddy class more so that we can align teaching and learning. This is important so that we are both working around the same areas and also not planning the same thing when we can work together or share resources more.

Collaborative inquiries

As a staff we sat together and I lead a bus stop discussion around our student survey data. We decided that there were 3/4 areas that we wanted to work around and discussed what are the ways we can support our students to be more confident when talking, sharing and questioning around their learning. Here are our ideas.
We then chose one area each that we would like to focus on to work around with our class. I decided that one area I would like to focus on in my teaching is encouraging students to check in more with their learning goals and be able to reflectively talk about their learning. I need to give them more opportunities to be reflective and use the buddies in their class to grow confidence before they talk to me the teacher, their parents or others.