Muritai Inquiry Visit

We visited Muritai School on Thursday 14th of August as part of the ICWC Cluster. Andrew Bird the principal started by giving an overview of the Muritai Infrastructure and an outline of the culture of the school. He highlighted the staff turnover, especially at the senior management level.

There had been a focus on staff teams looking at ict integration. "The 'Action Learning' process was used as a model of investigation and they were "continually developing systems to ensure the children can achieve to a high level". Andrew also acknowledge the influence that 'Quality the Richmond way' by Cheryl Doig had had on Muritai.

Some other areas of interest/difference

• specialist teachers for music (guitar, drums, performance)
• music lessons in school time
• Assembly was like a mini production - Emphasis on "high quality" performance

A panel of children from each syndicate shared how they saw the inquiry process. One of the most poignant comments came from 'Jed', when Mark asked, "What would you think if you were able to choose any topic to research/study". Jed said, he thought it would be quite over whelming. A very honest comment!!

Muritai's Inquiry was based on Blooms and the children carried out 4 inquiry's a year. We liked the expectation that the senior students were given specific criteria around output/action within an inquiry.

Overall it was a really postive visit...It's always good to see a different Inquiry model and to check out a different school environment.

Inquiry Meeting Term 3

The CSS Inquiry committee met to set up a time line for the development of the scaffold system.



The following details were decided.



Term 3

Scaffold System - Mark and Jan will met and put together a skeleton framework for the scaffold system.



Term 4

Information Literacy Skills - Staff will review how info literacy's are taught. What is working for us now. The connection with several other curriculum areas suggests we may develop a document that stands alone. Jan has found a resource that is very specific in how to teach these skills.

Thinking Toolbox Review - All staff to attend review meeting. Clarify what we are using and what all staff think should be in the CSS Thinking Toolbox.

Assessment Rubric - Review when and where we share the criteria to create common understanding around our assessment rubric.



2009

Staff will attend a teacher only day early in 2009 to decide which thinking maps will be used at CSS.

Key Competencies - A focus for early 2009 will also be the key competencies. Some discussion will be had towards the end of 2008. We need to think about ways to implement the key competencies.

There was also some discussion on assessing the key competencies. All agreed there needs to be a shared understanding within the staff of what the competencies 'look like'. This will ensure we have a common language to share with the children within each of the year levels.

Our Lady Lourdes Visit

The focus on Inquiry Learning provided the Coley St team with an insight into another schools rationale.  We noted difference and similarities.  A major difference was the whole focus on one theme.  This appeared to provide the teachers with control over what the children would be learning.  We wondered, with the structure of lessons and learning set at the beginning of an Inquiry, whether there was an opportunity for the children to explore their own question as they came up.

We were really interested in 

• ibook
  
• Mobile internet access on camp
  
• mp3 player as voice recorder for podcasting
• the water feature in courtyard

Again a valuable opportunity to see another inquiry process in action.