Week 26: PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT

School Culture 

Mangere Central is 158 years old. The first school was founded in 1859 when Mangere was a small farming community. It was one of the first schools in the community and served as one of the first schools in Mangere. The school as had a major part in the community since then and has connections with the local iwi. Fast forward to 2017 and much has changed from the one room school to a school that is vibrant and colourful. The school is very proud of its history within the community and we always look to ways of being a part of it.

Step 1: Identify the socioeconomic status of the community, organisational culture and professional environments.

Mangere Central School consists mainly of students who come from maori or Pacific background. The social economical status of our community is working class to families living in poverty. This is shown through many areas of our school where we struggle to get students to come to school with the basic needs. We receive Kids Can, fruit in schools and Eat My Lunch for our students daily. Money is a huge factor for our community with those who have it have the bear minimum and those that don't sometimes have to make the decision on weather they can afford to drive their children to school or to drive to work. The school hugely subsidises many of our school costs, like stationary, camp and any trips. 

There is another side to poverty that as a school we are always giving towards our families and with that we feel that at times they always expect that the school will cover for them. An example of this is school camp we recently went on. The cost of the camp was $245 per student but because we knew this would be way to much for our families to pay we took it down to $60 per student and $80 for siblings. Families were told the year before they could start paying this off but a week out from camp and we had $5000 owing from the students. This meant that teachers needed to call and follow up with parents and make sure they paid. After camp we still have $400 owning because parents chose not to pay, but we still took their child to camp. We still give the children stationary and make sure that they have what they need at school. But we feel the families know we will do this so they don't put in the effort to try or help out in any way. 

Below are statistics of Mangere-Otahuhu Local Board Area and Mangere-Otahuhu Local Board Area of Maori. 

Total personal income for people aged 15 years and over
Mangere-Otahuhu Local Board Area and New Zealand
2013 Census
Total personal income for Māori aged 15 years and over Mangere-Otahuhu Local Board Area and New Zealand 2013 Census

Although our school has a low socioeconomic status the culture is heavily influenced by the community and their backgrounds. The background maori and Pacific background is highly influenced on whanau being the most important thing. Stoll (1998), talks about how a school culture is influenced by the students and their social class background. We have created our school programme around the needs of our community and seek feedback and support from them. As a school we are always looking for ways to help our students and community. This links with Stoll (1998), Panel 2 of improving schools. 

Professional Environment

I think for our school our biggest downfall would be our professional environment in a range of ways. We have teachers who find it hard to fit into our school culture because they either do not understand where their students are coming from (culturally) and come to our school with assumptions already built about these students. We also have a 'sink or swim' kind of mentality at our school where, if you are not coping or not keeping up that's your fault and you need to find a way to sort that out. This comes from the top management and since our recent change we have had some improvements around this, where teachers feel they are overworked and not valued.  Clearly within our role of a teacher in a low socioeconomic community we become more then just teachers, we are mum and dad, social worker, doctor, chef and miracle maker. Being a low socioeconomic brings with it so many challenges for us as teachers and we need the support from our colleges to support our students. 

References

Stoll. (1998). School Culture. School Improvement Network’s Bulletin 9. Institute of Education, University of London. Retrieved from http://www.educationalleaders.govt.nz/Culture/Understanding-school-cultures/School-Culture

QuickStats about a place. (2017). Stats.govt.nz. Retrieved 30 May 2017, from http://www.stats.govt.nz/Census/2013-census/profile-and-summary-reports/quickstats-about-a-place.aspx?request_value=13625&tabname=Income 

Week 25: COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE

Identify your community of practice. 

When identifying my community of practice it took me a while to look at what this was and who it involved. I was confused as to what this actually meant and had to look at a few readings to help me understand what this was/is. Wenger (2000), talks about how communities have excited for as along as the human race has been around. And that a community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who share the same goal or passion and they are always seeking ways in making this goal better by working together regularly. 

For myself, I found that my main CoP was my team that I work with on a daily basis. I felt that my team was the main CoP as we have an Innovative Learning Environment (ILE) setup. Within this we have split our classes up and have mixed ability Literacy and numeracy groups. Because of the  mixed ability groupings we have split our 5 classes across the 5 teachers and we all have different students from different classes. We regularly have informal discussions about how students and the programme is going and every week 3 and 8 of the term we get together to have a meeting about how our 'target' students are going. Because of the constant informal discussions with the team we are always refining our practice and making it better for our students. Within my team I am classed as an experienced teacher who has been with the team for 5 years now and have been in the ILE environment for 4 years. Although I have been in the ILE for 4 years each year has been different based on the students we get each year and the teachers we have in the team as well. 

The second CoP I have just become a part of it our school leadership team. I have just become a team leader and have been learning how to be in a different role within the school. Because my role as a team leader is very new I feel that I have so much to learn and understand to help support my team, especially because this role means more than just a teacher. Becoming a team leader has made me look into my own teaching and leading abilities and I constantly reflect with my peer mentor about how I am doing and how I can do something better or differently. Something I am finding hard is being able to talk with someone about a matter, I find confronting people, especially about work matter hard and can sometimes come off abrupt or rude, but I am working on this and being able to find better ways with others.  With the team leaders we meet every Tuesday morning to discuss matters relating to the school and then meet every week 3, 6 and 9, to work on how we can become better leaders for our team and the school. Just this week we looked at refining our school message and how this can be transparent for teachers, students and our whanau. We looked at how we could make the The New Zealand Curriculum / Kia ora - NZ Curriculum Online. (2017), explains that these key competencies help students become activity members of society. 

 Shared domain 

Within my team CoP our shared domain is the teaching and learning of our students. We work together to create our planning with online interaction (shared planning), all our students are 'ours' and don't belong to one teacher. We aim to provide students with the skills to develop life long learning. 

With in my team leader CoP our shared domain is the support and learning of not only or students but teachers as well. Being able to support and grow our teachers links to the support and growth of our students. As team leaders we set up peer mentors for ourselves and others with teachers across the school teams, for example senior teachers and intermediate teachers have been paired together. 

References:

The New Zealand Curriculum / Kia ora - NZ Curriculum Online. (2017). Nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz. Retrieved 30 May 2017, from http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/The-New-Zealand-Curriculum#collapsible7

Wenger, E.(2000). Communities of practice and social learning systems. Organization,7(2), 225-246.