On the 25th of January 2016 we , as a staff had a Professional Learning conversation around Wellbeing within our school.
This was a great opportunity to discuss and evaluate how well we feel the wellbeing of students and staff is addressed at Whenuapai school.
We began by evaluating 2016, and what we felt went well and needed to be sustained. The staff also identified any strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to the school.
This exercise allowed us to really look deeply into the professional development that we receive and how we would like to deal with this. Some of the main trends across the staff that came from this exercise were:
- we have a positive and collaborative staff which is a strength of the school
- Professional development needs to be focused on maths.
- We need more time to consolidate our professional learning ie. Time to practice and use these new skills.
- The expectations of the community and the effect that these can have on the school is seen as a weakness.
We then evaluated the level of wellbeing for our students within the school. We did this by looking at the ERO wellbeing indicators in schools. In groups we looked at these indicators and highlighted green for done in the school, orange for sometimes done and red (pink) for not done.
This allowed us to recognise the extent of our wellbeing within the school. We were able to identify areas that we still need to work on. Some of theses being:
- the development of high quality PE sessions
- Explicit teaching of well being techniques ie. Meditations
- Wellbeing of staff and adult members of the school community.
The last part of our day was to re-evaluate our school values. We are doing this y moving from the 6 kinds of best to the National Curriculum Values. We are then going to integrate this with the school houses as displayed in our logo. These houses are :
- the house of knowledge
- The house of striving
- The house of growing
- The house of relationships
When discussing this the staff came to the agreement that this values system needs to be explicitly taught to all students within the school. In the year ⅞ team this looks like:
- students researching the school logo
- Students discussing and building understanding of what the values mean to them
- Students understanding how the values and the school houses fit together to form the school values system.
- Students understand how to uphold and model the school value system to the rest of the school.
