Week 6 Term 3 - Literacy Project: Kaiako Literacy Action Plan - Analyzing department responses + next steps (August 26 - September 2)

As teacher, I understand and believe that it is important to reflect. Reflect on your practice, to scrutinize what you need to work but to also see and appreciate what is working. In the last 4 years, I have prioritized reflecting through my blog as way to think about these areas for improvement but more importantly to capture what is working for me - as a teacher, HOD and dean. The Literacy Project is something that I am involved in and since it came together (late 2021) I have documented the journey as a way to monitor and reflect on how it is going and what the next steps are. 

I spoke about the recent steps that the Literacy Project has made since it's debut presentation in Term 2 (see Alby Blog's Entry - 15/08/22). One of the steps that I reflected on in this post was the department Kaiako literacy action plan - specifically how each learning area completed the action plan. The Literacy Project working team, since then, have taken the time to analyze the responses. We had four key points that we wanted to cover in our analysis which are: 

• What is the current literacy practice?
• What are the opportunities they see in literacy (what are they hopes with literacy in their learning area?)
• What are the next steps?
• What support do they need?

In analyzing the department's responses, we wanted to ensure that we were sensitive to what they are currently doing with literacy and what they hope to do next. Sensitive in that we affirm what they are doing and empower them to make those next steps, supporting them along the way. As I have said before, the literacy project is a journey to shift the mindset of our Kaiako - so that they all drive effective literacy teaching and learning in their respective subject areas. 

The Literacy Project working team (Mr Milford, Dr Jannie, myself and Julie Luxton) have met to discuss our analysis over three sessions. We have thoroughly enjoyed going through each department's response and appreciate the time and thought that each Kaiako has put into their Literacy Action Plan. We wanted to ensure that we captured what the department's identified as the literacy 'opportunity' that they would like to implement - that would have a big impact. Given the short time frame that we have to work with the different learning areas, we decided to choose one or two opportunities and provided some support around this. 

Literacy Project 2022: Kaiako Literacy Action Plan Analysis + Next Steps

We have documented our analysis and have summarized this into a presentation. The presentation outlines the opportunities as identified by the subject area, next steps and the support we will offer to help them move forward. We hope to meet with the departments in the next week or so, to share our findings and to check in. An important part of this discussion is to make sure that we are on the same page. We hope to share what have found and we hope that from here that the departments can agree with this and we can design what our next steps will be together. We are also prepared in that if we are not on the same page, we will have to review our findings and then reconvene with the department. It has been an awesome experience so far. I look forward in reflecting and documenting each step of the Literacy Project.