Assessment: Kei Tua o Te Pae

By taking a sociocultural approach, your team will develop and strengthen their ability to work as a team, creating learning stories and assessments that have meaning for children and their families. You will also enhance your team’s skills in creating profiles that build clear pictures of children as competent learners.

Effective self-review ensures that your team remains in a state of positive change. We will explore how you work together as a team and work from a strengths model to find your team’s skills, knowledge and aspirations.

Your community is your major asset, so it’s important to find the most effective way to communicate with them. Once this is established we can gather meaningful input from your children and their families. Through this we will identify their ideas interests and values so that your early childhood setting can be more inclusive, responsive and collaborative.

As a leader your major responsibility is to identify and optimise your team’s skills, strengths and knowledge. This topic helps you to achieve effective and positive leadership, giving you a responsive and dynamic team.

Through this busy and fun workshop we will establish strategies for developing relevant goals for your setting using shared visions and aspirations. This will support you to build a team who will be motivated dynamic and share the responsibility for achieving successful outcomes.

As part of this interactive workshop we will look at strategies for giving and receiving effective feedback. This is part of becoming an effective and positive leader and is useful with all levels of your staff or with student teachers. In particular, it is important to be able to give meaningful feedback in preparation for and during appraisals.

When planning to improve your practice, it is useful to take a systematic approach to finding out what is currently happening. You are then able to take informed steps to make changes. Through action research, teams or individual teachers can strengthen specific areas of their practice with a measured, evaluative and reflective process. 

We all are likely to make assumptions about what is happening in our working environment or with our own practice.  Action research is a great resource for teachers to have in their professional tool kit. As it primarily focuses on the researcher it is non-threatening to others and minimises ethical issues. In other words – it’s all about YOU!

As our nation becomes increasingly globalised, it is important that teachers understand how to be inclusive of the values and beliefs of those who represent cultures and ethnicities other than their own. However this can sometimes be challenging and maybe a bit confusing when you are unfamiliar with the nature of people’s life experience and worldviews.

This workshop can help you to look inwards within yourself at the same time as looking outwards, channelling your self-concept and strengthening your awareness of others. In this way you will learn how to become open to different perspectives and gain greater understandings of children and their families.

We will share a open, social and interesting time as we think about how other people might view our teaching and programme.  You will find ideas to implement in your own setting.

Each child has their own way of making sense of their world as they build their working theories and knowledge. In this workshop we will have fun exploring ways that children learn about themselves as thinkers and learners. We will also explore metacognition and by linking this to schema, we will find ways to help children to recognise their own cognitive skills and strengths.

Sound hard? It’s actually really logical and absolutely fascinating and exciting. The best part is learning to look at how children are processing their ideas. Once you start to do this you can begin to support them in relevant and meaningful ways. We’ll have fun tying out so of their ideas, too!