Activity 14: Evaluations of the Cultural Responsiveness in Practice

Create a blog post where you evaluate how you or your school addresses cultural responsiveness in practice in at least 3 of the following areas: vision, mission, and core values; policies; goals; communication methods; decision-making; planning and assessment; learning activities; school-wide activities; resources.

What do we do at May Road School? 

How do we address cultural responsiveness in our practice?

In a multicultural school like mine, it's hard to not be culturally responsive. Being culturally responsive is integrated into the way we teach and embedded into the culture of the school.

Vision, Mission, and Core Values

The school’s mission statement (or vision) of 

“Value yourself, value your learning and respect all others” 

implies that everyone should be valued and respected and that learning is the utmost priority. We aim to ensure that students experience success through high quality teaching and learning opportunities.

Our strategic plan outlines the ways in which our school demonstrates cultural responsiveness.

Figure 1: May Road School's Strategic Plan for 2015 -2017

You only need to look at the second page to see that we embed cultural diversity and a Maori dimension into our philosophy and pedagogy.

We also have separate Maori and Bilingual Plans to ensure that Maori and Pasifika students have high levels of success. However, that is not to say that we don’t value and respect other minor cultural groups.

 Figure 2: May Road School's Pasifika Education Plan for 2015-2017

Figure 3: May Road School's Maori Education Plan for 2015-2016

Goals

Our school has 2 primary goals that we focus on in order to achieve our vision:

Goal One: All students and staff strive to reach their potential

This means that ALL our students, regardless of their culture are engaged and achieve their potential. Our teaching and learning programmes are personalised and cater for the needs of our students.

Goal Two: All students and staff aware that they can make a positive difference to the world

This means that all our students are actively involved in all learning opportunities. Our teaching and learning programmes foster student agency, so that students know that they can use their skills and talents to create change.

Communication Methods

Communicating with our community is very important. When families are engaged and interested in their child’s education, the child is more likely to have academic success.

So how we do we communicate with parents and whanau?

• social media - school website and facebook page
• blogs - every class has a blog, and every child in year 4-6 has their own individual blog, there is also a community engagement blog that has been recently created
• weekly school newsletter is printed and sent home (an e-copy is also available on the school website)
• class newsletters are sent home once a term
• notices (for example: for camp) are translated into other languages
• orally - teachers have informal chats when they see whanau, a teacher/deputy principal also does gate duty in the morning and after school to greet students/ catch up with parents
• student conferences are held 3 times a year (beginning, middle and end). Maori students also meet with the deputy principal. If families cannot attend, teachers arrange an alternative time or phone/email home
• we have staff who can speak different languages so that they can also interpret when the need is required, and there are other parents in the school community who also support us doing this
• assemblies are held every week, and parents are invited along to attend these
• host workshops to help support parents with their children’s learning, eg: home-school partnership for reading, digital workshop, PB4L workshop, maths workshop...

Figure 4: May Road School Ideal Student in many different languages

We also aim to communicate and involve family and whanau with decision making within the school, so that they feel part of the community and can have ownership. For example, when generating our PB4L signs, we asked for input from our community for words in their language.

Learning Activities

There are so many ways that we incorporate cultural responsiveness into our teaching pedagogy. 

Some of the key learning activities that we use to do this are:

• tuakana-teina: where students can work alongside an older/more experienced buddy. This type of learning is an integral part of traditional Maori society. Last year we buddied up with a class and worked together on flax weaving and origami making. The previous year students were split up right across the school and worked together to build erupting volcanoes.
• parents/ experts are invited in to share their knowledge with students - eg: parents come into assist with the end of year cultural celebrations.
• integration of curriculum areas - for example when we studied space last year, we incorporated Maori myths & legends into our reading and writing, but also created videos, artwork and music to share our learning. This allowed students to have ownership and choice about what and how they presented their learning.
• celebrating different language weeks - drawing upon the “experts” (students) in our classes to speak about their culture and teach us words/ phrases/ songs in their language. We also host a Race Relations Day each year where students are encouraged to dress up in their cultural clothes, bring traditional cultural food and share their culture with others. We also have 2 Samoan bilingual units who regularly share their learning and culture with the rest of the school.

Figure 5: Celebrating Race Relations Day

• specific feedback and feedforward (both oral and written) is given regularly.
• learning activities are differentiated for the needs and levels of our students.
• evidence of students learning is used to inform planning and teaching, as well as students being able to identify their next learning steps.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of what we actually do to ensure that we are culturally responsive to our students and their families. At the end of the day, we all want to see our students succeed and being culturally responsive is just one part of how our school community achieves this.