Sharing our passion

Dharug Cluster

Finding 6.1: Approach
Have a focused, structured approach to what you want to achieve as a team and establish common core values and attitudes."

Throughout our Make It Count journey we, the Make It Count team, realised that we ourselves have learned so much as educators that we wanted to share this with our whole school. We felt that, in education there are so many new programs being introduced all the time and we didn’t want what we had learned to be seen as the newest in a line of programs that would be popular for a short time and then forgotten about.

We wanted the staff to share our passion for the education of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and realise that what we had be doing on the journey was not training in some sort of program but continuously challenging ourselves and evolving our pedagogy.

As a team we decided that for real change to occur, all staff needed to be on board but they needed also to question their own ways of doing things and shape their own pedagogies to benefit their students. Teachers needed to have ownerships of this for it to really make a difference.

To begin, we held one staff development session which focused on explaining the Make It Count project and what our team had achieved so far. This prompted a lot of discussion amongst colleagues and caused the staff to ask many thought provoking questions.

Following the initial presentation to staff we asked teachers to start focusing on one aspect of their Mathematics planning and work to make it culturally responsive. We followed this up with an additional presentation later in the year. All staff got together in stage groups to share how they had already begun to look at involving Aboriginal culture in Mathematics. They then spent time planning how they could, as a stage group, incorporate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture into their planning for Term 4. Teachers had many ideas for culturally responsive maths planning as well as links to Literacy planning.

We hope to monitor the success of this planning at the end of the term.

Some questions to prompt discussions with your colleagues:

1. How does your school respond to “the newest in a line of programs”? How can/do these programs impact the development of your mathematics pedagogy?
2. Do teachers in your school get the chance to share what they are passionate about in teaching and learning? What might be the relevance “sharing out passion” when establishing common core values and attitudes?
3. What other interesting or important aspects are in this Significant Episode?