Leading to Learn

School Marketing Mary-Angela Tombs School-wide performance is key to educational marketing. However the reputation of a school is also reliant on the conversations that take place at the local supermarket and in the school carpark. Such conversations have a huge impact on the community perception of a school and, in turn, the number of parents who choose to send their children to the school. It is up to each school to monitor the feeling within the school community, as well as the wider community that the school serves. In this way, schools can target their learning programmes to meet the needs of their community. They can also identify what makes their school unique and market the school to attract potential enrolments, based on this identification.   A smaller number of students in a school can be easier to manage and more personal than a larger number, however there are many negative impacts of roll drop such as the need for the funding that accompanies each enrolled student

  Building Culturally Responsive Practice In a 21 st Century School Mary-Angela Tombs Introduction A new school year is about to begin and a teacher of year three and four students at one school prepares to face her new class of students. As with previous years, the teacher notes the increasing cultural diversity of the students on her class list. In New Zealand, teachers are required to develop teaching and learning programmes that allow every child to achieve success in relation to The New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education (MOE), 2007) The challenge is: How does this twenty-first century teacher develop successful teaching and learning programmes that are culturally responsive when she operates within a Eurocentric hegemony? The challenge faced by this teacher is not dissimilar to that encountered by many primary school teachers in New Zealand.   This essay investigates how current knowledge related to cultural responsiveness can inform and improve edu

Literature related to Cultural Responsive Pedagogies Mary-Angela Tombs The purpose of this assignment is to explore a selection of literature regarding culturally responsive pedagogies. The four papers selected for review and comparison, focus on classroom management from a variety of perspectives. Weinstein, Tomlinson-Clarke and Curran (2004) write from an American perspective in their article, Toward a Conception of Culturally Responsive Classroom Management. They suggest crucial factors for ensuring that management of a classroom is culturally responsive. Villegas and Lucas (2002) also write from the point of view of American educationalists. In their article, Preparing Culturally Responsive Teachers: Rethinking the Curriculum, they make a curriculum proposal that emphasises the importance of infusing multicultural lessons into teacher training to ensure cultural responsiveness in schools. Glynn and Berryman (2005) investigate the response to behaviour management in the conte

Effective Teacher Appraisal Mary-Angela Tombs, 2012   In New Zealand’s self-managing schools, boards of trustees are required by the Ministry of Education (MOE) to be good employers, implement policies that promote high levels of staff performance and ensure that each staff member participates in a performance management process (MOE, 2012a, 2012b). Boards of trustees, through school principals, are accountable to their parent community for the practice of their teachers, ensuring that teaching practices are effective and responsive to student needs and community priorities (MOE, 2010; New Zealand Teachers Council, 2009, 2012). The Education Review Office, which is responsible for evaluating and reporting on school performance to the Ministry of Education and the school’s community, recommends that teacher appraisal can inform learning. But ERO reports that only 50% of primary school principals make a link between professional learning and appraisal. ERO notes the effect