Manurewa Intermediate School is a decile 1 multicultural school in South Auckland with approximately 800 students, including 50% Pasifika and 37% Māori.
This is our story of how we developed a Graduate Profile and then shaped an approach to enabling students and teachers to collaborate in making progress towards it visible, assessing that progress, and sharing it with parents, whānau, board and community.
This is just one way – there is no innovation without trial and error. We like to innovate. There are holes and things we already know we will change, things we neglected, room for improvement and things we should have acknowledged and included right at the start.
There is a robust dialogue emerging around "knowledge versus skills". Ours is a curriculum approach based on capabilities rather than knowledge acquisition.
There are three threads, as below.
The explicit teaching means that every staff member does have to be clear about what the eight big ideas in the Graduate Profile actually look like in practice, to be able to make these visible to the students, and to be able to give feedback to students about the extent to which the students are exhibiting them. They need to be able to engineer the learning environment to motivate students to build capability in these concepts.
Goal setting is a collaborative exercise in which student, teacher and family discuss which aspect of each concept will be right for the student to shape over the next period of time, how they will know they are making progress, and how they might use their family and the school for support for that learning.
Measurable outcomes is fundamental to sound pedagogy. Progress needs to be recognisable, self-identified and evidence based. So many of the goals are idiosyncratic to each student. How progress will be recognized is therefore discussed and agreed as each goal is set. We use a nominal 10-point scale to go alongside the goals to provide a soft reference point for how confident the student is about how well they are progressing. The rating is provided as an outcome of a collaborative, three way conference.
A challenge for the staff is now to be able to better describe the actual dispositional and behavioural qualities that we are looking for in all students by the end of year 8 – what does it look like on a day to day basis that you are an effective communicator, or respectful, or curious? We are getting there, but still have a little way to go.
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Process for Graduate Profile goal setting and tracking
We use an eight step plan, as below, which is pretty self-explanatory. Students are integral to every step of the way.
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Measurable outcomes
This rating scale is a simple form, and that is its strength. It provides a basis for personal reflection by each student and collaborative discussions with their teachers, parents and peers. How they then circle where they are at becomes a marker of where they thought they were at a point in time. It allows them to set a direction for further growth and to discover much more about each quality. They can then rate themselves lower on the next reflection time because ‘they now know what they didn’t know’ on the last reflection and realise they have much more to learn. They see this as a good thing, as do their parents and their teachers. Progress is described in terms of how much more they know about these qualities, as well as how much more they exhibit them.
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