Shanghai-29 N0vember 2008

Colonial architecture
Old China town section of Shanghai


Telecommunication Tower-Shanghai

YC Chong
View from Hyatt Hotel

Shanghai City


This morning I met YC Chang who has a daughter at Mount Maunganui College. YC very generously offered to show me around Shanghai, and he had hired a car and driver for the day to take us around.

We went into the city and went to the top of the Hyatt Hotel, about 55 floors where we could look across at the highest building in Shanghai and to get a great panorama of the city. YC then took me down to the bund, the waterfront where we could look across at the new part of the city on the east side of the river, and tp walk alongside many of the old original colonial era buildings that were taken over by the communist government. We then went into the old China part of town,very traditional Chinese architecture, and had lunch in a restaurant there. lovely old part of town with lakes and rivers full of fish.

later I asked YC to drop me in a shopping area, with the thought of doing a bit of present buying. However, after having been hassled so often to buy watches, bags and anything else that one might want, plus many propositions from young women, I decided I had had enough of crowds and caught a taxi back to the hotel

It is difficult to even describe the shear volume of people in this city-there is around 60 million in the province, and 19 million in the city. The density of huge high rise apartments, motorways etc is mind boggeling. It is hard to imagine how so many people can live in any kind of balanced lifestyle here-it definitely fees like a place where people work to live only. It is not a place I would willingly visit-I cannot see the point of subjecting ones self to being in a place with so many people-it is interesting, but not pleasant.

Shanghai 28 November

Suzhou Gardens




Today we were taken by the staff of Changzheng high School to the garden city of Suzhou, said to be the Venice of China as it has waterways-that I am afraid to say where the similarity ends. They also have saying that there is a paradise in heaven and Suzhou is paradise on earth-a little poetic licence taken here as well, though the two gardens we saw were very interesting and traditional. We did have a ride on a canel boat, which was interesting to observe the life along the water ways.

Later this evening I went to have dinner with Sarah and John Good (Alastair and paddy's daughter) and their beautiful new baby, Lola Grace. Paddy was also there, so it was great to catch up with her -strange meeting old friends in Shanghai.

Shanghai 27 November

Lunch Banquet
Foreign teachers at agreement signing
Sui Lei in staff cafe
Staff at Changzheng High School-Nini in the middle is International Relations Manager
Changzheng High School
Agreement signing
Signing agreement with Principal Li
Signing agreement

Flowers for visitors
School band welcoming visitors
School Band
Eric demonstrating how to teach English
Terry at No 2 School
Red carpet treatment

Today we were first bussed to No 2 School Shanghai where we were literally given the red carpet treatment and given gifts. We then watched a young Chinese student give a demonstration lesson before about 100 teachers and visitors from overseas.

After this we went to Changzheng High School to sign an agreement. this was almost like the signing of the treaty of Versaille-very formal. flags adorned the table of each country as we signed agreement, and then waited while a hundred photos were taken.

Leter in the day we each had ameeting with Principal Li Saobao and his senior management team to discuss how we could for lasting relationships in more detail.

Later still, another banquet!

Shanghai 26 November-Seminar Day

Sui Lei pleased seminar is finished
Seminar Room-Radisson Hotel

Area Chairperson-very important person
Chairperson, Putou Education District

After the official welcome this morning by the Chairperson of the Putou Education Department, and the Chairperson of the District and a number of other speeches, the seminars got under way.

I was pleased that I was second, after a Chinese Principal who spoke about the importance of work sheets!..I was then able to relax and enjoy the rest of the day listening to others. I confused poor Sui Lei by having a Maori introduction, but she took it all in good heart and we had a bit of fun. My presentation seemed to have gone down well and many were interested in getting a copy of the resource from me at the end. For some reason many of the questions at the end were directed to me as well, and I tried where I could to involve the others by asking them what their thoughts were on the question asked.

That night, in the bus and off to another banquet, and "much" more gambays...we were also given a very heavy present from the district related to the world trade fair that is happening in Shanghai in 2010-not sure what it is as it is beautifully wrapped so have left it until I get home.

Shangahai-25 November 2008

Seminar Venue

Sui Lei-translator

Arrived in Shanghai from NZ at 7.00am this morning. Being very tired and not really awake, I let some character arrange a taxi from the airport for me rather than go directly to taxi stand. As soon as I hopped in and he went about a kilometre down the road before he started to do a deal on the tariff, I knew I was in trouble. So I agreed on his figure, hard to do much else when they have your bag in the back, and thought i would sort it out when I got to the hotel. But w then had a big argument as he wanted me to pay up front, and would not pay until we got to the hotel. I have to say it was bit scary for a while, but he finally continued and dropped me an hour later at the hotel. Funny how the final fee suddenly dropped a hundred RMT when we got to the hotel and he saw me write down his driver's number. Bluff must have worked, but an anxious start to Shanghai.

I booked in, had a shower and then had a visit from my tranlator, a young teacher from the Changzheng High School, who wanted to go over my speech with me and she was obviously appointed to look after me for the next few days. Sui Lei turned out to be a very friendly, helpful person with a good sense of humour.

She took me to lunch in the hotel with the deputy director of the Putou Education Department, and then we had a rehearsal at 4.00pm. At 5.30pm all of the guests and presenters were taken for what was to be the first of many large banquets, held in large private rooms in even larger restaurants. Quite a shock when there were piles of cigarette packets for the guests on eac table.

It also seemed that there is some kind of challenege for our host to have as many "gambays" =cheers and down your glass of wine in one go, at each of these banquets as well. These seem to happen whenever there is a lull in the conversation, and averaged at least 15 per meal!

Arrived back in my room around 10.30pm, exhausted.

Building Progress

Good progress has been made on the new classrooms and now the old A Block is being ripped of its ancient planks to be revitalised into a modern teaching facility.

New Government- Opportunity or?

Bay News November 26, 2008.


With the hype of the recent elections dying behind us, we now look to the future under a new Minister of Education, Ann Tolley. Over the last nine years there have been large gains made in education in a reasonably stable period that has been free of industrial strife. This period has allowed teachers in all sectors to focus on lifting the educational achievement of students, especially in literacy and numeracy. There has been a tremendous amount of good will amongst teachers to spend a considerable amount of their time on professional development, improving teaching strategies, making better use of assessment data to inform good teaching practice, and to raise the achievement of Maori students.

The new National Government has signalled that they wish to continue this work in lifting educational achievement, keeping students meaningfully in education until eighteen and supporting the lifting of Maori achievement. The concern we have as educators is that so often in our experience, politicians come enthusiastically into a new portfolio with generalised goals that have been created in their own imaginations or with misconceptions about what is actually being done in education. It is not as if teachers, young and old, have been sitting on their hands waiting for some politician to tell them how to do the job, or that they have a good idea that teachers have not yet thought of.

There is immeasurable good will in teachers to work with governments to lift New Zealand to the top of international league tables. In the International PISA tests, New Zealand ranks in the top five countries in literacy, numeracy and science. We recognise that there is a long tail of underachievement amongst our students, and we have been working hard to rectify this. A new Minister of Education has a great opportunity to work alongside teachers to achieve a shared outcome. What will be disastrous will be for a new minister to come in and tell teachers how to do their job or to revisit thorny old issues such as bulk funding and the abolition of zoning. We need to maintain the focus on lifting standards and providing teachers with the resources to do this.

There are six issues I would like the new Minister of Education to address:
o Increase the funding for our special needs students, with adequate resourcing for staff and facilities
o Support the introduction of the new Curriculum with more time for teachers to prepare units of work that embrace all of the essential elements of the document
o Better resource schools to meet the day to day operation and maintenance requirements
o Fund staffing to reduce class sizes
o The bulk of New Zealand schools were built in the 60s and 70s. There needs to be a huge injection of funds to modernise old buildings to create flexible learning spaces and to allow students to access the necessary technology for 21st century learning.
o There needs to be a consideration given to a range of alternatives for students to continue their education up to 17-18 years. Planning within communities to address their needs is more important than trying to find standard solutions for the whole country.



The new minister has signalled worthy goals for education in her first three years as Minister of Education. It is our hope that she will take time to identify the excellent programmes that are being taught in schools and give schools the resourcing needed to build on these. Any imposed strategy will not work and be doomed to fail just as the “No Child Left Behind” programme in the America has failed for George Bush.

21st Century Skills-what are they?

Bay News October 15 2008.


Teaching 21st century Skills –What does it look like in practice?

Call it a quiet revolution. As teachers continue to lift the academic performance of their students at all levels, they are also finding common ground in a movement to bring “21st century skills” to the classroom, supported by a New National Curriculum and a movement to more effective testing systems.

What are 21st century skills, who’s pushing them and what does 21st century teaching look like in practice?

Although definitions vary, most lists of 21st century skills include the need to make the best use of rapidly changing technologies; the so-called ‘soft skills’ that computers can’t provide, like creativity; and those vital to working and living in an increasingly complex, rapidly changing global society.

The new New Zealand Curriculum refers to the five key competencies of: thinking; using language, symbols and text; managing self; relating to others and participating and contributing.

Some of these skills have always been important but are now taking on another meaning – like collaboration. Now you have to be able to collaborate across the globe with someone you might never meet. Some are unique to the 21st century. It’s only relatively recently, for example, that you could get two million hits on an [Internet] search and filter down to five that you want.

While educators in the past have often been wary of education reforms spearheaded by big business, the outsourcing of menial jobs and the need for workers to communicate in a global economy have brought about an unprecedented convergent of interests. When hiring new employees, business leaders are looking for the same high-order thinking skills as those considered necessary for university study. The traditional curriculum is information-based and the emphasis is to acquire information first and foremost, and secondarily acquire skills. It is back to front.

Teaching 21st century skills does not necessarily mean using a lot of technology; it is simply a matter of approaching an assignment differently to allow students to demonstrate skills like teamwork, collaboration and self-directed learning. Equally important, teachers have to be able to coach students on how to advance to the next level of particular skill. Students have to be taught how to be critical thinkers, to be flexible and to be able to think about their learning.

Everyday, our students open up the Internet and devour huge chunks of unsolicited information. The Internet is the most powerful, convenient, and potentially manipulative medium ever invented. It can give you any version of the truth you are looking for. The ability to think critically about Web information is an essential skill for students, and this means we must teach students to understand how search engines work and how information is controlled. Most importantly, it is again about teaching students to be critical thinkers and being able to evaluate information against an ethical base or set of values that are important to them.

Having designed a new curriculum, it must be accompanied with new assessment methods that assess critical thinking or problem solving skills. Unless the assessments adopt a better way of measuring 21st century skills, it will be difficult to bring about a shift in classroom priorities.

The change to teaching 21st century skills injects new life and meaning into a student’s learning. On being more actively engaged in their learning and in understanding the relevance of what they are doing, stops students from being bored and encourages them to engage more willingly in their learning.

Buildings Under Way

New Building Design-Art, Music and Commmerce


work under way
senior common room moved for building programme

It has been pleasing to come back to school and see the building programme get under way again. Using roll growth money, BOT reserve funds and the remains of our 5YA funding, we have started building a new music, art and commerce block. T some extent we have been lucky that the building industry is not as buoyant as it was and we received very good tender prices. Possibly a month on and they could be even better, but we have started and are now looking forward to the job being completed by the start of the year.

Boys better at maths, girls better at reading

Bay News- October 1 2008

Boys better at mathematics, girls better at reading

The recent publication of the analysis of the 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), shows that things have not really changed much over the years, girls are better than boys at reading, but they cannot match up to their male peers in maths.

The analysis carried out by the Ministry of Education demonstrated that girls outperformed boys at reading by 37 points, achieving a mean score of 539 compared to 502. But boys did better at maths, gaining a mean score that was 11 points higher than girls. These patterns were repeated for both maths and reading across the Organization for economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries in the tests, which were taken by 15 year olds.

And the difference continues right through adulthood, with women outperforming men on adult literacy tests, but men doing better in numeracy.

In the recent Adult Literacy and Life (ALL) survey, women achieved a higher score in literacy than men, but the mean numeracy score was better for males than females. However, the gap was much narrower amongst adults than teenagers.

When the PISA results were first released, they showed that New Zealand students scored highly overall in mathematics, reading and science, recording the fifth-highest score of participating countries in reading, the seventh-highest in science and 11th highest in mathematics.

Interestingly, the two countries that are investing a huge amount of energy in regular national testing programmes, England and the United States, continue to rank 25 and 36 respectively in the maths tests, and England 19th in the Literacy scores (no score for USA).

The focus in New Zealand education on formative assessment (using a range of types of tests throughout units of work to inform where a student lacks understanding), rather than summative testing (end point tests which show how much a student knows), is showing that the obsession with state run tests at many stages in a child’s education, does not bear fruit. Teachers need to be able to use small, regular and variable assessments to inform them of a student’s learning and their own teaching practice.

While in New Zealand we still have a way to go to bring all of our students to an acceptable level of literacy and numeracy, we are on the right track and doing a lot better than many of the countries we have had long associations with. We must be wary that we never have testing by edict ( a government’s bright idea to lift achievement by setting arbitrary standards), but maintain the focus on formative assessment that continually informs a student’s understanding of literacy and numeracy. We are on the right path, we just need to keep up the momentum and fine-tune the process as we go.

NCEA in the spotlight again

for Bay News 17 September 2008.


The New Zealand Post Primary Teachers’ Association has raised two very important issues for its annual conference in October, the first a review of “Tomorrow’s Schools”, and the second, a review of the number of credits required for Level I NCEA and the quality of the mathematics standards available at that level.

New Zealand has developed a unique system of managing its schools though each school having its own board of governors. It allows for more direct community involvement in the school and greater autonomy for the way the school can be run through the partnership of the Principal and the Board of Trustees.

My recent experience of attending a Principals’ Leadership programme at Harvard University, gave me the opportunity to meet with many American principals, and listen to and compare different ways of governing schools. On the whole, the American principals were envious of the autonomy that we have in our schools to manage our budgets and decide within the school how finances should be prioritised, appoint principals, senior staff and teachers, and set our own school goals and develop our curriculum from national guidelines. In other words, we can run our schools to meet the needs of our students.

In America, the district superintendent has a huge say in how the school will spend its budget, set its goals and meet its targets, appoints the principals and staff. And sets the consequences if targets are not met. The high stakes “No Child Left Behind” policy of George Bush puts added pressure on the schools to meet targets set by the district, rather than the school. The principals (administrators) seem removed from looking at the individual achievement of students and personalised learning, and are more focussed on lifting the results of their “building” (school).

While there are schools that struggle to find the right mix for their boards of trustees, on the whole, we have a system that works. It allows schools to focus on the needs of its students first, and look towards national targets as a means to measure progress as those needs are met. My own experience with the boards of trustees that I have worked with at Mount Maunganui College has been extremely positive. They have been committed to supporting the principal and staff in providing the best education we can for our students.

The second focus is worth a close look. We need to consider what is the right balance for students in terms of national examination requirements, and what is a reasonable national standard for our students in numeracy and literacy. On September 5, the Los Angeles Times reported that only 48% of the high schools met the federal standard, and then only because the state used easier standards for high schools than for elementary and middle schools so targets could be reached. Setting targets in the NCLB (No Child left Behind) programme become meaningless when standards are dropped simply to meet targets.

NCEA must be protected from similar criticism and standards must be such that they meet the needs of students moving into employment that requires good skills in numeracy and literacy. With three years of national examinations, we are out of step with the rest of the world. Perhaps it is time to consider whether or not we should drop level 1 NCEA and raise the bar on leaving qualifications for our students. We must also ensure that the required credit balance is right for each NCEA level so we continue to personalise learning and not see education as a means of simply achieving targets as has happened in America and England. If this happens, teachers will teach to examinations and critical thinking and the acquisition of relevant knowledge and skills will of less importance.

1-4 September-Back to Life in NZ

Dallas was off to work this morning and I set about sorting out things at home. Six weeks of mail arrived about 8.30am and it took me the rest of the morning sorting through it all. Later I spent time cleaning up around the section and starting to sort out what needs to be done if the weather eventually clears up.

Tuesday and it was time to visit the bank, hairdresser, supermarket and Farmlands.

Wednesday morning I met with the college's project manager to catch up on progress with new building projects at the college. Having sorted all of this I visited the college and caught up with Tina, Russell, Ady and Reece-great to catch up with them all and see that they are all in good spirit after such a wet and stormy winter. Tina has done a great job running the college while I have been away and she has had to manage a number of tricky situations (standard fare for the job, but none the less can be stressful and need careful management). I will catch p with them again next Tuesday when I go in for a meeting with the builders and architect building the new block.

Meanwhile, with a little spare time, dallas is able to come home each night to culinary delights lovingly prepared!

Disappointing news Thursday morning when Tina rang to tell me that the senior management offices had been broken into and that they all had their laptops stolen. This is really frustrating and upsetting for them, as true to form, most of their work was stored on their laptop and not on the school's network. We discussed a few other issues that Tina is dealing with, but she has got it all sorted.

The pleasures of this time away from school-had lunch in town today with Dallas and Maria. How come there are so many other people doing the same thing? They should be working. Nick's favoured comment when driving in KL during the middle of the day and dealing with the traffic jams, "why aren't all of these people at work? I am sure that they all follow me from their offices onto the motorways and city roads". Paranoia creeping in.

This afternoon I started to put together my sabbatical report and update my blog and have a read of Maurie's. I now have this amazing screen saver of holiday pics from France, Italy , Singapore and Malaysia.

Sunday 31 August

Dylan

Caitlin

Daniel

Eden

Finlay

Darcy

Liam

Marcel

What a great feeling it is to be home again and to finally catch up with our children grandchildren, friends and colleagues. This has been a trip of a lifetime-everything about it has been great-the educational learning, the time with Dallas, the companionship of Maurie and Leigh, meeting friends and family overseas, all of the great places w have visited, and all with the accompaniment of great, warm(hot) weather.

Cameron met us at the airport with Finlay this morning as we decided to take advantage of them being in Auckland to take our overweight bags back to Tauranga since Air NZ is getting fussy about a few kilos overweight on its local flights. Funny how it is neve a problem until you get home.

It was great to see Cameron and Finlay at the airport-Finlay has grown noticeably while I have been away and he is now walking quite confidently.

Said goodbye to Leigh and Maurie. I was going to say that it is amazing how Maurie and I have been travelling together for almost 7 weeks and got on so well, but not amazing, just a really good person to travel with-witty, thoughtful and a lot of fun. He has been a great traveling companion, and together with leigh, Dallas and i have had a great time in their company traveling to Liverpool, Italy and Singapore.

We caught the plane back to Tauranga. I was quickly brought back to the reality of school by the air stewardess who recognized me and told me how much she and her daughter had enjoyed the open evening at school and her daughter was looking forward to starting next year.

Fran picked us up from the Tauranga airport, again lovely to see another of the family. We had to detour back to her place to pick up the house keys she had forgotten and the finally back home to be met by Simon and Rana and the boys. Man, it is so good to see them all again-we have such a neat family.

Time to catch up and listen to the boys and their stories-Liam enjoying school, Marcel's soccer team is cleaning up the opposition, Darcy is still being Darcy, Simon is about to move into the new offices his firm has just completed, Fran enjoying being next year's Year 9 dean and enrolling for 09 going well, Dylan's looking for a job, Kate's dropped Music for Japanese etc etc...love to hear all this stuff.

Later in the afternoon Maria, Cameron, Eden and Finlay arrived from Auckland and stayed on for dinner. Then, an early night.