Victoria University and Karori Normal School

Yesterday we spent the day at Victoria University and had the opportunity to talk with lecturers and advisors (advisors are paid by the Ministry of Education to go to schools to help with different areas of the curriculum, in this case, literacy. They are welcomed by schools and are not seen in any way as being people sent in to "fix" things or judge them). We looked at a couple of literacy courses, and I was quite impressed at the amount of material they are able to cover in a relatively short time. There was some disappointment expressed that Victoria had cut the number of hours required fori literacy education, and we heard that repeated in the school. It seems that the lack of literacy education in this university is being definitely noticed in the schools (the decision to cut literacy classes was not made by the lecturers in the College of Education; it was made at a much higher level). It made me feel fortunate that we in Morehead still have a good hunk of literacy in our curriculum However, when looking at the course outlines from Victoria, I wonder if perhaps we could do more? Karori Normal school is a full primary, decile 10 school. It has about 710 students right now, but this will climb to about 780 by the end of the year. There are a lot of younger staff at this school which is both a plus and a minus. It's a plus because they can be moulded into what the school wants, but it's also a minus because they've missed a lot of the PDs (the ones held in previous years) and therefore the school must spend more money getting all the staff trained in the same areas. We went into a couple of classes, and yet again I was impressed at the way New Zealand children are able to articulate their learning. They know why they are doing things, what they need to work on, how they need to work, and seem to genuinely "own" their learning. I have asked a lot of children what they are doing and why, and not once have I heard "I don't know" or "Because the teacher told us" or "Because it's on the test". This has probably been perhaps the thing that has impressed me the most. After leaving Karori Normal, we visited Te Papa, the museum of New Zealand. I could have spent a long time there because there is so much to see. Afterwards, we drove around the waterfront, visited a sheepskin warehouse, had dinner, and returned the rental car. We're now in the airport awaiting our flight to Auckland.