Powerful Partnerships in Action

Our school has the phrase “powerful partnerships” in it’s mission statement and to me this is the aspect of our school that sets us apart as quite different from other Secondary Schools in our area.

We (aim/try to/do) live out these powerful partnerships in:

• Learning Hubs – partnerships between Hub coach, student and parents to support each student to pursue their vision of academic and personal excellence
• Learning Modules – partnerships between learning areas to enable connected, more powerful learning for our students (as detailed in yesterday’s post)
• Big Projects – partnerships between our students and local community to pursue PBL opportunities

Today was a great example of Powerful Partnerships. We held our 2nd annual Waitangi Celebration Day. Students from Hobsonville Point Secondary School combined with Hobsonville Point Primary School to learn together for the day in 90 minute workshops run by teachers, students or community members. Truly living out the Partnership Principle of the Treaty of Waitangi.

As our 2nd year of this, there were changes from last year – a lot more students and lessons learned from last year influenced the layout of the day. Next year will be different again after internal reviews over the next week or so and to reflect once again the growing rolls of both schools.

The highlights of the workshops today for me were seeing Primary and Secondary students working together:

In the evening Parents and whanau are invited in to come and celebrate Waitangi Day with us all. Student work is exhibited, music performed, sports played, food consumed and many great informal discussions occur between members of the Schools’ community. The highlight of the evening was seeing a student performing with Pete joined after a couple of songs by her Dad. Soon, the 3 were playing a great set while having never played together before:

 

To me, this day exemplifies the Treaty Principle of Partnership. Yet a tweet I received this evening reminded me that this day is very out of the ordinary for how NZ schools act towards Waitangi Day:

Wouldn’t it be great of all of NZ schools, and let’s face it, all of NZ society could attempt to live out Partnership at this time of year. Particularly this year, in the 175th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. Perhaps, this is the aim for the 200th anniversary? That the Powerful Partnerships at Hobsonville Point today are the common occurrence and not the exception to the rule.

See more of today on #HPSWaitangi on twitter.