Collaboration in practice

I am following up on David & Donna's challenge to use what we have learned about collaboration from the readings and posts in our work in schools. This school is a small urban secondary school with 90% of the staff new to the school this year. There is a combined class of 18 Year 9 & 10 students. This class can be quite volatile - they are like lambs for some teachers and like tigers for others (reference to William Blake's Songs of Innocence & Experience) http://www.rc.umd.edu/sites/default/RCOldSite/www/rchs/reader/tygerlamb.html

The teachers and I had co-constructed a list of priority students from this class based on the testing done at the beginning of the year and teacher comments. When doing the observations, I used these students for student voice whenever possible. This was fed back to the teachers during the practice analysis conversations and some were managing to adapt their practice to accomodate these students but it still wasn't enough.
So in the last round of PLD and observations/PACs, I gathered from the teachers positive comments of "what worked well for each individual student". These included:

• He needs positive reinforcement, praise after the fact. He is very needy and lacks concentration. He is timid with writing but can verbally tell you.
• Ignore off-task behaviour. He is a visual learner. When put at a table by the door so that he couldn’t see the others he made lots of progress.
• Having come from a Kura she may need extra catch up with her academic English. She will help others  in RE and by telling another student. This could be helping her own learning 
• She is so easy and smart. She enjoys extra stimulation, extra criteria and private consultation 
• Can be hard to work with at times and will go off task on You tube. Differentiate the learning for him. His career pathway is in Health Sciences and is aiming to study medicine. He may need a mentor to get him on track. He is a 14 yr old teenager and some of his behaviour can be due to this immaturity   
•  He needs to be clear on tasks set. Does not like the task to be altered. Lots of structure in the lesson is what he likes.  
• You can get him to do the work by sitting next to him and talking to him. You can't push him or he will fight back. 
• He works best sitting at the front of the class ie move him to the front. If he sits at the back he does nothing.
• She is looking forward to the challenge of doing some NCEA standards this year. 
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• We shared these in a staff meeting discussion focussing on each student in turn. The teachers found this process very valuable.
• This process of getting all the teachers together around the same target students was one that was used successfully on the Te Kotahitanga project, although it is a far more complex process in a large secondary school bringing 6 teachers together around the same students ie from 9 Year 9 classes. tekotahitanga.tki.org.nz/content/download/3174/20197/file/Module+5.pdf  co-construction groups 

• Me mahitahi tātou, mo te oranga o te katoa - We must all work as one for the well-being of all.