Interview with Sarah Ruawai
Interview with Sarah Ruawai, teacher and Ross Kennedy, Principal, College Street Normal School
Tuesday 9 May 2000
Interview conducted and written by Don McAlpine
School Profile
College Street Normal School is a contributing school established in 1893 with a current grading roll of 551 and a staff of 24 teachers including a Normal School Special Duties position. The school is situated in the Palmerston North suburb of Hokowhitu and is in close proximity to the city's central business district. Although a decile 10 school, the full range of socioeconomic groupings is represented in the community from which the children are drawn.
College Street Normal School is a contributing school established in 1893 with a current grading roll of 551 and a staff of 24 teachers including a Normal School Special Duties position. The school is situated in the Palmerston North suburb of Hokowhitu and is in close proximity to the city's central business district. Although a decile 10 school, the full range of socioeconomic groupings is represented in the community from which the children are drawn.
Interview
Ross Kennedy and Sarah Ruawai share their experiences and the process they worked through for developing programmes for gifted and talented students at College Street Normal.
| Interviewer | How did it all start? |
| Ross | Seems like eons ago now, but I suppose when I first came here, what, five and a half years ago now, one of the significant things about the school that struck me was the disproportionately high number of very able children in the school compared to other schools that I had taught in. It became apparent, early on, that perhaps the school wasn't challenging these very able children as much as it could. PAT results and other tests supported my observations. We had as many as 40-45 percent of our children achieving the 80th percentile for the PAT tests. With the senior staff we brainstormed strategies for meeting the needs of these children more effectively. The outcome of it all was what we called our Discovery Programme. It was given a sort of measured approval by the board of the day. |
| Ross | As time went by it became increasingly successful and popular. |
| Interviewer | Can you tell me something about that programme? |
| Ross | Well what we did was bring in resource people from outside the school. First we tried to identify, in a very clumsy way in hindsight, the giftedness of these children, the areas that they were gifted in and then we tried to match them up with people out in the community. We paid these people to come in. We hired them as tutors. We had a whole range of things covering a range of activities. Not just activities, there was extension maths and extension science, public speaking and many others. Often they lasted for the best part of a week. The children were actually withdrawn from their classes to work with the tutors in groups of about 12 or 15 maximum. The children actually loved it. They really, really enjoyed it, but, as I said, as it became more successful, it became more controversial, particularly with the parents. Increasingly we were asked "what are the selection criteria?","this child has actually been involved three or four times, my child has been involved once, but my child's PAT test results were...". And so it became quite contentious, in fact so contentious that by the end of the year we decided that we had almost had enough of it. But we had learned a great deal from the experience. Whilst it was successful, there were obviously a lot of issues that we needed to attend to. And it was really basically at that point that we cast around and found a student who was doing masterate studies at Massey University. She came in and worked with the whole staff and helped us develop a policy and a new programme. |
| Interviewer | You adopted a more school-wide approach from that point on, did you, involving more staff? |
| Ross | We did. In the beginning, the Discovery Programme was basically focused on just the year 5 and 6 classes. |
| Sarah | And a lot of children could have benefited from it rather than the gifted. |
| Interviewer | So now you have a more comprehensive approach, a more school-wide approach. What sort of issues have you raised in the school policy? |
| Sarah | The criteria for identifying students with special abilities. |
| Ross | Communication with parents. We found in the past that we hadn't been particularly good at that either. Often children were being withdrawn from classes under the Discovery Programme and parents weren't aware, or they became aware belatedly. And, as a result, there were concerns raised, "Isn't my child missing out on parts of the curriculum that perhaps they shouldn't be missing out on?" and all those sorts of questions. And so we felt that we needed to communicate more effectively and to really make an effort to help parents to feel more comfortable with what we were trying to do. |
| Interviewer | Right, so communication and education of the parents so that they were informed was important. Have you got anything on identification in your policy? |
| Ross | We have, yes. |
| Sarah | Basically teacher identification, the standardised tests (for example PAT: sometimes a battery of tests), the teacher, the parent and sometimes peers. |
| Interviewer | So it's quite a variety of things that you use? |
| Sarah | Yes. |
| Interviewer | OK. Anything else from the school policy? |
| Ross | Yes, the programmes are based on individual needs. Both for acceleration and enrichment. |
| Interviewer | What's your view on those two approaches? |
| Sarah | Well, I sort of try to do a bit of both. I use the development band certificate for maths particularly. To enrich and then to accelerate them through whatever strand they are doing in their class. |
| Interviewer | Do you find that acceleration works better in some subjects than in others? |
| Sarah | Definitely maths. |
| Interviewer | But maths is a more structured curriculum. |
| Sarah | Yes. Building blocks. |
| Ross | Sequential. |
| Sarah | OK, well we are basically using the enrichment triad model. We have one child in particular working at a range of levels, up to level 7 in some things across the curriculum. So he is on an individual programme. |
| Interviewer | When you say an individual programme, is it like an individual contract or an IEP? |
| Sarah | Yes, IEP. IEP, focused on Renzulli's top level (Type III activities) in the enrichment triad. |
| Interviewer | That's good. If we say it is a school-wide approach that you use, how many teachers are using the enrichment triad model? |
| Sarah | At this stage, just me really. But they have identified the children, so they have given me the children. |
| Interviewer | Do you go around the different classes and assist the teachers with identification and programmes? |
| Sarah | Yes, what I do is I get together with the team leaders. We sit down and look carefully at pre-test results. |
| Interviewer | So there are really several teachers within the school that are using the enrichment traid model. And that gives continuity, doesn't it? And that is another advantage, rather than piecemeal. If you have a school-wide approach teachers are working together. |
| Ross | At the end of each term we evaluate what's happened in relation to meeting the needs of our special abilities children and the effectiveness of the programme. And we make some decisions as a team about what changes need to be made and which children are going to be discontinued. |
| Interviewer | Well it is good to see that evaluation is on-going and built in like that. I seem to recollect that, at this school, students with special needs and special abilities are well coordinated. Is that true? |
| Sarah | Yes. |
| Interviewer | I think that that is an important point. Not tugging against each other. |
| Ross | Well, to clarify that, Sarah doesn't have a whole-class responsibility this year. And so her main responsibilities are in these very areas (Special Needs and Special Abilities and ESOL). She coordinates these three programmes with the team leaders. |
| Interviewer | Do you like that? |
| Sarah | I love it. |
| Ross | To just take that a little bit further, in the special needs and special abilities areas, we have become very conscious of the need to take full advantage of ICT, to be knowledgeable about the software that might be helpful in instructing these children. The challenge for Sarah, and for the part time teachers who work with her, is to identify the useful software packages, to dissect them and then to actually match them up with the needs of special abilities children and special needs children. We are really very conscious of the need for these programmes to make a difference. There has to be added value for our children within special needs and special abilities. We keep records that identify where the children are at the beginning of the term, the objectives that we have set and the learning activities that will be used. At the end of the term, we ask "How did we do? How did we get on? What was the added value?". If there is not added value, we ask "Why not? What are we doing that we could be doing better? What haven't we tried that might make an impact here?". And so on....I think it's true also to say that much of what we are doing now, particularly with children with special abilities, is challenging these children to think at a high level. Everything that we do is focused on asking those higher-level questions to really stimulate these kids, to really get them thinking. So while we may talk about acceleration programmes or extension programmes, they are not in the scheme of things all that important! By that I mean that the teachers questioning skills are of greatest importance. It's only by teachers asking the "right" questions that we are going to illicit and develop higher levels of thinking in our children. This is what we are really trying to achieve at College Street Normal School. |
| Sarah | In the groups that I work in, I suppose there are differentiated classrooms as well, where they are working at their own level, and I just step in and help them where they need help. We are also doing Otago Maths Challenges and most of them are coming out with at least three out of five right. |
| Interviewer | Now, how about productions? Do these students perform? Do they perform for parents and the community? |
| Sarah | This year, because of the literacy focus, we've got writers together and we are using the whole year to actually write and perform an operetta. They write the script and then this term they are doing the writing of the music, so they are actually doing it all. And then next term, they will be the directors and so they will take on those roles, and then in the fourth term, we'll present it. |
| Interviewer | That's good. It is a continuous, long-term project, involving original work and a product. So you've talked about the programmes and your evaluation which is built into it. You've also talked about setting clear objectives and then assessing the objectives at the beginning and the end of the programme. Are there any other points about evaluation? You obviously keep student records, and you evaluate the product and things like that. Are there any other forms of evaluation? |
| Sarah | Well, there are outside evaluations like the PATS, Maths Olympiad and the Otago Maths Challenge. |
| Ross | We also use the New South Wales tests. But it is more to get a feel for how we compare with other schools in Australasia. Sometimes we select children, sometimes we might select a whole year group to sit the NSW tests, just to get a feel for the standards being achieved in comparison to the wider learning community. |
| Interviewer | Is there anything else you would like to mention? |
| Ross | Yes. It may sound as though the children in the special abilities programmes are actually confined to working with our specialist teacher, but in actual fact that's not so. Programmes take many forms. We have gone to a lot of trouble through teacher inservice, to ensure that teachers are more aware of the needs of these children within their classrooms. Teachers in the classrooms now meet the needs of their children with special abilities in a variety of different ways. |
| Interviewer | Thank you for giving us some insights into your experience with students with special abilities. |