Evidence

Visual

A white-haired bespectacled woman wearing an orange cardigan sits at a laptop on a desk beside a bookshelf filled with books, binders and document boxes. She uses a pen to make notes on a highlighted page in a bound book. A man with greying hair and a goatee wears a dark suit and a black and white striped tie and black framed glasses. His name appears in a banner along the bottom of the screen: Henk Popping, Principal, Ōtūmoetai Intermediate School.

Audio

(Henk): It's just a matter of finding the right information that you already have to put it together into a picture that other people can read. So it's not as daunting as people might lead you to believe.

Visual

The woman wearing the orange cardigan moves to a wall covered in charts made up of squares coloured green, yellow, orange and red. She points to a red box on one of the charts and checks it against a page in her bound book.

Audio

(Henk): My deputy principal in charge of learning, Lynne Hutchinson, had already prepared quite a significant paper, so when we started the process of putting the entry form in, once we got our head around the different sections in the entry form, we were able to pull in a lot of the other information we already had.

Visual

A woman with shoulder length blonde hair wears a black cardigan over an orange top. Her name appears in a banner along the bottom of the screen: Karla Ralph, Acting Principal, Coastal Taranaki School. A bearded man in a Chiefs rugby jersey sits with a boy and a woman with short blonde hair at a group of desks in a classroom. The woman, who wears black rimmed glasses, goes over some documents in front of her and speaks with the bearded man.

Audio

(Karla): We collected student voice and we also collected whānau and parent voice. So, last year we had made a little DVD for all of our Dreamweaver mentoring new families to tell them about who we were and what our programme was all about, and we were able to present that.

Visual

A woman with long burgundy hair wears frameless glasses and a black and white top. Her name appears in a banner along the bottom of the screen: Dy Stirling, Kaihautū, Nōku Te Ao.

Audio

(Dy): Most of my studies were always based on what Nōku is doing. So it all feeds back into Nōku, and it is really, really cool because it means that I can see my study in action rather than just theory.

Visual

A girl in a knitted jersey with a pink and white zigzag design passes other children and adults as she heads to the front of a classroom. A woman directs her to take a picture down from a board titled ‘He Taonga Te Reo.’ A group of children in a classroom sing together. A woman with them gives a thumbs up.

Audio

(Dy): The studies that I had done was our case study. The research had evidence attached to it, but we also had other stuff just from the years that we had been running. Parent feedback, ERO reports, things like that, stuff that we knew we were doing. The number of staff that we had qualified through, their journeys, where they had gone, how did it change their lives?

Visual

A woman with short brown hair wears glasses and has a chain and bead necklace around her neck. She sits on a bench in front of a plant-covered rise. Her name appears in a banner along the bottom of the screen: Dr Michelle Dalrymple, Head of Maths Faculty, Cashmere High School. Two other women are sitting on the bench with her. One wears a vibrant coral-coloured jacket; the other a black blazer over a black and grey striped dress. The woman in the coral jacket’s name appears in a banner along the bottom of the screen: Elizabeth Forgie, Principal, Kerikeri High School.

Audio

(Michelle): One of the first places we went to to find data was that student feedback that you get in the formal feedback that you gather at the end of the year. But capturing those snippets of conversations that you have with kids when you see them having that 'aha!' moment and trying to get teachers to actually document it so you had it for the entry form.
(Teacher): And did you find you learned anything new from the students when you were getting their narratives?
(Michelle): Reinforcing what we had heard less formally in class, yeah, yeah, which was really cool.
(Elizabeth): The student narratives was such a powerful strategy. We had had practice of asking our Māori students for their stories of what worked and what didn't work for them in the classroom and in the school, what things they would like to see more of, what made a difference to their learning.

Visual

Teenagers in a white and maroon school uniform reach for a pile of brightly coloured plastic insects in the middle of their group of desks. They make notes as they separate them into different groups. A teacher squats down at the end of a group of desks, speaking with students who have arranged a group of yellow cards in front of them.

Audio

(Michelle): One of the scariest things was having to integrate the research to support what you're doing and showing that it does have value and you've done what you've done in the right way. Don't be scared to go back and check your research. There's summaries of the Best Evidence Synthesis. You don't have to read the whole books.

Visual

A clean-shaven, grey-haired man wears a black suit and a red and black striped tie. His name appears in a banner along the bottom of the screen: Greg Mackle, Principal, Gisborne Boys’ High School.

Audio

(Greg): In my entry, I very much focused on the starting point of the story: improving NCEA achievement. And that was very short. And you get all sorts of fancy data and graphs and all that sort of stuff, and I didn't do that. Craig and I sat down and said, ‘No. This is what we wanted to achieve, this is how it is going to be presented.’ So a table over eight years, I think it was, and three graphs. That's it.

Visual

A woman wears large flower earrings with purple petals around a yellow centre. Her name appears in a banner along the bottom of the screen: Steffan Brough, Expert − 2014 & 2015.

Audio

(Steffan): Whatever it is, to give us some sort of frame for the data and to make the connections with the data, is really important.

Visual

A man with greying hair wears a grey shirt under a dark suit with a red and black striped tie. His name appears in a banner along the bottom of the screen: Tom Cairns, Assistant Principal, Gisborne Boys’ High School.

Audio

(Tom): As part of the course, part of programme, the boys had written essays on identity, on values, on relationships, on their place in the world, the good man that they want to be, and we use those essays.

Visual

Boys in red, grey and black-coloured uniform polo shirts stand in lines. They look focussed as they stand looking out over the city of Gisborne from a monument site atop a hill. They then ride a bus with Tom Cairns.

Audio

(Tom): We had anecdotes of change, and then we found hard data on things like even detentions. We found that detention and stand-down and suspensions figures drastically decreased. There is some time involved, but it is rewarding. And, you know, as I said, the bulk of the work you've done.

Visual

Henk Popping sits outside near a red brick wall, talking with Greg Mackle.

Audio

(Henk): Do you have a leader who is responsible for analysing all that data?
(Greg): It was done by me at the start of the year, but now we have academic deans whose responsibility it is to analyse the data on a weekly basis. We look where we are going to but we also put it all together and we have a really robust discussion amongst the senior leadership team and the academic deans every week.
(Henk): We always go back to that research to say, ‘Well, is this being effective? Is this aligned with what the Best Evidence Synthesis is telling us? Or are we finding other trends that we hadn’t thought up on before?’

Visual

Small children play with toy money and a small plastic cash register in a classroom.

Audio

(Steffan): What you’ve got to do, I suppose, with that evidence is see a line of sight between what it is that you're presenting as evidence and what those outcomes, those valued outcomes, have been for children.

Visual

A girl in a maroon-coloured school uniform jersey swings her way across some monkey bars in a playground.