Principal's Page
Kia Ora - Greetings Friends
Just a quick note to say I will be away for the next two weeks, so I won't see you all until the start of term four.
That being so, I want to express my sincere gratitude for your awesome support, kindness, and goodness over this past term.
My sincere thanks also to our amazing, awesome and outstanding staff team here - they are the best and I am grateful to them for their passion, energy, kindness, skills and imagination every single day.
School finishes in a couple of weeks, so I wish you a safe and relaxing break from school, quality time with whānau, and a safe return for all in time for term four on Monday, October 14.
I am available via email at macash@mac.com and am happy to help however I can as always.
I recently shared with you the big picture regarding New Zealand's student achievement standards compared with the rest of the world.
Our government has been sharing much data recently, and we should note that some of the data the Prime Minister and Education Minister shared was misleading. The maths data shared was based on a sample of only 853 year 8 students and was measured by testing a maths curriculum that has not even been taught in New Zealand.
While the data presented by the Ministers painted a concerning picture, we are far from alone in this problem as follows:
Overview: Between 2018 and 2022, teenagers in wealthy nations experienced significant declines in reading and math proficiency due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This period saw an unprecedented drop in educational performance, exacerbating pre-existing issues of stagnating educational standards.
The Scale of the Decline According to the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), test scores dropped significantly across many affluent countries. On average, math scores fell by 15 points, and reading scores dropped by 10 points from 2018 to 2022. The OECD considers a 20-point change equivalent to one year of learning, underscoring the severity of this decline.
The Good News:
Pisa's Creative Thinking Result For New Zealand:
Dr Claire Coleman, honorary lecturer at the University of Waikato.
In the middle of June, the first Creative Thinking PISA report revealed that New Zealand Aotearoa is in the top 5 in the world for creative thinking. You might think it would be celebrated by educators, artists, innovators, technologists, and businessmen as tremendous news, but no, not really. Happily, this post aims to highlight for educators what PISA Creative thinking is, what it might mean, whether it matters and the potential implications for Aotearoa New Zealand education.
Why is creative thinking important?
Creative thinking is recognised globally as one of the key 21st-century learning skills and vital for adapting and innovating for our unknown future and employment, building resilience, cultivating empathy and finding joy. It makes things interesting, captures and fuels imagination, provokes learners to think beyond finite answers, and invites new questions. While AI technologies offer valuable tools for creativity, they cannot yet replace it.
So, what is the Creative Thinking test?
The Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) is a research programme that evaluates education systems worldwide.
Assessed for the first time in 2022, adding creative thinking to PISA reflects the global interest in cultivating critical, creative, and innovative skills and workers with flexible mindsets for a rapidly changing and unknown world. Mainstream schools in NZ were randomly selected, and 500,000 students from 81 countries participated worldwide.
Caveats of the Creative Thinking Assessment.
The test narrows the definition of creative thinking to the (little-c) creativity and the ability to produce divergent ways of thinking and solve problems. This test addressed four areas of creative thinking: written, visual, social and scientific.
The results are in!
Several key results are of interest; these are just a few.
• Access and use of technology are positively related to students' creativity. Students who spend more than an hour a day using digital resources (laptops, tablets, etc.)performed better on the creative thinking assessment.
• New Zealand scored in the top 5 countries worldwide for creative thinking and is considered one of the four most successful in developing students' capacity to engage in creative thinking.
• Students did better in creative thinking than predicted based on their relative performance in maths and reading PISA scores.
So, back to those results!
Perhaps our results resulted from a 'number 8 wire' Kiwi attitude to challenge the impact of staying at home and being creative during Covid 19. After all, unlike the other high-performing countries, Australia, Singapore, Canada, and Korea, New Zealand currently has no specific government-led strategy for creativity.
9% of Aotearoa, New Zealand students were considered resilient, creative thinkers and outperformed their socioeconomic circumstances.
Considering creativity and the Arts in Aotearoa schools
• While not the exclusive domain of creativity, the arts have a specific contribution to creativity, education, and life. The arts provide unique ways of knowing about and being in the world. Through imagination and aesthetic experience, we make new connections, understand things differently, expand our horizons, and engage with our humanity.
• Priorities within schools have shifted in recent years, and as a result, we have fewer arts in schools, which reduces students' access to the arts as a key vehicle for creativity.
• The accountability culture of schooling raises the stakes of arts activities and pressures them to generate an outcome, a performance, or a product and prove their value to the school. This pressure on the school and its students to create familiar, perfect artworks rather than allowing for genuine art exploration may stifle creativity, innovation, and joy.
Suggestions and provocations
• We can ensure that all students have equitable access to high-quality arts education in our schools across various art forms.
• We can strategically integrate creativity across the curriculum and provide teachers with the skills and resources to cultivate creativity.
• We can embed opportunities to engage with diverse ideas and contexts to broaden students' aesthetic and effective experiences and fuel their imagination.
• We can counteract the socioeconomic factors by providing adequate funding and access to address inequities.
• We can genuinely value play, improvisation, exploration and serendipity.
• We can value failure and mistakes as an essential part of the process, not the end result.
While there is no easy answer, I hope that educators and leaders consider what creative approaches can be applied in their schools, the role the arts can play in developing creative capacities, and how we might work to ensure equitable and vibrant learning experiences for all.
Dr Claire Coleman is an honorary lecturer at the University of Waikato and the host of the theatre podcast. She has an extensive background in arts and education, including previous work as a puppeteer, drama and dance teacher, cabaret theatre manager and ITE programme leader. She is passionate about embodied and creative pedagogies for transformative education. Contact Claire at claire@playfulpedagogy.nz
The Western Heights Connection:
We place considerable value on learning programmes that encourage, develop and enhance creativity.
This begins from day one at Western Heights, where children engage in learning through a structured approach to play-based learning and lots of language-rich and meaningful experiences that encourage creativity, role-play, inquiry, and experimentation.
This continues with our children's many and varied opportunities as they progress through Western Heights - visual arts, drama, Bush School, Chess, EPro8, animation, 3D modelling and printing, video creation, music, bands, and so much more.
Rest assured, our students are well-placed to succeed in this area, which will assume increasing importance in our rapidly evolving world.
The test of a student is not how much he knows, but how much he wants to know."
Source: Aphorisms for the Year (1897)
More on creativity on our Learning about our Learning page in this newsletter.
As always - if you have questions or concerns about anything school-related - email me at macash@mac.com, and I will get back to you asap.
My very best regards to you all,
Ash Maindonald
Principal.
