It appears that everything is not at all as it seems.  From what I read, schools and clusters can continue to use ICT PD funds to support their attendance at national conferences in 2010.

This is indeed good news and recognition of the value of these events.

So what about 2011?

Yep, that sums it up.  Got a message this morning…

from after L@S in 2010, the direct ICT cluster funding cannot be spent on national or international conferences. This will be emailed as a message to schools from the MOE and is about the govt signalling fiscal restraint. This does not prevent schools from sending people to these events but payment for such things will have to come from school budgets not from the direct ICT cluster funding.

Well, ‘fiscal restraint’, that’s fresh coming from a bunch of people (politicians in this country) who very rarely exhibit such a characteristic.  This won’t be my last entry on this matter as it is frustrating for it to happen at such a time and very difficult for educators in this country.  The message is clear, ‘we undervalue conferences’ as a learning, networking and capacity building tool.  Clearly if ICT-PD cluster funding cannot be spent on this, then it perceived to be of little value by the Minister and this Government.

I don’t expect that they will stop taxpayer funded Political Party Conferences in a hurry?

I cannot put this off any longer.  It is now time for some backward glances and retrospective thought post the Learning@School conference in Rotorua last week.

Aside from the wonderful time had with my colleagues from the Stoke NZ Cluster, it was amazing to hear such passion and willingness to do something ’special’ with the cluster.  There were exciting ideas, innovative thinking and creative desire to work together and synergize.  The expressed desires from every School Leader are exciting to hear, and ensuring the action plans are there to do is the logical next step to ensure quality outcomes for our teachers, kids and community.

I am still adamant that we need ‘clarity’.  After all of the haze from the conference clears, we need to be clear about our vision, outcomes and the plans to make this all happen.  Without the clarity of, and shared agreement and understanding of, the goals and plans… this initiative will not amount to much more than 120 teachers doing ’some extra PD’.

As a group there was lengthy discussion around our next step being that we get into curriculum framework design.  My belief here is that it is difficult to decide what is powerful to learn before we have decided what is powerful learning. Are we allowing ourselves to be driven by beautacratic deadlines if we write our curriculum frameworks now?  I can see through my crystal ball that the whole framework will change as pedagogies, understandings and evidence-based practice takes hold.  So to dedicate resourcing to this now would in essence defeat itself.  I believe that we can’t decide what to learn before we have decided how we will learn it!

Sometimes when you look for clarity it helps to prioritise… and ask, What is most important right now?  In order to gain some clarity for the Cluster, I believe that this is what we need to ask ourselves now.  Is this next step of curriculum framework more important than

- Student Learning?

- Teacher Learning?

- Community Learning?

I believe that the natural progression is learning before curriculum.  Curriculum is a ‘parallel’ it can run alongside, but to me the most important element to this is the understanding of pedagogy and the importance of asserting ourselves as learners first… after all, how can we ever expect to understand teaching, if we do not understand learning?  To me, these come from the same principle… teaching and learning are one in the same, if you pick up one end of the stick – you pick up the other (whether you like it or not).

Gee, let’s not overdo this word.  Call it what you will, but your journey is about your own learning from birth until you pass on from this existence.   I hear this word ‘Journey’ so often used to describe the ICT-PD and it doesn’t sit well with me – a journey denotes and end point… our learning should not, can not and will not end immediately after the conclusion of the project.  One’s journey is much bigger than just ICT-PD for the next 3 years.  This is a minor scene of a much larger series of acts in a play.  To me the ICT-PD we are doing is a pathway, or a series of steps we must encounter to continue our wider learning.  How we negotiate this pathway depends greatly on the lens through which we all, as individuals, look at the world.  Our own frame of reference will dictate the learning we do and what happens to use as we learn further.