Life as a Learning Coach

October of this year marked my 10 year anniversary at Hobsonville Point Secondary School (HPSS) where I started as a foundation staff member. Much has changed since those early days before we had any students and we dreamed up a school that would be better at meeting student needs. A lot will keep changing, particularly with an all-new senior leadership now at the helm in 2024.  With so much change on the horizon, I have found myself thinking a lot about the areas of our school where I am reluctant to see major change, as well as the areas in our school where I would like to see more change. 

One area that I hope will stay strong in our school as we go forward is Learning Hubs. Learning Hubs are our pastoral care system at HPSS, replacing the role of form teacher. While we do all the admin things a form teacher might do, we also have extra time with our learning hub students so that we have time to develop life skills such as self-reflection, leadership, emotional intelligence, etc. 

Daniells' Donkeys - My Learning Hub

Without a doubt, being a hub coach is one of the most rewarding aspects of my job. Students keep the same hub and hub coach for their entire time at our school. This means that I see these students at the start of every day. Over time, this allows us to build really strong relationships where students and their parents trust us to discuss challenges in their education. Over the years this has involved supporting students and their families with everything from academic goals, behaviour expectations, bullies, gender transitions, parents with terminal illness, disabilities, etc. When families trust us, they are able to be much more transparent with us about the support that young people need. And as a result, we can meet their needs much more effectively. 

One of the aspects of my practice that I am really proud of is how I am able to help my hublings develop as a hub family. We know that when students experience a sense of belonging, they are more likely to succeed at school. Hence, I work very hard to create a sense of belonging for my students. This is done through lots of things but in particular:

• CHECK-INS: For a check-in, we sit in a circle. Each student answers a question about themselves. For example, what was the best part of your weekend, in what class are you having a lot of success right now, etc. There are a few reasons why I have embraced this practice so thoroughly including:
• Ensuring that every student has had an adult and their peers listen to them, everyday. How can any student feel like they belong if they can go through an entire day without anyone actually talking to them? 
• Ensures that the hub group members hear what is going on for their peers. This allows them to make connections with each other and build their relationship with each other.
• Doing this regularly means that I can stay connected to my students and what is going on for them in an effective way. 
  
  
• THANKFUL THURSDAYS: If you are not familiar with the neuroscience of gratitude, I suggest it is time you get caught up. Every Thursday morning during hub time, we each get a chance to share some of the things we are grateful for that week. This helps students start their day in a better frame of mind, while also giving me a little insight about what is on top for the students. 
  
  
  
  
  
• TRADITIONS: Few things make a person feel like they belong as much as being part of a tradition. For our hub, we have had a long tradition of playing werewolf. Our older students enjoy teaching the new ones and the young students enjoy having fun with the older kids. Other traditions in my hub include silly photos, and can collections for the annual can drive. We are working on some more traditions however these are best when co-created with students.
  
  
  
• LEARNING GAMES: There are lots of learning benefits to games, and this becomes particularly evident in hub. Over the years I have created many games for my hublings. Sometimes it is something like Whanaungtanga eels and ladders that help students learn and make connections with each other. Other times it might be role-playing games that help them learn about career pathways. I've made games to help them develop critical thinking and games to help them with their communication skills. The great thing about using games for learning in a hub context is that as well as students learning and practising new skills, the games also help create shared memories that contribute to the students' sense of belonging and engagement. 

Another aspect of Learning Hubs that I feel is really successful is the academic coaching. Sometimes in school students who just get on and do the work rarely ever get one-on-one attention. We also have students who with the right encouragement could do much better. We have students who struggle to make sense of their work and those who need more challenge. The benefit of hubs and keeping them relatively small is that we can have fairly regular conversations with every student individually about how they are going in their learning, what the challenges the are encountering, and what needs to be done about this. I believe that learning hubs are a key aspect of what allows us to have high expectations of our students at HPSS. 

While academic coaching conversations can be helpful in communicating high expectations, it can also be helpful in helping identify where students need additional support. One area where this is often the case is advocating for students, particularly those with disabilities. As a learning coach, I have spent a great amount of time ensuring that students are getting the support that they need. More often than not, the areas where students needed support or someone to champion them were identified through a one-on-one coaching conversation. 

In summary, hub is one of the areas in my practice where I feel that I get the balance of warm and demanding right. There are systems and structures in place that allow an inclusive approach where every student has their own pathway, yet enable us to have high expectations of every student. 

Where to next?

As our hubs have students from year 9 to year 13, every year we have new students who join our hubs. As a result, every year we need to bring new students on board into our hub and help them feel just as included. Hence, every year my 'where to next' is focussed on how I might continue to develop the warm and demanding in hub to extend to new students. 

Every kid needs a champion

Hobsonville Point Secondary School (HPSS) uses an advisory model for pastoral care (informed by the work of  Dennis Littky and Eliot Levine). We call these pastoral groups hubs. The young people in this photo are my responsibility for their time here at HPSS. I work to help them succeed in whatever goals they set. I work hard to help them feel like they have a place here at school where they feel they belong, and where there is an adult who will always have their back while having high expectations of them. Or in the words of Rita Pierson; "every kid needs a champion". And that is exactly what I work hard to be for these students. 

("It's been a little while since I've blogged regularly so to get back in the habit, I thought I would share one photo every day for the remainder of the school year to capture some of my learning, reflections, and creations for 2022. Each photo is accompanied by a short caption. The idea is to keep it short, simple, and reflective. I would love for people to join me - if you do, make sure you include #edphoto22 on whatever platform you share it (Twitter, Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram, wherever...)." 

Academics and Achievement > Well being?

Many of us are familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs. We know that many things precede achievement, problem solving and creativity. Yet, with schools having such a big focus on the latter, it seems curious that we spend so little time on helping students build and develop their well being. You might argue that this is covered in the Health and Physical Education curriculum, but I would really question whether this is sufficient considering the home environments that some our students come from. 

I also wonder, what type of students our schools and the systems therein will be turning out? If we only teach and emphasise achievement, NCEA and national standards, then what are we teaching kids to value? I would argue that the same is true for teachers and other professionals, to what extent are we sending the message that results and achievement are more valuable than well being, happiness and quality relationships?

Image Source

This year, I have really enjoyed that working at Hobsonville Point means we are working at developing all of the students, not just their minds in class or the muscles in their sports teams. A large component of my role here is acting as a hub coach (for more information about hub coaches see Claire Amos's post). As this role evolved throughout the year, I found increasingly that it has dealt with friendships and family, with values, morals and respect. As most schools and teachers do, we have also dealt with safety of some of our students. But what really stands out for me about this year was the focus on student well being. The focus of developing student self-esteem and confidence and explicitly learning about respect and managing relationships. By working together in our hubs, we have given students a safe place within the school where they are able to explore some of the more personal things that we all go through as we learn to make sense of an adult world. Together our students have unpacked and reflected regularly using the hauora tools from the health curriculum. Together we identified strategies and unpacked scenarios where our well being might be out of sync, and what we might do about it. We talked about how we might support someone else who might be struggling spiritually, emotionally, physically or socially. 

In our hubs, we also unpacked the Hobsonville Habits. A set of ten dispositions that we aim to help our students develop. By calling them habits, we send the message that they are things we can develop until they become second nature. As a result, I am able to talk to the students in my hub, but also any student in the school, about how they might show more compassion. This might be in the context of looking after the school, our buildings, or their peers. 

Here are some of the activities that I did with my hub over the year in effort to build dispositional excellence:

The Love Wall

• Unpacking the Hobsonville Habit of Purposeful, we read some exerts from Sean Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens (Sean Covey is the son of Stephen Covey, author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People). The students really loved the book. In particular we focussed on the chapter about being proactive. Over a series of lessons, we then unpacked acting in a proactive and reactive way in more depth. This involved listing some of the proactive and reactive ways that we act in different scenarios. I prompted students by giving them different scenarios and by looking at some movie clips. Mean Girls is great for this one. We also looked at the compass of shame, a great tool that allowed us to explore different types of reactive behaviour in more depth. Finally, we also did some role plays, where we acted out a challenging scenario where the student had to respond using only proactive responses. The rest of the group then gave the student feedback about their responses. And finally, no series of lessons at Hobsonville Point would be complete without some alone time to reflect.
• Some of the simpler activities included the love wall, where every week for a term, students were asked to write something that they liked about themselves, but also something the liked about another student in the hub. These are displayed on the wall of our hub.
• Steve Mouldey also introduced the students to Caine's Arcade. A powerful video of a young boy who created an arcade from cardboard boxes. Students then unpacked lessons from the Caine's arcade video.
• Of course, no dispositional curriculum would be complete without a good selection of TED talks. Our favourite this year was probably the thirteen year old Logan LaPlante's TEDx talk, Hackschooling makes me happy. 

Other things that we explore in our hub is Hermann's brain, a tool which has allowed us to explore thinking preferences. This allowed us to help students explore how we learn, think and act in more depth. 

Most mornings in hubs also involved a quick check in with students. This might involve each person sharing what they most need to focus on for the week, how they are going, how they are feeling about particular events, etc. This often acts as a measure of where students are at, what support they need, whether they might need additional support in terms of strategies to cope or manage a situation, stress management or even referrals to the school councillor. 

Finally, there is also the ever important parent communication. By checking in with students, following their academic and dispositional progression and getting to know them very well through all the team building and discussion, we are able to bring parents and family on board to a much greater extent. Our conversations are often more meaningful and we are able to work together towards supporting our students.

All of the above, is only the first year of learning hubs. So as I sit and reflect about the where to next, I am as excited today as I was a year ago about the potential of the learning hubs at Hobsonville Point. Knowing that I have time and tools allocated to helping my students build their emotional and academic resilience, and their well being, that I can coach them through when they get stuck, and that that I am not alone in this, makes me excited for our students. It also gives me hope for the many under achieving students in our country. In fact, a 2014 Ministry of Education report about low decile schools that are performing well, actually talks about the success of schools who have adopted a similar model. 

Who would have thought that working with students around their whole well being, not just their academic achievement would have such great effects? Perhaps we all know. Or perhaps the real question is who is willing to rattle enough cages to make sure that every child has someone looking out for their well being? 

Quotes from my students: "Throughout the past year, my being has definitely grown and developed into something much better than what I started out like. One of my best highlights about my being is being able to learn more about my Hauora and getting to know more about how each of our quadrants in our Hauora needs to be equal and cared for." "Hub activities were new and different to me, it was interesting to get to know and understand different peoples opinions, to think about what others say and then take into account, how different we are but how we can still interact with each other." "My highlight for my being was that I have a better meaning and understanding of the word “respect” even though I have not fully changed, I am on a road to being a more respectful person to myself and others. I enjoyed learning about the difference between being reactive and proactive with my hub. This was useful because I now can have a look at different situations and understand how I can make the best of every situation." "I have learnt how to manage my emotions.  I have learnt different strategies to deal with conflict."