West Coast New Zealand

Outcomes

Three Ways of Going Forward

1. The West Coast Way – we’re at the leading edge in raising achievement levels in literacy and we want to carry on.
Mary Pupich, Principal Paparoa Range School, and George Maskill, President West Coast Principals Association, are strong advocates of The West Coast Way which has been established to continue the direction of the Literacy Programme. They have an $80,000 grant to bridge this year in advance of future funding for sustainability, which means that data can continue to be collected, analysed and fed back to schools by Woolf Fisher.  “We now want to develop our own directions with The West Coast Way. We’ve established this model to build our regional capacity and sustainability in literacy methods. As a group we’re looking forward to driving ourselves, strengthening  learning communities within schools and throughout the West Coast, and providing professional development for teachers and literacy lead teachers,” Mary Pupich said.

2.  Developing a model for sustainability
Dr Mei Lai said the Literacy Programme offered a rare chance to research how achievement levels gained during the project can be sustained and accelerated over time.  “We are very interested to learn what enables schools to continue everything they’ve learned during the programme, what the patterns in achievement will be, what conditions and practices will have the most effectiveness for sustainability. If we can identify these things then we can increase the value of the original work considerably.”

3. The Secondary School Literacy
Programme
This will be undertaken by the Woolf Fisher Research Centre over the next three years. The University of Auckland Deputy Vice Chancellor, Professor Raewyn Dalziel, visited the region in March to confirm the project and $516,000 funding through the University’s Starpath project, which gets funding support from the Tertiary Education Commission. This additional funding was possible because DWC had invested in the original literacy programme. The new project will involve profiling, analysing and checking phases as well as professional development. The main objective is to investigate the apparent disparity between relatively high reading comprehension and writing scores in Year 8 and the relatively low literacy achievement in NCEA at Year 11.

Feedback

What teachers at Early Childhood Centres said
“We undertook a Literacy Review and as a result our centre has made language, books and symbols a lot more visible and of more direct appeal to the children.” “It made us focus on the quality and variety of books we were providing, to make good books more accessible, and to get more books that boys are interested in, for instance books about diggers and trucks.” “We’ve been interested observers in the programme, and participated in the professional development, and we felt it was a two-way process as we had a lot to offer about young children’s learning.”

Feedback on our teachers
Prof McNaughton said the way teachers are instructing pupils and working in the classrooms has been the major reason for the gains in student achievement. Teachers have gained new skills and knowledge, especially the Literacy Lead Teachers who have had several training sessions with University of Canterbury Education Plus Literary Advisers. All primary teachers have had training sessions on areas within the literacy and writing programmes. Licensed early childhood centre staff attended sessions on language development. A West Coast Literacy Website was also available. There were marked changes in teacher knowledge of writing in both surface and deep features. A significant ability to moderate writing samples has increased to 95% in agreement with the benchmark, up from 85%.