Acknowledge contributions and empower others to continue
When we strengthen the capacity of everyone who supports mokopuna, we promote positive relationships and environments that enable our mokopuna to grow and flourish. A key aspect of learning support is recognising the adults in the lives of mokopuna as key agents of change.
Empower throughout process and beyond
Teams can feel empowered in circumstances where they have developed relevant confidence, knowledge, skills and experience. Empowerment is promoted when collective expertise and responsibility is shared, and teams or individuals feel able to lead and make decisions for themselves, based on their learning.
Benefits of strengthening knowledge, skills and confidence
Whānau and educators who have been actively engaged in all stages of the process (such as goal setting and planning) will feel confident to use the knowledge, skills, tools and strategies that the team has developed and used. Confidence in using this learning can inform and strengthen future responses to needs.
Every request for support provides an opportunity for a practitioner to learn and inform future practice. When satisfactory progress has been made against the desired outcomes, it is good practice for each practitioner to evaluate their professional contributions to the team and reflect on their knowledge, skills and performance against professional competencies.
Top tip
Revisit the Outcome Measurement Tool as a team
Revisiting the Outcome Measurement Tool and service agreement as a team can provide an opportunity for a practitioner to consider completing or renegotiating their involvement. The reflective questions can support these discussions.
“Empowered educators are persons who believe in themselves and their capacity to act – they support the self-actualisation of all persons in their schools, classrooms and communities.”
(Irwin, J.W. (1996). Empowering ourselves and transforming school: Educators making a difference. (p. 13). New York: State University of New York Press).
Examples of empowerment from practice
Practitioners facilitated a series of workshops based on He Māpuna te Tamaiti for a group of early learning services in accordance with the service agreement or negotiation. The workshops supported the early learning services to progress their own inquiry process. The feedback and evaluations demonstrated that kaiako now felt confident to use the strategies to support development of the social and emotional competency of their mokopuna. As a result, it was agreed that no further professional development support was needed.
During supervision, the reflective questions were used as conversation prompts to review and reflect on key aspects of He Pikorua and how these aspects feed into the supervisee’s practice. This reflective conversation led to the supervisor and supervisee discussing further training and development opportunities, including further reading, work shadowing and conversations with peers. They agreed a date to review what had been put into practice as part of their individual development plan.
A team and their manager used part of each team meeting to share a case and use a selection of the reflective questions as prompts for discussion. They also used the time to discuss the types of tiered support undertaken across their geographical cluster, and look at future team inquiry and professional development opportunities.
During a home visit the whānau and the practitioner reflected together on the progress of the mokopuna regarding language and communication and managing the assistive technology (hearing aids). The whānau indicated that they had the confidence and capability to move forward independently with their mokopuna and would contact the practitioner if they needed support in the future.
Top tip
Learning from a parent's insights
Video of a parent’s insights into learning partnerships. Garth Clarricoats draws on his experience of being dad to a son with autism to share insights about learning partnerships.