Enhancing Our School Values

Last night at our staff meeting, we settled on our school values, so I am just going to record my thinking here.

I think we need to display what each value means with either bullet points or an explanation (or both), in order to help students to understand them better and connect them to their everyday experiences at school.

Current Values AreCare, Respect, Strive and Cooperate.

We have altered these slightly:

Care - manaaki Kaitiakitanga

Connected themes: Ako, Whanaungatanga, Kaitiakitanga

Cooperate - mahi tahi

Connected themes: Ako, Whanaungatanga

Strive - takakawe

Connected themes: Wairua,

Kindness - atawhai Aroha

Connected themes: Ako, Whanaungatanga, atawhai

Manaakitanga kind of means both care and respect together so we have added in Kaitiakitanga to represent care instead. Kaitiakitanga is guardianship. It involves taking care of both the people and environment. I feel this word better represents what we would like to achieve at our school. It links nicely to our environmental focus whilst also connecting strongly to Maori values, in particular the connection to whenua.

The word guardianship means protect, defend, watch over.

Links to Kaitiakitanga from https://teara.govt.nz/en/kaitiakitanga-guardianship-and-conservation

Mana means spiritual power. If a forest has mana, it will have plenty of flowers, fruit and birds.

Tapu can mean spiritual restriction. Sometimes rāhui (restrictions) are needed to help the mana of the forest. A rāhui might stop people taking birds, fish or fruit from a certain area, or at a certain time.

Mauri means life force. This must be protected in forests, rivers, gardens, lakes and the sea. Special mauri stones, which tohunga (priests) said prayers over, were used to preserve this force.

We have also added in aroha to introduce the kindness aspect. Aroha also involves the caring for each other aspect too.

I was inspired by this model at Ngaruawahia School to create something for our school.

http://www.ngaruawahia.school.nz/our-school-values/

I think each value needs a symbol to represent it. James says Russell Street has done that too. They got someone to draw the symbols for them.

https://www.russellst.school.nz/values/

Potentially I could come up with some designs for the symbols or ask someone. I have plenty of artist friends that might be able to help.

Also I would like to take into account our local area when creating these symbols/pictures and our school colours.

Here is a Google Slide to share my ideas so far on each value. This is just me organising my thoughts and thinking about what the values mean to me and what they might look like in action. If we were creating something for our school. Everyone would need to contribute to this, not just me.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1VAHLu_mx_85FxveoRZRLu7n2bj2u86AjGK3IRfCSe00/edit?usp=sharing