Top 5 tips to get the most out of Arinui in your first year

By Megan Peterson on February 27, 2018 in Leadership

We’ve asked some of our Arinui schools and kura what top tips they’d give others as they embark on their first year with Arinui. We know that each school/kura decides how they are going to use Arinui but these tips are too good not to share with others. We hope that they will help make educators’ first experience with Arinui really powerful.

1.    Clarify expectations

  • Unpack the Standards for the Teaching Profession considering what they look like in your context. Build shared understanding about what they mean for you. Work through the Quality Practice Template.

  • Co-construct expectations about how Arinui is going to be used at your place. What are the must dos? What sources of evidence have to be integrated within Arinui?

  • Create a time frame which outlines these expectations, or adapt the one provided in Arinui (adapt the ones provided in the Arinui support centre”). Add this to the “our resources” section on Arinui so all teachers and leaders can access it.

  • Decide what counts as strong and supporting evidence against the standards. Be guided by the clarification from the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand.

  • Reiterate that the focus is on improving, not just proving.

  • Make sure all staff are clear that it is about providing good quality evidence, not mountains of evidence!

2.    Make Arinui a habit

  • Allocate time during existing meeting structures for Arinui.

  • Ensure that your language of professional dialogue and learning is about improving practice.

  • Build time for formal and informal professional conversations about practice.

  • Talk about how you are using Arinui with your colleagues and encourage others to do the same.

3.    Provide professional support for appraisers

  • Meet with the designated appraisers to clarify their role in a teacher-led appraisal model.

  • Use the Maia exemplar provided by Arinui: to moderate the appraisal decisions that your team would make, and to role-play informal and formal appraisal conversations the appraisers would have, using her collection as evidence.

  • Upskill in Open-to-Learning conversations. Seek additional support on this if required.

  • If you have an external appraiser, they can be easily added into your school’s Arinui zone. Let us know if you’d like this to happen by emailing info@arinui.com.

4.    Approach with an open mind

  • This is your first year with Arinui. Don’t expect all staff to be 100% perfect with it. Use your first year to figure out exactly how it is going to work in your context.

  • Align your current processes and how you’ll use Arinui to enable teacher-led appraisal.

  • Use the skill set of your staff to support each other – if you have a whiz with uploading videos, managing different sources of evidence or analysing data, see if they are happy to support their colleagues.

  • It is incredibly difficult to ‘break’ Arinui. Contact us if you are stuck.

5.    Review, review, review (and evaluate)

  • Check in with your staff each term about their experiences with Arinui. What is better as a result of using Arinui? Are there roadblocks for your staff? If so what are they? Collate their responses to see if there is a shift over time.

  • Check in to see whether your staff are regularly reflecting on their practice in Arinui.

  • Be open to hearing if things aren’t going well – not everything is going to run perfectly in your first year.

  • Give feedback to the Arinui team. Your feedback helps us refine Arinui so it is better than before.

  • Revisit your initial school-wide expectations and revise these if necessary after your first appraisal cycle.

If you would like to learn more about using Arinui in your setting get in touch with our team today

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