Gaylene Young Professional Blog

  🌱 My Growth Cycle 2026 This year, my professional growth cycle is grounded in a purpose that sits at the heart of our kura: Ensuring our learners experience success as Māori. This is not just a goal — it is a responsibility. It requires us to reflect deeply on our practice, strengthen our capabilities as educators, and ensure that every decision we make supports our students' identities, languages, and cultures. 🎯 A Clear Focus for 2026 My focus for this year is to strengthen teacher capability and accelerate Māori student achievement in pānui, tuhituhi, and kōrero . To achieve this, I am working across three key areas: Developing clear progression frameworks from Years 1–8 Strengthening culturally responsive teaching practices Enhancing assessment for learning (AFL) to better respond to learner needs. This work is grounded in the understanding that progress does not happen by chance — it happens through deliberate, informed, and responsive teaching. 🧠 Building Capability Th...

Amplifying Maths Learning Through Quiz Design In our classroom, we believe students learn best when they become creators of knowledge rather than simply consumers of it. This term, our maths focus on measurement provided the perfect opportunity to put this belief into practice. Instead of completing a traditional test, students were challenged to design and share their very own maths quiz. The task was simple but powerful: create 5–10 accurate and well-thought-out questions on topics we had explored in measurement. But the real excitement came from how they brought their quizzes to life. Using Canva, students designed visually engaging layouts that captured attention and made maths feel fun and dynamic. To amplify their work even further, they incorporated multimedia elements such as images, video, and even audio. Suddenly, their quizzes weren’t just worksheets—they became interactive experiences. Through this process, students demonstrated much more than their knowledge of measurement...

🌱 A New Chapter in My Teaching Journey Last year, I found myself asking a tough question: "How can I meet the growing needs of every learner without burning out?" Like many teachers, I care deeply about delivering meaningful, inclusive learning experiences.  But the traditional tools and methods we use sometimes feel tooslow to adapt to the pace of change in our classrooms.  That's when I began exploring the possibilities of AI - not as a replacement for good teaching, but as a partner in better teaching. 💡 Why AI? Why Now? We're living through one of the biggest technological shifts in education since the internet entered our classrooms.  For me, this moment is not about hype - it's about opportunity.  My 2025 professional growth goal is clear. To enhance teaching practices and improve learning outcomes through the advanced application of AI in education. My focus isn't just on learning about AI, but on using it to personalise learning, refine assessment, a...

One of my goals this term is to ensure that our team of teachers has a planning template or checklist of thinking supports to help guide their thinking and practice when teaching mathematics. Elements that needed to be addressed were our ability to question students to encourage discussion, scaffold student learning, understand the expectations for each phase of the curriculum, and highlight whether our lessons are balanced. Teachers can get easily frustrated trying to find their planning within their Google Drive.  They want to locate everything in one space.  Therefore, I've designed a Math Planning Template that supports the needs of the team of teachers I work with. If we can effectively track our progress over the year, and ensure that we're achieving the goals set by not only the Ministry but our students... we're hoping to alleviate the expectations for future teachers to 'catch them up'. Link to supporting document

Kia Ora Koutou, It's the start of a brand new year with brand new goals and aspirations for myself. I've decided to establish systems within our school that will enable us to be effective in our teaching practice to achieve maximum results in mathematics.  Below you will find my focus for 2024.  Growth Cycle 2024 by Gaylenep> 

One key component that I've come to realise supports the acceleration of math concepts is ensuring that my students are exposed to opportunities to solve word problems that have multiple entry points, connect to the big ideas, and can be solved in a variety of ways. 'Rich Tasks ' are a term many of you will be familiar with.  The tasks are primarily reared to a particular strand, but you soon discover that multiple strategies, engaging discussions, questioning, feedback, as well as opportunities to show their thinking are elements that are demonstrated by students. Here is a presentation with a variety of tasks for my students to solve. Please find attached work from some of my students:  

This afternoon we moderated teacher samples of the Multiplicative Thinking aspect.  Every teacher had to bring copies of their student's written responses to various problems that primarily focused on multiplicative ideas. Great discussions were had.  It was quite telling when we had varying understandings of what we felt the students were demonstrating in their thinking and how this aligned with the LPF rubric.  Below are scanned copies of our thoughts and why. Multiplicative Thinking Rubric                       Student Exemplars We will remain focusing on the 'Multiplicative Thinking' aspect, and hopefully we will have a more unified opinion on where our student's samples sit within the LPF rubric.

Tautoro School Math Moderation               Term 1                                                                 Term 2 I've come to realise the importance of understanding student data.  It is the basis in which we collaboratively set goals as a school, a syndicate, a teacher, and therefore, as students.  We strive to strategically plan effective learning experiences for our students. As a leader of mathematics, it's important to provide professional learning opportunities for your team and colleagues so they too become proficient in the long-term implementation of effective practices of mathematics. We're fortunate enough to be part of the Kaikohekohe Education Network, which at the mom...

  Word Problems - Maths. One of the key areas that we've been focusing on in our maths programme, is ensuring the students understand the problems they solve.  Equations are straightforward.  You know whether it requires addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.  Word problems require students to think a little more deeply.  There are a few key strategies that I've been implementing to support my students logical sequencing of working through any problem. R ead - Read the problem I dentify - Identify any key information S trategy - What strategies can you use. S olve - Solve the problem, and be logical in your sequencing. C heck - Self-check, correct if wrong, and reflect on misconceptions or where you went wrong. I've found that when they follow these steps, they are able to share with their peers their thinking and the steps they followed to solve a mathematical problem.  If they can share their thinking with others, they're able to teach i...

  Math PD - Curriculum Refresh, 2023 I had the opportunity to attend a Mathematics PLD which covered information about the curriculum refresh.  As a whole, I'm really liking the direction in which the curriculum is shifting - embedding the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, identifying the overarching focus and essential pedagogies within each phase of a student's learning pathway, will in my opinion help teachers moving forward. My understanding is that schools have until 2027 to familiarise and build teacher knowledge and understanding of key changes. Our school aims to implement regular meetings and discussions to build teacher capabilities in mathematics.  We hope to be more focused and intentional in our lessons for our students.  Math moderation, sharing of effective practice and/or lessons will hopefully instill inspiration in our teaching practices.

Professional Growth, 2023 - MATHEMATICS  Rationale: 2023 brings an abundance of new changes to the NZ curriculum.  This includes NZ Histories; Literacy, Communication, and Maths Strategy; The Common Practice Model. Therefore , I feel it would be beneficial to our kura, colleagues, and whanau to gain a better understanding of these key changes. As a result of the many changes happening, I’ve decided to focus on being an ‘agent of change’ and support teachers through this process. I have decided to focus on one key curriculum area - Mathematics.   Strategies to achieve successful outcomes of mathematics. *Become familiar with the changes to the Curriculum in mathematics *Support the change of mindsets. *Build teacher knowledge and capabilities for each of the respective phases of mathematics. *Become familiar with the assessment processes and tools for Mathematics. *Facilitate math moderation with Staff, and design moderation templates for teachers to follow. *Observ...

 Kia Ora Koutou, I was tasked with digitising a tracking system to gauge the progress of our students within Level 2 Te Reo Māori.  We wanted a way of knowing whether the students were: Manawa Taki - Needs a modified programme Manawa Āki - Working towards National Expectations Manawa Ora - Achieving National Expectations. Manawa Toa - Exceeding National Expectations. The trickiest part to this process was knowing that our students were arriving within our senior syndicate classrooms at different stages. For example, a new student to Tautoro School in Room 6 would start at 0.0 - 0.6 (less than 6 months) regardless of whether they started at the start of the year or halfway between.  However, students who have been at our school since Year 5, in the same room would be learning at 1.0-1.5 (between one and one and a half years). As a result, we needed a way of easily identifying individual goals and expectations for Pānui, Kōrero, and Tuhituhi. Below you will find a google ...

As part of Room 8's Pānui Programme, I realised that students needed multiple opportunities to engage with the texts they read, as well as increase their reading mileage.  I found the perfect resource - available online through TKI, 'Te Huinga Raukura' .  The only issue I discovered, however, was the lack of access to digital resources that allowed my students to practice and consolidate the skills they'd learned during our reading lessons. For every text the students read, I created supporting resources to consolidate their learning.  The plan is to create a resource bank for many years to come.  Below are examples of resources we'd expect the students to complete weekly.   * He Pānui Whakaharatau - Reading Practice (reading groups, audio tape support) * He Mahi Takitahi - Independent Practice (without audio support), can request a conference with the teacher. * Hei Mahi Tiriwā - Cloze activity * Hei Mahi Whakaraupapa - Sequencing activity * Hei Papa Tāk...

This year I have decided to focus on how to design and implement an effective literacy programme in Te Reo Maori. Rationale: My colleagues and I are struggling to deliver an effective Level 2 Te Reo programme. I feel that this year we’re going in blind without having a strong content base of knowledge, strategies, and expectations in Panui, Tuhituhi, Korero. Level 2 is a huge step up from Level 3. I'm also finding examples online of what other Kura use and do, which is extremely difficult. This is why I have decided to focus on designing and implementing an effective literacy programme of Te Reo Maori at Level 2. The programme will then be a crucial resource for all teachers of Level 2 going forward. Strategies: Over the course of this year I will implement several strategies and capture their effectiveness within my classroom. I will share my successes, struggles and general reflections. These include (but are not limited to...) Becoming familiar with the Curriculum documents...

Finding solutions while navigating in an online learning platform. Thinking outside the box seems to be a regular occurrence for the students in Room 7.  We are constantly trialing new things to support their individual learning needs.  Take Jamboard for example.  We needed a digital whiteboard to help us explain our thinking - particularly in mathematics.  The only issue was, we couldn't seem to figure out a way to transfer that learning to our individual blog sites. Two great things eventuated from coming up with solutions to these problems.  One we learnt how to download to a pdf, which helped our students who had access and internet issues use drive offline and continue with their work.  As well as download as a pdf and embed the Jamboard into their blogs. Maybe this post will help you in some small way.  If you come up with another solution, please feel free to share in the comments.