 The circumstances that led to us working with Team Solutions was we got our midyear overall teacher judgement data and our writing data was quite a bit lower than our reading data. I think we had about 38% of students below the National Standard, with a higher percentage of boys in that data. Matapu school is a small rural school and it came to us with a problem around its raiting data. It's a problem that's been across New Zealand on a regular basis. The particulars of Matapū School were very specific to them and we really had to come to grips with what was going on at Matapū School with the teachers and with their learners for us to make a change for them. To begin with, we created a plan and it was a three-fold plan. It was looking at developing understanding around data, looking at developing clarity of teaching, building success criteria and developing agency for their learners. From out of this plan, we were hoping to dovetail all these things together and start seeing some shift. And what I am seeing is shift within teacher confidence, student achievement and also leadership confidence. And I'm feeling that we're on a positive road with this. Once we had a clear understanding of what the data was telling us, then we could start really looking closely at our learners pathways, setting out goals and success criteria, specific teaching like front-loading, accelerative processes and really understanding what our students needed to ensure they made shift. That's one of the beauties really of working with Team Solutions is it's not just one-off professional learning. It is a team approach that is sustained over time. Yes, we're a work in progress, but there is that sustained urgency around and expectation around teachers working together, discussing in our staff meetings, the target students and what's worked for that teacher with the idea that everyone hears and builds on their own capacity and capability. Urgency was a really big thing at Matapu, getting a consistent rate of urgency for teachers and for students. While we wanted to take a process that needed to be embedded, we wanted to make sure that everyone understood this was really important. The first part of it was to be really clear about what we were teaching. If the teachers were clear about what they were teaching, then the learners would be clear about what they were learning. And this would make success criteria, setting learning intentions, meeting purpose and developing audience for our students much easier. From the clarity around teaching and learning, the students then could develop their own agency. Agency became the big underpin for the whole journey in terms of teacher agency and student agency. Having some clarity for our learners meant that they could start looking at their work and analysing it themselves and setting their own goals for their next learning. Research shows, and we've found too, that students who are below are passive learners. They sit there and wait to be told what to do. They're like spoon-fed within the classroom, and so the research shows that if students have agency, then they are more in control of their learning. They are taking ownership of their learning and we've started to see this across the school. The students actively highlighting in their writing box the evidence of their learning and talking about where their next steps are and what they need to be doing. One of the big shifts at Matapu was actually moving away from ability grouping. And we started off on a beginning process of taking groups off teacher aids, which seemed really difficult for some of them to get their head around. And once they got it in place, they loved it and so did the teacher aids. Because the teacher aids then had a real role and a responsibility within the class that didn't involve having to work tightly with children and create shift for children, but actually labelled them to support the teacher in that role. Moving away from ability grouping meant that the children could be mixed up, they could learn off each other, they were sharing information more and sharing their work more purposefully. One thing I've worked on with Marika is the acceleration of priority learners in the classroom. So not teaching in remediation, but teaching to where they need to be at. This has been huge for my classroom. It's been really empowering for those students and they are able to have the same learning goals as their peers and able to communicate their successes and their success criteria with those around them, which is really awesome to see. The students in my classroom have responded really positively to the success criteria and the focused engaging activities that we've been planning. Students I've noticed have felt empowered when they're sharing with their learning partners those successes that they've had in their writing lesson and they're able to communicate that they have had a successful writing lesson which has been really awesome to see. They've become more responsible for their learning and they're taking responsibility for their learning goals and how they can achieve those learning goals. This journey has been a great success for Matapu in terms of the teacher confidence, the teacher capability development and the understanding of actually what is good teaching in the classroom. It's been great to see the teachers grow in their confidence and be able to talk about their teaching ability and their ideas around how to lift their own capability and alongside that seeing the shift in student achievement is obviously a highlight. For us at Matapu and it isn't us because I believe it's been a team, this journey is just beginning and I like to think that for Matapu the journey will continue as they grow in their confidence. I'm just so sold on what she's doing for our staff and our kids. Her passion is there as well. You can see it's not just a job to her and the working together with myself and the staff it's just making all the difference. It's linked to research, good practice, her ability to model, her ability to have challenging conversations and the staff respect and, yeah, respect what she has to say.