CONTENTS
You may make mistakes at first – kia kaha! Allow those mistakes to be your friend and teach you.
1999, page 59
Overview
Review is the deliberate process of preparing, gathering, making sense of information, and deciding in order to bring about improvement. It offers opportunities for early childhood education services to evaluate the impact of practice on children’s learning.
'Ngā Arohaehae Whai Hua | Self-review Guidelines for Early Childhood Education' supports teachers, kaiako, management, families, and whānau to learn about review and to improve the effectiveness of self-review processes.
The main body of this document is divided into 3 sections. The first section explores the concept of review. The second section outlines the review process, and the third section invites us to reflect on our self-review process by considering the elements of effective review. Each section concludes with a series of questions to provoke our thinking.
The appendices include examples of self-review in practice. Review stories have been provided by a range of early childhood education services. Their stories show different ways of going about review – each reflecting the focus for review that their service had at the time.
Templates of review plans and frameworks that can be used as guides for review are also included in the appendices. A glossary and references follow at the back.
The use of 'we' in this document signifies an inclusive approach to self-review as all members of the early childhood education learning community have opportunities to participate.
The whakatauākī in this document provide a way of considering review concepts from a kaupapa Māori perspective. Whakatauākī are sayings that have many meanings rather than direct translations. They should be read in this light.
Te Whāriki and raranga | Te Whāriki me te raranga
… to grow up as competent and confident learners and communicators, healthy in mind, body, and spirit, secure in their sense of belonging and in the knowledge that they make a valued contribution to society.
1996, page 9
Of all the Māori weaving techniques, raranga is the one that has best survived. … it also has the strongest links with Pacific Island weaving.
1999, page 44
The early childhood curriculum, Te Whāriki, explains that everything we do has an impact on learning and teaching. We use the term 'whāriki' to describe the day-to-day, collective weaving of curriculum for our tamariki. The way we weave together the distinct pattern of our curriculum defines what we do and how we do it.
As members of an early childhood education service, we belong to a community of weavers, working together to provide the best possible learning and teaching for children.
'Ngā Arohaehae Whai Hua | Self-review Guidelines for Early Childhood Education' builds on the weaving metaphor introduced in Te Whāriki by supporting us to examine the whāriki that each early childhood education service weaves for its children.
Raranga is the technique used across cultures to weave a whāriki | mat. The metaphor of raranga can provide a way of understanding review. The process of raranga reminds us to pause in our work, to look closely at the way our curriculum whāriki has been woven, and to evaluate our practice.
Raranga is known as lalaga in some Pacific communities.
This document uses raranga imagery to guide us through the process of review. Review is an important part of what we do together to generate growth through improvement. By pausing in our work and evaluating the effectiveness of our curriculum, we have opportunities to transform practice. Such is the nature of review.
Te pūnaha arohaehae | The review process