Leadership 3:
Leading Partnerships & Collaborations

An online course from The Education Hub

This is the personal workbook of

Notes and reflections from Part 1. Collaborating with families

The importance of collaboration

Collaborations with families and whānau are important because...

Develop your leadership

To begin, reflect on the extent and quality of participation, collaboration, and partnership with families and whānau at the present time in your setting. Which families would you describe as participating, and what form does this participation take? How influential is what families contribute on the early childhood setting’s practices and on children’s learning? (Do you use what you receive well?) Which opportunities for participation are not being taken up by families? Why do you think that is? Take a large piece of paper, and begin to sketch out some of the factors and influences that encourage or inhibit the capacity of families to participate and contribute to your early childhood setting. This might be things like the demands of work, meal preparation, allergies, transportation, confidence, cultural expectations and beliefs, and experience. Consider what you know about their lives outside of the setting. You might like to upload it here:

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If you like, you can extend your investigation into potential barriers to participation by talking to some key people in your setting – this might be other teachers, or family members themselves. Try to find out about their lives outside of the early childhood setting, the pressures they experience, and the pastimes they value, as well as which opportunities to participate in the early childhood setting families find useful, or not, and why. Update your Voices Wheel with some of your reflections, observations, and conversations. Add it here:

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Strategies that support collaboration

Practices I currently use: New ideas:

Parent partnership

Notes:

Look again at the list of positive outcomes of parent partnership that you encountered in the previous reading.

How many of these do you think are dependent on the forms of partnership at the bottom of the ladder (emerging and consolidated partnership)? How many will not be likely to be achieved through informing, consulting, and placating forms of partnership?

At what level of partnership would you describe the majority of relationships with families and whānau in your early childhood setting? Is there some variation – for example, are there some families with which you experience a stronger level of partnership, and some families for which partnership remains somewhat superficial, or perhaps non-existent? If there are differences, what do you attribute them to?

What are the families in your centre able, wanting, and willing to do?

The ethic of hospitality

What aspects of the developing partnership model (strengthening relationships, creating reciprocity, developing mutual goals and aspirations, and shared decision-making) do you see in the descriptions of practice offered by all three speakers?

Strategies for orienting to collaboration with families and whānau:

Consider the most recent interaction you have had with a family member.

What was going through your head? What ideas that you have read about in this part so far could help you to be more present?

It’s not always easy

The speakers in the previous video suggest there are many reasons why families seem distant and difficult to reach, sensitive, easily upset, and even confrontational, many of which are factors outside of the early childhood setting context.

Are there families attending your setting (or who have attended in the past) that you would describe like this? What factors outside of the early childhood setting context might be impacting on these families, and creating some of these problems?

Which of the modes of response would you identify as focused on the relationship? Which are focused on outcomes? Is there a middle-ground which focuses on both?

Can you think of an example of a situation in which avoidance would be an appropriate strategy? Or when compromise would be a good course of action?

Consider how using each of these modes of response to family’s disagreements and challenges makes you feel.

Imagine, for example, you only ever avoided issues with families and whānau – how would this make you feel? How would you feel if you always accommodated families’ wishes? Or if you always asserted your way? How would you feel if you were always compromising some of your values and beliefs in order to meet families half-way? Finally, how do you think regularly solving issues by collaborating with families would make you feel?

Notes and reflections from Part 2. Culturally responsive collaborations

Cultural generalisations

How does the concept of generalisation and practices for keeping generalisation in check align with your understanding of the ethic of hospitality introduced in Part 1?

Develop your leadership

You might like to upload your updated Voices Wheel here:

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Culturally responsive pedagogy

Notes:

How could culturally diverse families be disadvantaged if early childhood settings do not implement culturally responsive practices?

How many supports on the list above depend on teachers’ and leaders’ strong collaborations with whānau?

Superdiversity

How much do you know about the migration patterns and statuses of the families in your early childhood setting? What challenges do you think these migration statuses create for your families?

Culturally responsive practices

What starting points are suggested for culturally responsive actions?

Who leads cultural activities and skill development?

Drawing on cultural expertise

What cultural expertise in yourself, your team, your families and children, and your community do you currently draw on?

Think critically about this.

How authentic and meaningful is this cultural content, or might it be somewhat superficial? Does it enable a platform for deeper cultural values to be understood and promoted?

Also think about how people with culturally diverse expertise feel about contributing their knowledge and skills.

How do you think the people with whom you collaborate for culturally relevant content in your programme experience this collaboration?

What lessons have you learned from your attempts at collaborations with culturally diverse families? In what ways were the misunderstandings or mistakes that occurred a result of assumptions on your part, or the part of the family or community members you were partnering with?

Notes and reflections from Part 3. Inclusion and social justice.

Develop your leadership

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Inclusion

Values demonstrated in inclusionary practices include:

How does a complexity theory perspective help you to conceptualise collaboration, and the conditions needed for successful collaborations that enhance the ‘system’ of the early childhood setting?

What kinds of habits in your early childhood setting might form barriers to flexible and adaptive practices that are responsive to the diverse needs of families? What kinds of beliefs, behaviours, and values might restrict your potential to offer families truly flexible options for their children’s care and education? How might the ethic of hospitality help you with overcoming these?

Social justice

Think about your respective understandings of the concepts of inclusion and social justice. How do you perceive that they relate to each other? You might like to draw a diagram to reflect this and upload it here:

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How do you see these principles as supporting inclusive and socially-just practice for children and their families? Which are most helpful? Which do you think might not be relevant?

Can you relate this understanding of vertical and horizontal identity to yourself?

Which identities were passed to you by your parents and family background? Do you hold any horizontal identities? If so, in which communities do you feel a sense of belonging related to this identity? Could you describe the way in which you approach and live life as a person with this identity as a culture?

 

Neurodiversity

How might the neurodiversity paradigm and the social model of disability assist you to think differently about supporting neurodivergent and disabled children and their families in your early childhood setting? How does this way of viewing neurodiversity (as a natural and valuable form of diversity) connect with the way you think about cultural diversity?

How would you manage a situation in which a family provided only chocolate-based products for their child’s snacks (chocolate biscuits, chocolate yoghurt, and chocolate spread), if the promotion of healthy eating was an important principle of practice for your teaching team and part of your centre philosophy?

Trauma-informed practice

Think about the families that attend your early childhood setting, and perhaps also the local community. Remembering Madeleine’s comment that trauma is a ‘psychologically stressful’ event or series of events, what potential or actual traumas and stressors can you identify for families?

Notes:

Notes and reflections from Part 4. Collaborating with children

Why collaborate with children?

My feeling about their perspectives:

Develop your leadership

You might like to add your updated Voices Wheel here:

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The rights of the child

What different assumptions about children are mentioned?

What is your image of the child? Spend a moment writing it down or creating a visual about it.

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If your image of the child was being enacted every day in your early childhood setting, what practices would you see? Does everything you do and say reflect this image of the child? Are there practices, language, and behaviours that perhaps communicate beliefs about the ‘cuteness’ of children, or that are aimed at protecting their ‘innocence’? Are there perhaps behaviours and language that reflect a belief that children cannot be trusted to make appropriate choices? In what ways might consulting with children in ways such as those outlined in the Developing leadership activity for this part, and, importantly, acting on that consultation, support a positive image of the child as competent and capable?

What does participation mean to you? What does it mean for a child to be an ‘active participant’ in their learning and education? What qualities and skills do children need to develop to be active participants in their learning and in their education? What is the teacher’s or leaders’ role, do you think?

Listening to children

How could you enable listening to children in your centre?

What concerns, interests, and passions do children bring to your setting? How do these connect with things that are also of issue and concern for the wider society? Are there ways that you could connect children’s interests with your own leadership responsibilities towards promoting equity and social justice? If you are not aware of children’s thinking about wider societal issues, why is that? What potential do you believe children have for contributing to these issues?

How well do you think your teaching team(s) are listening to children and using what they learn to co-construct curriculum? If not well, is this an area you might select for an improvement journey? What specifically are the skills and understandings that you think are missing?

Active listening

How accomplished are your team at listening to children? Would you describe teachers’ intent for listening to children to extend beyond trivial matters (such as colour of paint) towards a deep and respectful curiosity around children’s opinions and beliefs?

There are implications for the leadership of an early childhood setting here, as the child’s participation depends on the teacher’s availability and capacity to observe and interpret the child’s intentions, to take the child’s perspective and try to experience some of the child’s way of understanding and expressing themselves.

What do you think these implications are?

Equity and social justice in collaborating with children

In what ways do you think the participatory pedagogies of free play, choice, and self-initiated activity might serve to limit children’s decision-making about their learning?

What role do you think there is for the leader and for teachers in ensuring that collaborations with children are focused on, as well as characterised by, social justice and equity for all? How does an intention for equity and social justice change the way you view listening to children and supporting children’s decision-making?

Consulting with children

What agency do children in your setting have across a range of everyday interactions and routines? Do you and your team consider children’s rights when children push against the rules of the setting? Are there times when you and your team need to override children’s right to participate in decisions in order to protect children from harm? How can and do you maintain children’s agency at these times?

What kinds of things can leaders do to support teachers to enable children’s decision-making in the more routine aspects of the setting’s practice?

You might find it helpful to think about the image of the child here. 

How does your centre ensure that children’s participation and best interests are at the heart of practice?