2025 MIT - KICKSTART HUI

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” 
Sir Isaac Newton

As part of the ManaiaKalani Innovative Teacher 2025 squad, we started our year with a 3-day retreat in Kūaotunu in the Coromandel. 

Late Thursday afternoon, the 2025 MIT cohort arrived in Kūaotunu where we were warmly welcomed by Matt and Dorothy. After settling into our stunning accommodations, we kicked off the evening by enjoying a delicious dinner spread prepared by Jenny. It was the perfect opportunity to mingle and get to know one another in a relaxed, welcoming atmosphere before kicking off with the first session after dinner.

After dinner, we were straight into it. Dorothy began the retreat with an inspiring presentation on Manaiakalani: A Community of Innovators. 

In this presentation, Dorothy showcased the initiatives and achievements of intrepid innovators who contributed in the early days of ManaiaKalani such as Allanah King (whom I had the privilege to meet and hear talk at a conference  - so inspirational!), Tim from Mount Aspiring, and Derek, the founder of Core Education. We learned about how their endeavors in the early days helped Manaiakalani to prosper and achieve the success they have had over the years. Dorothy also shared with us some amazing impact stories regarding teachers who have really taken on being early adopters in the world of blogging and podcasting and are using it as a catalyst for educational success. The big takeaway messages from the presentation were the principles of purpose, passion, partnership, perseverance, and proof forming the foundation for addressing educational challenges, equity, access, and change.

And lastly, to wrap up the evening, we were treated with a message from the 2023 MIT crew, offering advice for the year ahead. The most important messages I took away from the video were...

• Staying open to new ideas
• Really refining and honing in on one focus
• Seeking feedback at every step of the journey
• Test, test, test!
• Start early
• Leaning on MIT peers for support.

Our Friday sessions introduced us to Design Thinking which is a way to solve problems using a human centered process that focuses on empathy and testing different solutions to find the best one.

The first activity helped familiarise us with the concept of design thinking. In this activity, we had to roleplay being parents with diverse backgrounds within the Kōautunu School community. The context was we were attending a school meeting with the principal and the chairperson of the BoT. At this hui, we were presented with a range of challenges that the kura was facing and we had to question what the kura was doing to address these issues and offer solutions. This exercise helped us to connect with the problems from a variety of perspectives and introduced us to the idea of empathising which would help us further on in the day. 

It wasn't until we got halfway through that I realised that these were in fact OUR challenges that we had put forward in our initial interviews to be a part of MIT 2025! I thought it was a powerful way to share everyone's focus challenges and to get people's initial reactions to the problems.

Next, we had to work in pairs to create a short skit that illustrated our own problem in action. This invoked empathy for the problem which helped deepen our understanding of the issue. I worked with Zana and we both prepared 2 short skits for each of our challenges. My skit featured two teachers—one in a kura Māori and the other in a mainstream kura. They meet and talk about their weekends. The teacher from the mainstream kura describes a relaxing weekend, while the kura Māori teacher is shocked, having spent the entire weekend preparing literacy lessons—finding readers, creating resources, and uploading online mahi. When she asks her colleague how she had time to relax, she learns her friend prepped everything during a lunch break using tools like Twinkl and online reading programs. The skit highlights the inequities between resources available to mainstream and kura Māori teachers and emphasises the extra time and effort kaiako Māori must invest in delivering high-quality lessons and resources.

The above roleplays helped shift our focus to the users and consider how they might be affected. The next step in the Design Process was to create an Empathy Map. 

The process for this step is to gather as much information as possible about the problem by understanding the context and viewing the issue from the perspective of the user. We were encouraged to empathise with each user’s experience by answering four key questions:

• What does the user do?
• What does the user say?
• What does the user think?
• What does the user feel?

For my empathy maps, I focused on te taha kaiako me te taha ākonga.

Moving on from the empathy map activity, we used the following statement to hone in and really start to define the problem. I found this activity helpful as it made me realise who the true owner of the problem was and made me pinpoint what the actual needs were. This was my end statement:

Next, we moved on to "How might we turn this problem into an opportunity. My end HMW statement focused on how might kaiako access this online literacy content and also share their existing content:

The final part of this activity we were given Post-It notes and asked to peruse others' sheets and think about opportunities connected to their project using sentence starters such as... "Have you thought...". "Could you...", "Is this an opportunity to...".  

There were some really great suggestions on mine, some of which I had already started to look into, and some I had not considered

For our last session of the day, we focused on IDEATE. The activity was the Crazy 8. Coming up with 8 ideas in a short time span. Using our How Might We statements, we had to come up with 8 solutions for our problem - no matter how crazy, far fetched or left field the ideas may be! I found this activity valuable, as I tend to be someone who quickly jumps to what I believe is the best solution, without fully considering other possibilities.

We revisited this activity the following day. We had to go around and read each others' Crazy 8's and leave little round coloured stickers on our options that we favoured.  As a final round we had to go back and leave one sticker on our favourite idea from each Crazy 8 presentation.  This meant we ended up with 1 or 2 clear favourite options.

Our last session of the retreat focused on creating a list of those in our support networks using the BAR thinking tool (Bigger, Add, Remove). We were asked to make an extensive list of support people including whānau, friends, work colleagues & connections and to consider others in networks such as ManaiaKalani, Kahui Ako, RTLB, tech companies, and so on. Lastly, we were asked to add someone we could only WISH was in our support list and someone CRAZY and then we were asked to narrow down our selection. I found this activity was helpful as it helped conscientise me to whom I have in my circle and helped me identify certain people I would go to for particular reasons such as my whānau to support my wairua and hinengaro, my hoa kaimahi for testing prototypes and testing ideas, my reo matatini guru's for support with literacy ideas and my tech people to support with all my tech-y problems.

What an amazing few days! I thought we got through so much! I appreciated being guided through this design process as usually I skip all this and go straight to the creating. It made me take a step back and really consider who the stakeholders are, their needs and its made me really think through all the solutions.

I look forward to seeing everyone real soon at the first KPMG hui!