I am weary and a little nervous

I have just written a blog post for the Kōrepo blog which sums up some of the progress we have made so far. I think we have done really well for the first two terms, I think we've come a long way.

Things I am proud of:

• Working as a collaborative team - avoiding top down decisions where possible
• Sticking to our vision that we created last year for learning as much as possible and referring back to it
• Inducting new people into our team (Parintorn, Maddie, Ripeka) and getting them on board with the learning even though they weren't there last year.
• Managing people's grievances with as little collateral damage as possible (Melody) 
• Developing my idea of leadership, and what it means to be a leader that needs to work with a large group of people, but also keep the idea of leadership. 

It's been challenging, but as I reflect it has been really fun too. I think I have missed the challenge over the last 2 years...

I'm weary of the behaviour issues though, and I wonder how long the staff will be able to put up with being abused both physically and emotionally. I am nervous about who will stay and who will leave at the end of the year, and whether we will have to start again with a lot of this stuff with new people. 

I wonder what we can actually do about it - some say that learning and behaviour go hand in hand, and I do believe that, and have seen it with these students when they do things like go to the skate park; they are awesome. But the rest of the time they are a battle. So can we do that all the time then? What is the balance for preparing these students to be ready for the future, and keeping them engaged so that we don't have the extreme behaviours? 

When is it too much? 

How can we cater appropriately for both ends of the spectrum is still one of my major questions. 

We have divideed students up into four categories - 

extremely disengaged/peer pressured/learning at a different pace/ready to learn.

Perhaps these groups will allow us to focus on what these students desperately need. 

I sincerely hope this is an answer for my, and my team's Hauora.