About Kagan New Zealand
Where it all began…
When Jennie Moore attended an introductory session with Laurie Kagan in 2005, she could never have envisaged how much her life had just changed. For Jennie it wasn’t a huge paradigm shift as she’d been doing what she thought was cooperative learning, but it was really group work. Plus, normal cooperative learning doesn’t provide teachers with the ability to develop social and communication skills the way Kagan does.
Excited about Kagan’s ability to seamlessly teach and deliver every aspect of both ends of the New Zealand Curriculum, without any add-on programmes, Jennie could see this was something she could not let go. New Zealand needed this!
Skip to 18 years later and she and her husband Allan are the proud franchisees for New Zealand and the Pacific. What’s even more amazing is that Allan is a builder, not an educator, but he too is convinced of the difference Kagan can make to every community in New Zealand, by growing empathetic and kind people.
Kagan was founded in the late 1960s by Dr Spencer Kagan, a psychologist, who found that structuring cooperative interactions made a significant difference to race relations and interpersonal skills. And so the structural approach to cooperative learning was born. Laurie Kagan, a previous lead educator for the state of Nevada, is responsible for the workshops we now deliver worldwide. Kagan has a wealth of expertise and experience to support teachers and trainers around the world. If we don’t have the answer, we know someone who will!
Even though Kagan was developed in the USA, it’s an approach that can be implemented anywhere due to there being no content in any of the Kagan structures. Cooperative learning is the most researched educational strategy of all time, but only Kagan provides schools with a one-stop-approach for culture-building, creating safe and inclusive classrooms, accelerating student achievement, increasing oral language and communication skills, and ensuring student engagement, equity, and excellence.
About Jennie
Jennie Moore is the driving force behind Kagan NZ. Ever since she was little, Jennie knew she wanted to be a teacher. (Well apart from being an air hostess, but this was in the days where you had to be over 5’2” - so that wasn’t an option.)
Training in Wellington in the early 1980s was an exciting time for a girl from Westport. She was the last crew through on a full salary, so didn’t need to ‘work’ her way through three years of teacher training, meaning she had fun, and most of her closest friends are from that period in time.
Wellington Teachers College had a very comprehensive training plan - every year level, every decile, and out in schools often. The final year started with three weeks in school to learn how to start the year, then every section was at that school, culminating with six weeks of sole charge in Term 3. Trainees came out feeling like they knew how to teach (but there was still a lot to learn.)
So if you do the maths, Jennie has been teaching for quite some time - with a few breaks here and there. Over her career she has pretty much done everything: NE to Year 8; Low decile to high decile; Reading Recovery; Gifted and Talented class; Relieving; Special Needs Teacher; RTLB; Team Leader; Deputy Principal; and Principal. During this time she completed her B.Ed,. P.G. Dip. Ed., and Masters of Education.
Now she is Director of Kagan New Zealand and loving that she gets to work with teachers and schools across New Zealand, and the world in some cases. The pics show her training a group of teachers in Singapore.
Kagan is Worldwide
Kagan has established franchises in many countries. Franchises offer the only Kagan authorised and certified workshops in their respective countries. Each franchise has trainers who have been rigorously trained and who have passed demanding testing to become a Kagan International Certified Trainer. Quality training in the Kagan methods is assured only by working with Kagan trained and certified trainers.
“The power of Kagan lies not only in what it can do for schools, but what it can do for their communities.”
- Jennie Moore
Casey Simson
Jennie Moore
Trish Mackay
Kagan Summer Academy is held in Orlando, Florida every July. Over a 1000 teachers from all over the USA attend this fortnight and is the one time of the year when the international franchises induct and train new and existing trainers, and reconnect and share stories, successes, and more. It’s a whole lot of fun and not to be missed!
Pictured above are some of the Kagan Downunder crew, along with myself, Casey and Trish, two extremely busy DPs, who are also part-time Kagan trainers, and my main support team here in New Zealand.
