About Us

Paddy is a Media Studies and Drama teacher. As Paddy's brainchild, M.A.D. underwent many iterations before emerging as a timetabled elective class. The goal was to provide students with authentic opportunities to develop content creation skills that they could translate to the real world while also benefiting the school community.

M.A.D. is a student run class and Paddy works as a member of the group helping where his skill set allows but mostly learning from the knowledge the students bring as digital natives.

Paddy believes that using digital and social media M.A.D. is able to help the school more effectively build, develop and maintain the culture and community of the school. The technical skill set students develop in M.A.D. is becoming increasingly relevant and important for any groups or businesses that maintain an online presence which is what drives Paddy to push his students to learn as much as they can across all forms of media creation.

Paddy also relishes the opportunity to work with students in M.A.D. to develop their soft skills as they work in teams to create media for a diverse range of the school community

Deputy Principal Lisa is an expert in learning. She has had an extensive educational career, working across a range of sectors. Her ability to challenge the thinking of others around the nature of learning and to inspire with ideas for action, creates change. Lisa is dedicated to empowering people.

She develops innovative practices that maximise the learning experiences in areas such as curriculum design, professional development, effective use of technology in a blended learning environment and fulfilling the learning needs of ākonga in a bicultural context.

Working mainly in low socio-economic areas she has been both a Primary and Secondary teacher; a Specialist Classroom teacher, and a community literacy and numeracy tutor where she helped people to gain employment. She held a leadership position as a teacher trainer at the New Zealand Graduate School of Education and in 2019 was a boma Education Fellow studying innovation, technology and exponential thinking.

Lisa is known as an enabler, having superior leadership capacity, she is passionate about making a difference to ākonga so that they can make a positive difference in our world. She combines her educational experience with future focused thinking to create innovative learning experiences.

With a team of ākonga, Lisa uses social media in a creative and socially conscious way to provide a learning platform, to use technology to inform, promote and celebrate Riccarton High School to its community, and to promote social action.

Kiera Brown is one of the communications directors for 2022 and a year 13 student at Riccarton High School.

Kiera’s media journey began in 2021 when she joined both MAD and media studies at Riccarton High School, however she’s been analysing film and writing stories since she could write. She’s always been interested in editing and creating works to entertain and educate, leading her to the worlds of both media and the performing arts.

She believes that the way to bridge the gap between the older and younger generations is through social media, and aspires to use the school social media as a way of educating and informing the wider school community.

Before being communications director she was head of MAD’s design, overlooking the creation of social media posts, posters, among other amazing projects. She has also appeared in many episodes of The Riccarton Report. Kiera has aspirations to study a bachelor of communications and move onto teaching later in life.

Lachie MacKechnie is one of the communications directors for 2022 and a year 12 student at Riccarton High School.