Collaboration: first lessons

This week Dan and I trialled our first collaborative teaching lesson.  The idea had come from some of our students who wanted to combine the classes.  Dan and I decided that we would run a series of weekly combined skills sessions, as we only have one hour per week where our year 10 teaching slots align.

We wanted to support students to read a range of unfamiliar texts (poetry, prose & non-fiction) and show their understanding of the ideas in each text and how they are developed.  Secondary English teachers will be familiar with the dearth of publicly available resources targeted at level five of the New Zealand Curriculum.  A few ARBs (Assessment Resource Bank) and that is it.  Primary schools have the School Journals, and senior secondary schools are well resourced with NCEA activities.

Dan has the Sport in Education class and has done a great job of orienting texts and topics for study towards the sports interests of his students.  When you look at the non-fiction resource Dan has created, you can see how he has used SOLO thinking to explicitly scaffold students into higher order thinking.  We did a lot of work on SOLO a few years ago in the English Department at Grey High, and while we still value it hugely, it hasn't had the same centre-stage focus as new initiatives and their accompanying vocabulary have come through, such as Learn-Create-Share and UDL (Universal Design for Learning).

I made a poetry resource.  The idea is that all students will develop their skills across poetry, prose and non-fiction, but they will be able to exercise choice about the order and the texts they use to develop their skills.

Our chosen shared platform for delivering the content to our students was workspace, part of the Hapara suite of tools for online classrooms.  Whereas I find blogging to be the most useful access (live and rewindable) point for my classes, Dan has honed his skills with Workspace and uses it effectively for all of his classes.  BUT...... Thursday was router change day for Grey High, with no internet for a chunk of the day, and unreliable access for other parts.  The photocopiers were running red hot across the school!!!!

We had a quick starter in my class with both groups together and then students could choose which task they wanted to do.  Poetry students stayed with me and non-fiction students went with Dan to room 15.  Some students wanted to stay as close as possible to their safe and familiar classroom, and expressed reservations, while others jumped with both feet and set up mixed groups for their learning.  My favourite new learning for the day was going through the poem (Mother to Son by Langston Hughes) with a young man who I'd only ever known in a duty discipline context before and discussing stairs and skateboarding.  I will look at all stairs a little differently after that thoughtful conversation.

It was the first paper session in a long time, and what frustrated me is that out of the session, I have no evidence of who completed what and with what level of understanding.  On chromebooks, whether we used forms, workspace, smartsharing into google folders, Socrative, Padlet or Kahoots, I would have information which I could use for identifying next steps in our class learning.

The class was loud!  But it was a cheerful learning noise and it was a start.

We collected some feedback at the end, using a method Jo Newton had used with my class a few weeks ago, that gave students a low stakes opportunity to identify which aspects of the lesson they had enjoyed and would do again (see image above).

Dan and I reflected afterwards that we had made a good start, and are now ready to make some modifications.  Our first activity was in substitution mode (using the parlance of the SAMR model).  We gave students enhanced levels of choice, and gave them more scope to tap into the social nature of learning, but our learning activities were the same as if we had been running separate activities.  Before next Thursday, we are going to research and come up with a starter which has students moving and mingling, and then think about how we can take advantage of having two teachers across a larger group (c.48 students) to give the students different opportunities to learn, to create and then to share their learning.

I would like to do some Socrative work across the larger group, and then run some team game tournaments.  Then we could get some blogging going, sharing our progress on digging deeper into texts and developing confidence with showing understanding in extended paragraphs.

Dan's class have explored using movement in their learning, and I'm keen to learn from both Dan and his class to get some ideas to literally spread our wings.

If you are reading this and are at another Manaiakalani Outreach cluster secondary school, please get in touch.  The primary schools have done a lot of successful work with Tuhi mai tuhi atu, but we have yet to make connections across schools in our junior secondary learning environments, and I'd like us to build some more bridges for ourselves and for our students.