Making progress

Today was chaos.  I'd made a commitment to support professional learning around Learn-Create-Share and digital immersion in our school, and suddenly it was time for a Term 3 focus on sharing.  I didn't feel I had anything new to offer from my classroom practice.

After lots of brainstorming and thoughtful discussion with colleagues about types of sharing and the roles of digital immersion and authentic audiences, I decided to offer a workshop on Pinterest and collaboration.  Had I used Pinterest for school even once ever?  I had not.  But I have been playing with Padlet with some success in each of my classes, and I knew that students often like visual rather than text cues.  I had a window to do some experimenting with my Level 2 class before the workshop, or so I thought.

Last week I put the wheels in motion for Pinterest to be whitelisted for students and staff and I started to play.  Yesterday there was still a glitch for student access which was sorted by this morning. This afternoon, utterly and precariously close to my staff workshop, my students could not access the Pinterest website.

Sometimes technology sucks.  Even when you have superb IT staff.  I came close to meltdown, and even chocolate barely touched the sides of my despair.

But we have fabulous, kind and flexible teachers at Grey High, and after a quick conference with those who had signed up to my session, I had a mandate to run a Pinterest session focused on staff collation and curation, with a side-serving of Padlet, and the knowledge that capacity for staff-student and student-student collaboration will come - soon.

It turned out okay.  We had a whole hour to play with one tool, and teachers started to get enthusiastic.  I got to talk Padlet where Pinterest wasn't working so well.  I realised I'd made more progress with embedding Padlet than I'd given myself credit for.  My students are not up for blogging right now, but they are participating with authentic audiences (each other) and it is rewindable through our class blogs.  Here are some examples: Collecting and processing texts showing differing perspectives on controversial issues,  Reflecting on the short film Fritters, analysing the pub scene in Day Trip (embedded below), and identifying and collating connected advertisements for the Level One connections unit.

My inquiry this year is focused on using learn-create-share to lift engagement in my classes.  My next steps now are to develop and send out a survey to get student voice on exactly this, to augment the student voice on engagement and stretch collected by my appraiser when he observed me earlier this term.  I am going to trial news ways of collecting resources (Pinterest) and presenting information (not sure yet, but something with paragraphs and mindmaps online) for my US25073 standard.  And to walk on the beach more often.

Mawhera CoL training day with Vision Education

Our awesome English teaching team identify top literacy priorities for this year:
1. How to interrogate the text
2. Know how to apply different writing strategies, e.g. sentence structure and organisation, for different text types.
3. Understand the thinking processes behind key English verbs, e.g. "show understanding" (level one), "analyse" (level two) & "critically respond" (level three)

Metacognition

I went to another CoL meeting today.  Part of me was thinking with my big picture hat on about how we can best utilise the resources of Alison Davis at Grey High across all of our learning areas and all of our teachers.  As Alison filled the board with her enthusiasm and samples of the work she could do with our CoL teachers, another part of me was noting all the strategies and thinking that I should be doing lots more meta-cognition with my year 13 class.

I am now one month into teaching a new course called English for Academic Purposes to year 13 students who wish to pursue a university pathway but know they need more support to bring their literacy skills up to speed.  We developed the course in response to the significant numbers of students who needed to upskill on their literacy for university but were not interested in the study of English Literature.  "No more metaphors" was one message I received when gathering student voice :).  We are required to assess one standard in Term One for all senior courses at our school, a policy which I understand and support, even though it can be quite challenging at Level 3.

We are focusing on our reading skills this term, and will be assessing the reading standard at the end of term.  We have looked at a range of texts and practised the various useful skills described in the standard.  We've looked at tourism in New Zealand, texting & driving, NZ's stunt school, a baby killer and the school starting age.  More details are on my class blog.  I am looking ahead to being able to support students with their assignments in other subjects, and have collected assignment sheets and exemplars today for Business Studies, Biology & Health.

I had run from teaching EAP313 and setting relief for my students for the second part of their double lesson so I could attend the meeting, and I knew that I didn't have the formula right for the class.  As a new course, and given that students often chose the course because they couldn't work out what else to take, or they knew they needed it but kind of wished they could ignore literacy, none of us has a radiant vision of what this course could optimally be.

I'm not sure yet what my big picture next steps are for altering the course design to make it more connected and engaging, but I know my small picture next steps are to incorporate more meta-cognition in my activities with the class, and get them using their strategies in a practice assessment.  Although I've identified my Level 2 class as my inquiry focus at this stage of the year, all my classes need focus, and all of them need meta-cognition development.  Alison Davis today talked about lifting the bar on teacher's default settings, the strategies they resort to when they are exhausted and short of time.  I could see how making more and more meta-cognition integral to my classroom work could lift my default setting performance.

On the upside, we ran multiple workshops at our Toki toolkit yesterday and teacher voice was really positive about the practical focus.  Strategies + practice + choice = engagement + achievement.  

Inquiry: setting my compass

Every year, I'm involved in supporting senior high school students and parents through their decision making process about which is the right English course for them.  They (we) navigate the requirements for tertiary pathways, the University Entrance specifications, endorsement for NCEA, what is interesting to them and what is the best match for their skills.  Most parents and students find understanding how NCEA works a little tricky, and parents of several children are sometimes frustrated to find that just as they felt they understood how it all works, the rules change in some significant way.

At the beginning of each year, I feel the same.  Many aspects of school are similar each year, but significant change is also a constant, and I need to take time and enlist support to work out what my priorities will be for the year.  The more involved I have become with the life of the school, the more I have understood about documents like the annual plan and how I can contribute to its goals, sometimes as a classroom teacher, sometimes as an HOD English and/or a Literacy Leader, and this year as a CoL within schools leader.  That understanding is always hard won, as I question and reflect and work out what is practical and how to lead by example.

This year we continue on our journey towards a radical reshaping of our teaching practice using the learn-create-share philosophy.  Our school is committed to making this central to our teaching and learning work.  All of our Mawhera CoL commitments to numeracy, boys' writing, culturally responsive pedagogy and lifting NCEA Level Two achievement are grouped together under the commitment to learn-create-share.  Making this a reality is part of the project of our CoL within schools leaders.

I spent most of yesterday with fellow Learn-Create-Share leaders from across our Toki Punamu cluster and then with fellow Mawhera CoL within and across school leaders.  By the end of the day, I was a little overwhelmed.

The only way to make it work for me, and I think the best way, is to step back from the bigger picture of what support for other teachers means this year and focus myself on what I will do with learn-create-share and our annual plan in my own classroom.

I have a Level Two Communications English class this year.  Three years ago, I wasn't happy with what I achieved with the equivalent programme, and I am really keen to learn from the successful work done by two of my colleagues in 2015 & 2016 to make this course engaging and relevant.  A new and positive development for students on this course in 2017 is that they all have their own chromebooks, and there is space to experiment with our learning process in quite new ways.

My big goal is for all of my students to achieve 15 credits by sustaining engagement in English and to take significant skills from the course into their later working and learning lives.  Some students have come in to the course without Level One Literacy, so adapting tasks for them to meet their achievement goals is also important.  Over time I anticipate that I will also have specific target students who are at risk of not achieving NCEA Level Two, but we don't have those names just yet.

My this-coming fortnight goal with my ENC212 students is to take the discussion skills we have been building through our work on Smash Palace, Under the Bridge and a seminar at school on The Teenage Brain by Nathan Mikaere-Wallis and tie them with written texts related to one of these topics.  I want us to use on screen texts which we annotate and then use screencastify to discuss.  This work will form our evidence for US2989 Select, read and assess texts for gaining knowledge (3 credits, Level 2).

I can use the Learn-Create-Share tools shared by Madeline Campbell and Dorothy Burt as my pedagogical basis for this experimentation, and I'm lucky that our across schools lead teacher, Karen Schwabe, has taught this course before, and I'm going to ask her to come and observe me and share her thoughts on what is working and what we can tweak.  This year our principal is my appraiser and so he can observe and give feedback on the next stage of my inquiry.  Classroom focused inquiry is how I will keep my feet on the ground, and work with others will grow from there.