The 2019 reading project: takeoff!

Yesterday at our HOD forum, we looked at the draft proposals for our annual plan objectives and targets, based on the data and discussion presented at our annual plan middle leaders' hui last month.  Reading will definitely be a school objective and target, and we considered the challenge of how to measure reading progress throughout the year.

For me, measuring is irrelevant if we don't unpack our processes with teaching reading.  I've mentioned before (I think....) my frustration with the current state of reading guidance for secondary schools.  Lots of good ideas, lots of links on TKI which are often for primary audiences, but I know something is missing.  It could be that it is missing from my world and I find nirvana just by doing some more research.  Or it could be (more likely), that we need to start by locating ourselves in the student's experience, and building up from there.

So, yesterday afternoon we started with unpacking the PAT reading experience.  In blue below is the task I set up for us to work on in our department meeting time.

Unpacking PAT reading: Tuesday 11 December 2018

We will each work with a photocopied set of the PAT Test Seven booklet (typically used with Year 10 classes).  I will have highlighters and scissors available. We will work through the following questions on paper (so old school!  I’m all about tactile at the moment, and then taking photos to upload for records and next steps).

1. Can you code each question: blue = on the lines; orange = between the lines; green = beyond the lines?
2. What is the essential vocabulary for each question which not all of our students will have?  Make a list.
3. Is it feasible for us to integrate this vocabulary into our teaching?  Ethical?
4. What other skills are needed to decode the answers?  Make a list and link the skill to a specific question(s).  E.g. p3, q1 requires understanding of connotation.
5. What key competencies/dispositions are needed for students to demonstrate their best skills in this test?
6. Next steps/questions for 2019?

We were blown away by the experience. We all thought that the test is very difficult. It is very 'white' and 'middle class' in terms of the texts ("The lore of finchland"?!). The demands of the vocabulary in the text are considerable, and the process of making the inferences required to answer many questions correctly requires three steps and strong visualisation skills. Key next steps for me/us include:

• The first set of questions is really difficult, possibly the most difficult in the test. We need to flag this to our students, and help them develop their resilience to keep concentrating, and not to give up and make random or close to random choices for their answers.

• Provide a paper copy of the test for the students. As with the Unfamiliar text exams for NCEA, students will answer online, but have the ability to underline, highlight, circle and do any other annotation which supports their processing. We noted for the Science text in particular, that the questions were on the lines questions, but they required close reading of the text to isolate the precise step which answers the question. Doing that manually is much easier than only being able to use our eyes to search for a specific piece of information.

• There are some processes tested which are specific to Maths and specific to Science. Using my Literacy Leader hat, I could break these skills down and share the expectations with the relevant departments in my school.

• The level of inference that the test asks for is very high. For example, one question asks the reader to choose the best word to describe the sea. When I went searching for the keyword "sea," it was nowhere in the text. I then looked for words which referred to the water, and found Pukewai Harbour. All good for the student who knows the word harbour, not so much for the student who does not. Then the phrase in the text was "Pukewai harbour was a sheet of bronze." So in order to decide whether the sea was white, choppy, warm, flat or stormy, the student has to identify the reference to a body of water, understand and visualise the metaphor and then evaluate it against four adjectives. That is a 3-4 step process of making inferences, and I think we generally teach two steps of inference.

• Some teachers noted that this seems harder than the Level One Unfamiliar Text paper, and I am inclined to agree. We do really well with our results for Unfamiliar Text at Grey High, and I have wondered before about the relationship (dissonance?) between the closed nature of the norm-referenced reading tests (we used asttle reading before we used PAT reading) and the open nature of the Level Six texts and questions we see a year later. However, PAT Reading tests skills across a much wider area than just English, and interrogating the test from a student's experience has already begun to show us paths for us to be more effective at how we teach critical thinking and close reading.

• We started with PAT reading three years ago, and I think I didn't go near the actual test because it seemed like cheating in some way - that we might be influenced to teach specific vocabulary and that would compromise the test process. This meant that the world of these skills (or the specific PAT manifestation of these skills) stayed quite closed for us. We have spent time (quite a lot of time) analysing the results of the tests, and we have had a valuable session with Cathy Johnson of NZCER looking at how we can make the most of the NZCER data, but that hasn't brought us closer to understanding the student's experience.

• Lauren and I are going to spend some time in January looking at a possible coding system for the different types of reading skills required in this test, and then look developing a skill focus and tracking test for one skill for each term.

Reviewing my 2018 inquiry

My inquiry into using blogging to support the social nature of learning was part of a larger school goal:

How might we improve key competencies for Year 10 in order to experience learning success?

In 2018, I have been conducting my own inquiry into this with my year 10 class (wearing my teacher hat) and leading a professional learning group of six colleagues on this goal (wearing my CoL/Mawhera Kahui Ako within school role hat). Many of the teachers in my PLG also taught my class, so we took advantage of opportunities to collaborate, whether through discussions, observing each other's lessons, or aligning vocabulary and approaches.

Last Monday all of the professional learning groups shared their journeys. Each group had a poster board on which we put summaries for each person for the following headings:

• Improvement Actions (What we did)
• New Learning (What we found out that supported our Inquiry)
• Shifts in thinking / practice (We started thinking x but now we think y...)
• Outcomes for learners (including target students)

Then we all had drinks and nibbles and wandered around reading the poster boards.  The mood was positive and genuinely interested.  Making the spiral of inquiry front and centre to our professional learning at Grey High was our big project as CoL leaders, so it was great to see so much thoughtful and effective work.  Below you can see some GHS staff looking at our poster board.

When I return to my own goal and inquiry process, I am both pleased and wanting to have achieved more. I used a blend of social inclusion strategies and scaffolding of tasks leading to blogging, in order to build a culture of deeper learning and sharing in my classroom.

Outcomes:

• high rates of inclusion in my lessons. Only two referrals in the year, and even for those two students, outside of the week of the referral, lots of evidence of growth in working with me or working with others or both. 
• Student voice (from circle time, restorative meetings, 1:1 interviews) very positive about the supportive environment in English.  
• Growth in students interacting positively with each other.
• Growth in students taking learning risks, both on their own and together.
• The research unit involved students choosing their own topic and sources, learning to evaluate sources, to summarise relevant information and to form conclusions.  I saw many positive effects of the high element of choice, particularly for students who don't love English (or school).
• Progress in students finding a "high school" mode for blogging.  Part of being a teenager is about creating a distance from childhood, and 'selling' blogging has involved creating a distance from primary school blogging.
• I didn't see outcomes reflected in amazing asttle writing scores.  In an environment where students responded best to high levels of choice, these norm-referenced tests were highly restrictive.  Students commented that they found it much easier to write describing the scene on the Greymouth floodwall (one of our practice tasks) than the asttle market prompt.  Of 19 students with beginning and end of year data, 26% made accelerated progress (3+ curriculum sub-levels), 26% made expected progress (2 curriculum sub-levels).  Below this, 21% made one curriculum sub-level of progress, 5% stayed static and 21% went backwards.  
• Even though the work we did as a class this year that I was most pleased with focused on reading skills, they didn't translate to the level of progress I am clear our students need in order to be successful in NCEA.  PAT Reading is a closed test which I don't think draws out the best in our students, but it is the one we have to work with.  Results below:

So, what next?  Two things on top for me that I can change:
1. To set up 2019 with a Friday blogging culture in my junior class, either weekly or fortnightly.  We had some blogging success, but it took quite a while and our frequency wasn't high enough to maximise the culture of sharing.  I need more contexts where the interaction will build deeper understanding.  One on layers of understanding in reading a film could be worth trying.
2. Reading!  Almost a quarter of students going backwards.  Our data across the whole cohort strongly suggests that we need to do more and try new strategies on reading, and think very carefully about our planning for reading opportunities.  Next week in our English department meeting, we are going to take some old paper (we do online testing now) PAT tests and chop them up and organise them according to what skills each question tests, which skills we think we are teaching now, and where there are gaps.  NZCER process a lot of very useful data on the results of the tests, but I want us to start with the student's experience.  Next year is definitely going to be about reading.

Leading Professional Learning Groups: a reflection

This year I have led a group of six fabulous colleagues who are all inquiring into their practice with a focus on building key competency skills with year 10 students in order to lift academic achievement.  We are a team looking at key competencies and achievement through the lens of Technology, Mathematics, Physical Education & Health, English, and Assisted Learning. 

We started with the model of the spiral of inquiry that Suzi Gould shared with us at a PLD session in January of this year.  Lots of teachers with leadership roles across our CoL came together for her session, and started to plumb the depths of what a rich picture you could build from looking at data from the school, from student voice and from whanau voice.

From Term Two onwards, each of our CoL leaders in our school took on leadership of a group focused on one of the school annual plan targets.  Interest in the year 10 target around key competencies and academic achievement was so high that Jayne and I took a year 10 group each.

As I write now, I look back on what I'm really pleased with and what I would like to do differently next year.  Some of this reflection is just for my own experience, and some of it will comprise feedback later this term on how we might all approach this process a little differently in 2019.

The biggest benefit in my view has been about breaking down the silos.  We built up a team as we met almost every Tuesday morning for two terms, and we had lots of learning conversations which were focused on what is working and what we could try next.  The feedback on the benefits of working as a team were positive and really validated this approach for me.

There is no doubt in my mind that teaching is a job for magicians.  We tweak and squeeze and find ways to fit more in a day than we would dare itemise into a list, and then we still find that there is more to be done.  So I absolutely expected that teachers would arrive some Tuesday mornings feeling that inquiry was not something they could fit in, and indeed that happened sometimes.  My job at that point is to help my colleague(s) see that they are further on than they thought, and to help them identify one specific next step they can take and make a time for it to be done and the results shared.  Often we made a time to meet 1:1 or 2:1 to help make this process work.  One of my goals was that more teachers would see that inquiry is something that they can do and have done this year.  Signs are promising on this, though we haven't finished our inquiry write ups that will give me concrete evidence - yet.

Three teachers in my PLG are working in the Assisted Learning Department and we learnt so much together.  I really valued the long conversations we had asking each other questions and building up knowledge of different systems, ways of tracking progress and needs in our school and how we can talk an increasingly common language.  Kia ora, Annette, Tara & Jason.

Helen, Ben & Shelley all shared their projects with me and continue to do so.  We share the same year 10 class group and I'm grateful for the opportunity to learn more about how my year 10 students respond to different learning opportunities outside of English. 

We used a very long document that had lots of options for tracking our inquiries, and I am definitely keen to simplify that for 2019.  The other key change I would like to make for next year is to include data points and discussions in our meetings programme.  I think we could have strengthened our process if we identified our own data points (whether pastoral data or academic data and I would suggest that using both is the best step) early on in our inquiries, and then tracked these and shared our progress as a team, that would have created more robust inquiries. 

Next week we meet to share our inquiry write ups as a group.  I've got some 1:1 meetings lined up this week to support teachers with their inquiry write ups which will help us all be ready for some deeper level sharing and reflection in week three.  After that we have the wine and cheese session where all the groups' inquiries are on display boards and we wander round reading them all.

As an English teacher married to a very talented dyslexic scientist, I'm conscious of the impact of written inquiry reports on teachers across the school.  I have seen many teachers in recent years experience frustration and anger about inquiry, not because they are not interested in inquiring into their practice, but because the write up aspect is so far away from how they best use their brains.  This year I have offered support 1:1 and 1:2 which has helped teachers, but there is also room to find/develop another tool for conducting inquiries.  Another project for another year...

Woo hoo! Students digging deeper into learning through their blogs!

At the end of Term Three, I started jumping around showing colleagues my student blogs with huge enthusiasm.  I was excited because my students were asking questions of each other about their learning in the comments and then responding.  They were also responding to my questions in their comments.  This is something I'd been looking to achieve since 2016, when my year 11 students looked at me, first patiently and then with gritted teeth and explained that under no circumstances would they be interested in sharing their learning on blogs or using the comments to give feedback to each other.

In 2017 I didn't have a junior class, and juniors are the best playground for new ways of sharing.  I played with other aspects of learn-create-share with my seniors, and made sure I had a junior class for 2018.  At the beginning of 2018, I had lots of pastoral and literacy data to help me decide on what I needed to focus on with my year 10 class.  I participated in several meetings where we looked at this data in larger groups, and we hypothesised that improving key competencies in our year 10 students would lead to improved academic success.

I had my own hunch about the role that blogging could play in promoting both improved key competencies and academic success.  We looked at the Seven Principles of Learning, and I focused in on the importance of the 'social nature of learning.'  I knew that blogging by itself would not achieve change automatically - it needed to be part of a range of interventions.  I've reflected on the steps which I found work for getting students to blog earlier in the year here.

I had early adopters in the class who made it easy for others to follow on after them.  Nina enjoyed the film The Freedom Writers, and she wrote about it here.  When we trialled Prezi, she reviewed it here.  Nina was one of several students who liked having the work up on our class blog so they could work at their own pace.

Everyone worked on a visual mihi at the beginning of the year, and put it on their blog.  As we went through this process, I could see where students' skills were with technical aspects like turning the google drawing into an image and uploading it.  Our Toki Facilitator, Madeline, directed me to some pre-existing tutorials to share with students and even more importantly, I could get students to help each other.  I could see where students didn't have a blog, where addresses were not matching the student or not matching the school blogs list, where one student was using another blog entirely... all this took quite a few weeks of choosing 1-2 students per lesson to look at their blogs with me.  I didn't do more per lesson, because we were continuing our learning on other topics at the same time.

Another key message for me as I looked at students' visual mihi was that often when students wrote about what they didn't like, it included reading, like this one from Poppy:

or school, like this one from Jayden:

or Julia:

Another theme was students wanting to be able to sit comfortably and listen to music in their learning space, and I'm lucky that I have a large classroom to enable lots of sitting on the floor or couch or more conventionally at desks.

Also in Term One, each student made four posters charting the changes in the relationship between Rowdy and Junior in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian. We each had to select key quotes to illustrate an important aspect of their friendship at each key stage in the novel, and develop our images to support this.  Some students were embracing the blogging aspect and giving each other thoughtful feedback at this stage, such as Grace and Zoe, but certainly not everyone.

In Term Two, we focused on The Freedom Writers, and then we presented on the connections between the novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian and the film The Freedom Writers. Some students posted their slide show on their blog (e.g. Byron), but we focused at that point mostly on students sharing their work in class orally with the visual support of their slide show.

Term Three was focused on Research.  I was really keen to develop students' reading skills in this unit, and provide opportunities for student selection of topics and texts.  It was also time to get some more blogging going, and to see if we could get to my holy grail - students commenting in ways that deepened learning.  Blogging for feedback was going to need some careful scaffolding.

As students were choosing their topics, we also worked on common texts to develop our reading, note taking and evaluative skills.  I pulled on my old favourite, SOLO, to help students to understand what 'evaluate' means, this time using an analogy with a ball.  Although in some ways 'SOLO' is indeed an old favourite of mine, developed when we worked with Pam Hook about five years ago, it's not an 'old favourite' for my students, and the rewards of spending time on SOLO with 10QI were worthwhile.

We blogged a midpoint on our research which was focused on evaluation.  Some students had evaluated thoughtfully at this point and others were finding their sources and reading them.  What was important to me was that each student was progressing, and that they were confident to share their progress on their blog without it needing to be 'finished' or 'right' or 'perfect.'  Malachi shared his research process and it made my day - I saw engagement and a link to Malachi's personal interests, and I saw (and still do) growing confidence to share.  Jameila began to make connections to her research work in Global Studies, and I realised I needed to post instructions on how to remove formatting in blogger.  I wish they would fix that unnecessary glitch!

Then we got our research write ups completed and it was time to share and get feedback.  I wanted to raise the stakes on comments so that students actually answered their commenters with new information.  So I set up the task for posting, commenting and responding here.  Here is an image of our research blogging tracking document from 21 September:

As you can see, almost everyone (absences notwithstanding) has posted on their final research paragraphs.  There has been more commenting and responding than currently shows on this document, but I was careful to stand back from managing this document beyond where I've indicated that I've commented.  Everyone had edit rights to this document and no one misused the document.

I saw so much that I was really pleased with as I worked with students and watched them work with each other.  Jenna wrote beautifully on Maui and discovering Aotearoa, and began to see herself in the story.  Jameila shared her passion for dinosaurs and wrote thoughtfully in response to both her peers and her teacher.  Marshal shared his thoughts on PubG and gave me an idea for more research I need to do on gaming.  Jon wrote on a topic dear to many of us: ice cream.

If we were still researching, I would like to carry this on, with a Friday session each week where I work with individuals on their blogging and others work on giving feedback and responding to it and updating our tracker.  It's definitely a model I will use again.

We are now back into testing season, and we've been brushing up our skills on writing to describe. I wasn't looking for lots of blogging on this topic.  In a class meeting recently, many students were enthusiastic about getting out of the classroom and moving more as part of English, so that was what I wanted to incorporate next.  But what absolutely warmed my heart as we wrapped the term up, was to see the growth in confidence of students to share their writing with the whole class and in an online open-to-the-world context.  We had a writing task about our school skatepark, and we spent time outside collecting ideas on a grim and wet day, and then sat around the skatepark (anywhere people felt comfortable) and wrote on the next day which was gorgeous.  Some students ran up and down the skatepark before settling to write about the experience beautifully.  On the last day of Term Four, everyone chose their favourite sentence or paragraph, or their whole text if they wished, and shared on this padlet, which was posted on our class blog.

Everyone who was at school on the last day posted something they had written.  We had one student, Ashleigh, who had only joined our class the week before, and she was happy to post.  I have an ORS student who has written beautifully on this padlet and several students who have been very reluctant learners this year who have written beautifully.  Someone posted my writing for me!  I made brownie for this class for the last day of term and we all finished the term feeling good about English.

It's not far from asttle writing and PAT reading testing now, and I am hopeful that the great work that 10QI students have done this year will show in their testing results.  If the results are great, then we have plenty to celebrate.  If they are not, then we work on how we can grow our learning more in the last part of the year, and strategies for success in NCEA.  We will look at approaches to reading texts which we wouldn't choose in order to nail great results this week coming -  a useful life skill for sure. Then we are moving on to Shakespeare!

Reader writer support and making changes in our classrooms

This week I have been thinking about SAC and reader writer support in our teaching and learning programmes.  I posted the comment below to the English online forum, and then thought I would post it here as well, as SAC support is one of the strategies I am using for two of my priority learners in my inquiry this year.  One of my next steps is to find expertise to interpret the data to a level/in a way which means I understand how I can support my student in English.  

This year we have not used reader-writers for either PAT reading or asttle writing for our juniors. We use this testing for all students at the beginning and end of year 9 & 10. The advice we have had from MoE and NZCER is that a reader-writer invalidates the test. Students who are being trialed for reader-writers for NCEA are still able to use a reader-writer for other assessments in English and across the curriculum. We can then look at how much difference the reader writer support has made against a control.

Further to this, we don't offer reader-writer support for 1.4, 1.5, 2.4 or 3.4. We do offer it for the unfamiliar text standards at every level. Having someone read it aloud is little different to using the read-write application on a device, which a person could use in the workforce or for further study.

I don't think the writing standards are the best way to support students with reader-writer eligibility in an English programme. I think that I and my colleagues have a responsibility in English to prepare students who have reader-writer eligibility for the wider world, whether that be the workforce or further study. The connections standards, the close viewing, each of the externals and research all allow students to develop both their writing skills and their skills at using a reader-writer to develop their best ideas and arguments, without having to worry about the highest levels of technical accuracy. Students can use grammerly, read-write and other tools which they can take with them when they leave school when they are working on these standards which involve writing but do not explicitly assess writing. They can, of course, also use reader-writer support for these standards. The reality is that reader-writer support can only ever be available for some of each assessment, and so other tools, and developing student capacity to overcome their challenges with writing, always matter.

There is so much to say on this topic - I wonder what we are doing with the current trend for an increase in reader writer support. I have a hunch that if someone were to do careful research throughout the country (and it is part of an international trend in education), they might find that numbers of students with reader writer support have risen exponentially, and across the country they have the support of people who are often barely trained and sometimes not even paid, but that the results of the testing that led to reader-writer support in the first place have not actually been interpreted in ways that have led to changes in teaching and learning in New Zealand classrooms. This thought came out of asking questions about a recent LASS test at my school for a priority learner where I didn't just want a reader-writer assigned, I wanted to understand what the student actually had difficulty with according to the test and how I could alter my teaching and resources to make a difference. When I went to the LASS website, the information was focused on fast testing for schools for reader writer eligibility, and no mention that I have found yet of what else could be done with the results. Lots of money involved for big international testing companies.

learn create share and key competencies

This year, I wanted to use learn-create-share to lift confidence and collaborative learning in 10QI students. My hunch was that if I could build student confidence in sharing with each other and the wider world, they would be able to work more cooperatively and help each other make progress. Student voice indicated that there were factions in the classroom but if the teacher managed groups and mixed up student-chosen group activities with some teacher-assigned activities, then they were willing to try new sharing. Blogging feedback showed that if I drip fed the blogging from the most willing first and eventually to everyone, then the fear of online sharing reduced hugely. 

My new learning (ongoing) has so far been a blend of relationship building with my class, with individuals and with groups and also the important mahi of building a class team ethic. It has also involved working with other 10QI teachers to find out what and how they are learning in Maths and Global Studies. For my ORS student, it has involved working with Jason, Bev & Cherie to make resources and strategies for sharing work for Max. I'm pretty excited about Max's progress, particularly his growing confidence to speak in front of the whole class.

A key challenge last week related to a key competency challenge that arose when I was off sick yesterday - some students wrote inappropriate comments on the padlet on our class blog (inappropriate content now gone). I rehearsed my speech in the shower about how we are a team and need to show team pride to the world. The class took my grand speech with the seriousness I had hoped for but not presumed, and those students who could not remove comments on their padlet posts asked me to get rid of the inappropriate content for them. We could carry on with our research with our heads held high.

This week we are looking at participating and contributing in class. We have some tension in the room, and I want all of the students to be welcomed and welcoming in our class, not all-minus-one. So I've been working with the class, and with the dean, and we are going to run a restorative process. I'm not sure that I have the skills to do this on my own, and I'm looking forward to learning from the two deans who do have the restorative training for this project.

I have two important next steps for the next fortnight:
1. We are evaluating resources. I've started to prep this section, and I'm going to bring SOLO back into our skill set.  We were a very committed department in terms of SOLO about four years ago, and I don't want to drop that ball as we bounce so many others.

2. I've organised for my appraiser to observe me in ten days' time.  It's precious time that people give up when they do observations, and I want Scott to be able to collect useful information when he watches us (10QI & I).  I figure we will be ready for some significant sharing of our research by then, and so we can test progress on using sharing to improve key competencies and, in turn, raise achievement.

The crazy blogging lady is back, again.

This blog post is our starter resource for our GHS Late Start Professional Learning on Tuesday 12 June 2018.  I've set up the same brief as for the last session (different colleagues this time though), but I didn't want to just do exactly the same thing.  For info on that earlier session, see this post.

Key points from that session:

1. If we think of 'blogging with students' rather than 'blogging with classes', it takes the pressure off both teachers and students.
2. Making opportunities for blog posts reminds us to be creative in how we get students to show what they can do.
3. Blogging is a fantastic way to get students to reinforce their learning by showcasing what they can do in a new format.

Today, let's have a play with some tools which can enable us to show our learning in ways that are not just writing...

Screencastify
If you haven't used Screencastify before, then today is a great day to have a play.  It's an easy tool to use in the classroom, and all students have it added to their chromebooks.  Students don't have to show their faces - instead they can create a how to guide for solving quadratic equations, or assessing whether meat is cooked or how to use apostrophes correctly.  Here is a guide to starting with Screencastify:

Reviewing a new presentation tool
Sometimes I want my class to branch out in how they are presenting their work, and I have to acknowledge that new tools don't always work out. So we review the new tool, and students practise their evaluation skills (SOLO), show their learning in a new way, and share their experience so others can learn from it.  This is Jameila's review of using Prezi for her character development presentation.  Prezi worked pretty well for Jameila and she chose to use it for her summative assessment presentation yesterday.  Nina doesn't think she would choose to use it again, but she did make some valuable observations on strengths and weaknesses.

Trust
Trust is a huge tool for blogging success.  Students don't want to look stupid.  They will put what they are ready to put up, when they are ready, with our encouragement.  You don't need to check what students have done before it goes up any more than you had to check a student's exercise book before they took it home in the pre-digital days.  I set this inquiry blog up as a way of making me get over thinking I looked stupid, or that all my writing needed to be perfect before it hit the (potentially) wider world.  When we trust that students are going to be awesome, they usually are. 

Photographs
Photos are fast and easy and can say so much.  I often take pictures on my phone of things happening in my class, and email them to the relevant students.  My MSA students love this, and I have lots of posed photos.  It's not so hard from there to be taking pictures of students discussing a maths problem together, plus a close up of the actual problem, or getting someone to photograph a sequence of how to clean up the kitchen in hospitality, or truss a chicken, or make meringues, and then share the folder of pictures for students to use in a blog post.  It is also possible to take photos using the chromebook itself, and using screenshots or Snipping Tool.

Toki Leaders' PLG 8 June 2018: focus on blogging

Today was a chance to come out of the classroom and think and brainstorm together on the purposes and achievements of student blogging with colleagues from across our Toki Pounamu cluster.  Angela and I shared a couple of projects we have been working on to do with blogging at Grey High, as indicated here.  When I posed a series of questions (on the padlet below) about blogging, we then got to see that blogging is working as a tool for learning and deep growth for our students.  Still lots of challenges ahead of us as we work on expanding meaningful blogging at Grey High (and in the Toki Pounamu cluster) but we are making progress. 

Using blogging to build on the social nature of learning is part of my inquiry this year, so more work and reflection is coming.

Mike Wolking visit: the role of technology in developing key competencies.

On Thursday 31 May, Grey High hosted Mike Wolking, an Axford Fellow, usually based in Los Angeles, who is spending nine months in New Zealand researching the role of technology in developing key competencies in the New Zealand Curriculum. Key competencies are the skills students need to access life long learning: thinking, relating to others, using language, symbols and text, managing self and participating and contributing.

Year 13 History students, year 12 English Literature students, 10QI and MSA students all met with Mike and shared their experiences of learning at Grey High. Level 2 English students shared their perspectives on the highs and lows of the chromebook era and ways in which teachers are adapting learning tasks to make them more relevant to students’ lives. MSA students shared their stories of their journey to being more engaged with education. 10QI students were interested to find that Mike had worked with some of the ‘real’ Freedom Writers in Los Angeles, as we have been studying the film “Freedom Writers” this term.

Mike also spent time with Madeline Campbell talking about our work on using devices to make learning deeper and more relevant and with Angela Seyb on our upcoming school project linking blogs (digital learning portfolios) with our graduate profile. In junior classes in 2018, students are blogging in each subject at least once per term, and building up evidence of the range of their learning over their time at Grey High.

Building student (& teacher) confidence in blogging

Building student and teacher confidence in blogging is one of my key projects for 2018.  It forms part of my inquiry with my year 10 students into building key competencies to support learning and engagement.  We've been talking about this project (blogging, building confidence in blogging, linking to key competencies in blogging, linking to the graduate profile via blogging) in small groups throughout the school.

Earlier this term Angela & I ran a session with HODs on blogging (the verb) and digital learning portfolios (the objects).  We've spent time on what is working, challenges and next steps with blogging in English department meetings.  Today I ran a late start with colleagues on building student and teacher confidence in blogging.  We got to think specifically about how this could look in Maths and in Social Science classes.  Some of our thinking and discussion is captured in pictures below.  For me, two themes emerged:
1. The technical how-to aspect.  We can keep on supporting teachers with this, and Madeline is always willing to be involved, which is an awesome resource.  Bringing Madeline in helps with pedagogy and learning design as well as the technical aspects.
2. The strong links to key competencies.  Building respect and trust are key components of building student confidence in blogging, and building teacher confidence that students are ready to blog their learning.