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...
Monday 22 October 2018
Sunday 14 October 2018
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!
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!
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