The good news & the big challenge

Good news first:
Today I did the taster day training for the storytelling method.  Liz Swanson blew me away.  I loved her work on storytelling, I loved her work on pedagogy, on the steps for listen-speak-read-write, and the rich opportunities that the story telling approach offers.

Although the link to writing is often what prompts the storytelling approach, I am really interested in it because of the potential for viewing reading skills acquisition in new ways.  I'm about to do a sales pitch within our school and our kahui ako for delving deeper into this approach. 

As Liz spoke, she was working with oral stories, and I was thinking about when I read aloud a novel to my class, and what we could do with mapping, and using familiar text, and front loading vocabulary in new ways, and so on and so on.  When I get students to turn a section of the novel into a cartoon, I start to go in the direction of her story mapping, but now I see how I can develop that into a much richer opportunity for learning.

Big challenge: 
Earlier this week I put my students into groups, splitting up all the social groupings, ability groupings and asking them to work cooperatively to answer some reading comprehension questions.

Oh Sandra.  So much to learn.  Again.

My students basically went on strike in terms of the cooperative learning aspect.  Their body language was shouting at me that I was asking way too much.  So I scrambled through the lesson, gathering student voices while they protested, hugging their devices or question sheets close to their bodies and sitting as far away as possible from the peers I assigned them to work with as possible.

It was a revealing lesson, and I'm reminded again that the social nature of learning isn't like a worksheet or online game to roll out, it's careful and slow work with individuals and groups to build a collective learning culture which must start again every year, with each class. 

So, next step are some collective activities to respond to The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian where the students choose their own groups.  One student suggested they could choose pairs and then I could put pairs together into a four, so people had support as they went outside their comfort zone.  Great suggestion, which I will try out soon.

I really want to try out the storytelling method mapping activity for when Junior has his first week at Reardon High School though...

Tomorrow's learning goal: to show our understanding of the clash of conformity codes between Reardon and Spokane in a multi-media context.

Success criteria:
1. We can retell the story of Junior and his dad driving to school OR the story of meeting Penelope and the debacle of his name OR the story of the Spokane rules for fighting OR the story of Junior responding to Roger's racist taunt.
2. We can create an image or performance to show the conflict inside Junior's head as he negotiates a new world, with its new set of rules.
3. We can create paragraphs about one of the events in success criteria #1, describing the event and explaining why it is important for our understanding of Junior's challenges.

Sharing is coming... I will do stealth blogging again like last year.   As we experiment in class, I will be looking at where I can introduce rich vocabulary.  I've only done the taster day so far, but that doesn't have to hold me back!

Leaping in to the reading challenge

At the end of 2018, we started work on our 2019 reading challenge at Grey High.  We knew that our efforts hadn't yielded sufficient results in 2018, and that doing the same thing but expecting different outcomes wasn't a viable approach.

You can see here where we pulled apart the PAT test.

Towards the end of 2018, I was awarded a place on the Manaiakalani Innovative Teachers programme.  Initially, I put in a proposal to develop online resources to engage students and whanau in our Mawhera Services Academy.  However, as our end of 2018 reading data emerged showing that we had not made the gains in reading that we really needed, I moved my proposal to accelerating reading.

Earlier this month, the Manaiakalani Innovative Teachers group of 2019 met in person.  We had been communicating online, working in pairs on our proposals and it was fabulous to finally meet in person.  I think I wasn't the only one who was nervous, but also ready to turn the proposals and online chat into something more tangible and more strongly developed.

Our first hui was on the beautiful Coromandel coast, which for a South Islander used to cold and rough West Coast seas, was swimming heaven. 

We used the Design Thinking process to critique our projects and get ideas rolling for responding to each of our now quite carefully identified problems.  The energy in the room every session was really positive and I got a lot out of the process. 

I came back to Greymouth ready to make a powerful difference in my classroom and my school.