KPMG day#1

Three weeks after our fabulous Coromandel hui, we all came together at the KPMG offices on the Auckland waterfront.  No bells, no late notes, no uniform passes.  All those times we talked in the staff room or on bedraggled corridors about how much better meetings would go if they were not on site - all TRUE!

As we worked on our prototypes in groups of three, I came to see that my innovation tool had to be a process, not just the cooperative task at the end.  Otherwise, if I only developed, modelled and shared the end product section, other people might try it once and give up, thinking it just isn't suitable for their students.  

My focus on process, starting with the skills of working in groups, works really well with our thinking at Grey High that student wellbeing is a critical pre-condition for engagement and achievement, and thus that our inquiries in 2019 all need to link to wellbeing.  It also links to my work on the social nature of learning in 2018.

So, as per the diagram above that I talked through with my fabulous MIT peers at KPMG, my tool is actually a process.  We start with a group forming process.  I have more to experiment with and learn in this phase.  I have achieved it with classes before, but this year reminded me that each new class requires this process of support, and the tools and process are never quite the same.  Nevertheless, I am keen to have some key processes for other teachers to work through by later this year.  For now, based on student feedback, we are working through a process where we start with student chosen groups, then move to a 2 x 2 process, where students choose one buddy, and then pairs of buddies are grouped into fours for collaborative reading work.  Then we can move from there into completely mixed groups.  I think that this is worth teaching because working effectively in a range of group settings is an essential higher learning and workplace skill.

Then we use some storytelling tools.  The things that I loved about Liz Swanson's storytelling workshop was the focus on deepening.  We learned to get the students to make story maps (sketching out the plot in a series of quick pictures), to 'step out' the story by identifying key elements to the plot and expressing them in a step, a word/phrase and an action, and by using interviewing to pull out more information from a key character.  All of these activities require students to summarise, to prioritise and to identify and name key changes in mood in a story.  As the teacher goes around groups as they prepare, they can support the students with these skills in readiness for sharing back with the whole class.

Then we work on reading comprehension and paragraph writing skills.  I've been trying to put multi-choice questions into the mix as much as possible so that students improve their skills at this type of assessment.  We know from student voice that if the first question on the PAT test is difficult (it certainly is in the year 10 test we typically use beginning and end of year), then some students will guess that answer and then go down guessing everything.  I'd  like to change that approach!

Finally, we have the team game tournament, a tool in use in education for many years for which I am exploring benefits of digitising the process.  This is where the students work in groups to learn the material with practice questions, and then do the test under test conditions to earn points for their team.  Within each team, students rank themselves in terms of their skills at the skill to be assessed, in case reading.  The 'ones' have the strongest skills.  In a class of 20, you could have four teams with five students in each.

As you can see in the points table above, each person in a team competes against the other class members with the same rank.  So the winning person in each rank gets the most points, in a descending scale.  At the end of the process, there is a winning team, and the best way to win a tournament is to work closely as a group to make sure that everyone understands the material that is being assessed.  Also at the end of the process, each student has information on what they are doing well at and what they could improve on in terms of formative assessment.  The teacher has the information for each student as well as for groups and the class as a whole.  The raw data above has always been available via a paper and whiteboard (or blackboard, if you were using this tool long long ago), but I can see benefits for digitising the process in terms of breakdowns of which questions students achieved well on and where there are gaps.  I've trialled using google forms, with some success.  My next step is to use Socrative.

My focus is on my year 10 class, with some work with my Mawhera Services Academy class (mixed year group, but with a majority of year 11 students).  As I create the contexts and tests, the other benefit I see is building up a bank of new resources focused on Level Five of the English curriculum.  Primary schools are well served with School Journals, and NCEA is well served with tasks and exemplars.  For years 9 & 10, outside of the relatively small number of resources in the Assessment Resource Bank, there is nothing provided that is focused on Level Five.