Stealth reading

When I call an activity "reading," it's not proving to be the best sales pitch for my students.  But when I feed some reading activities in that have film study as the big context, and involve learning through moving pieces of paper around to make sense of some exemplar texts, then my covert sales pitch works better.

In 10QI, my focus class for my 2019 inquiry and MIT project, we have been looking at a range of film techniques and building our skills in writing SEXY paragraphs showing our understanding of how meaning is made in a visual text.

I've been experimenting with different ways of students acquiring the skills to discuss film techniques.  Earlier this month, I set up the class with resources for students to read and make their own notes on a range of film techniques.  The class looked very "compliant" - they were reading the documents, everyone was quiet and no one complained.  But when I looked again at their work afterwards, I could see that many students had stopped at the reading activities, a few had made notes which were in phrase form rather than sentences which could help another person learn and no one had gotten all the way through to explaining how the technique developed meaning in the trailer for Akeelah and the Bee. 

We then spent some time practising identifying film techniques, describing how they were used and explaining what we learnt from them, using the opening scene from Akeelah and the Bee (which we have already watched in its entirety - great film).  This section was strongly teacher-led, so that no one was left behind on identifying two visual and two verbal techniques and understanding how they were used and with what effect.

Several students identified that when we went slowly, looking at one technique at a time, as a whole class, with everyone drawing visual techniques and writing to describe verbal techniques, they felt much more confident about their learning.  In a parent-student meeting later that day, one student identified that when she could just see one task at a time, it worked really well for her, such as our one that day.  Conversely, when the whole lesson/series of tasks was laid out at once, she felt overwhelmed and, often worried that she would appear stupid, she sometimes opted out of attempting the learning.  It was a helpful insight that has guided my planning since.

I wrote two sample paragraphs so that my students could see what I was looking for.  This is important preparation for two NCEA English assessments for these students next year and, of course, for having the tools to analyse how we are positioned by visual media texts in our leisure time and on social media.  I broke my paragraphs into separate sentences, and then printed each one on a different coloured piece of paper and cut the sentences up.  As we started the lesson, each group was engaged in organising their sentences into logical order and there was a satisfying level of conversation about the choices in each group.  My paragraphs (as originally constituted) are below:

Now that we have put these together and discussed the use of the SEXY paragraph structure (Statement-Explanation-eXample-whY it is important) for writing an effective paragraph, we are each writing our own paragraphs.  This time there is a lot of scaffolding, but later in this film study, students will be ready to write more independently. 

I like that the examples have helped students see what is possible in a really concrete form.  One previously frustrated student who had been thinking it was silly to be doing this much analysis of a film can now recognise the process and skills involved. 

In the next 1-2 lessons, each student will write their own SEXY paragraph showing their understanding of how the director uses visual and verbal techniques to help us understand the Akeelah's world.  I am going to bring Socrative in to this process, getting all students to submit their answers on Socrative, and then using their voting function to get students to decide which is the best paragraph and why.

There is a lot of detail in this blog post.  My purpose in linking to the actual exemplars and describing the process in quite a bit of detail is to make the resources as well as the thinking available to others. 

KPMG Day #2 What difference does a day make?

Sunday night/Monday morning: the South Island MIT contingent meet up in our motel, walk to breakfast, share notes, wonder if we are going to be ready or sufficiently progressed for Dorothy and Anne.

8.30-midday - we are all together and sharing what is working, what we are struggling with.  We play the Inquiry game called Catalyst and keep on digging into our project and challenging our own assumptions and each other's.

By the time we stop for a delicious lunch soon after midday, I know that we can all do this.  The digging deep approach reveals those things we had not yet thought of, or fully exposed, or developed an action plan for.  But it doesn't reveal weakness.  It reveals strength and courage, because we don't shy from these revelations, we take them seriously and use them to improve our thinking and our tool project.  We get so many ideas from each other, noting down thoughts and reconceptualising our next steps and challenges.  We relish this and I see people strengthened by the process, including feeling it myself.

After lunch we are all about the Edtech conference at Sydney.  One thing I was curious about was the 'why' for this conference.  Dorothy talked about Manaiakalani's goal of growing us (Manaiakalani Innovative Teachers) as leaders, and building our confidence to address large groups.  We will address a large group of principals at the end of the year when we present on our tool to raise achievement.  In the interim, we have the opportunity and encouragement to present online toolkits, both in Term Two before Sydney and in Term Three on our progress on our tool development. 

For me, the prospect of presenting at Edtech in Sydney is a little daunting, but the prospect of using my passport for the first time this century, and meeting my daughter afterwards in Melbourne for her first ever use of her brand new passport, outweighs any nerves.  We all know that teaching involves huge hours, and that family life can suffer, and the opportunity to link my new adventure with MIT to a new adventure for my daughter who is often sick of me being at work for too long (gosh teachers at your school have to go to a LOT of meetings, Mum!) is awesome.

Collaboration: first lessons

This week Dan and I trialled our first collaborative teaching lesson.  The idea had come from some of our students who wanted to combine the classes.  Dan and I decided that we would run a series of weekly combined skills sessions, as we only have one hour per week where our year 10 teaching slots align.

We wanted to support students to read a range of unfamiliar texts (poetry, prose & non-fiction) and show their understanding of the ideas in each text and how they are developed.  Secondary English teachers will be familiar with the dearth of publicly available resources targeted at level five of the New Zealand Curriculum.  A few ARBs (Assessment Resource Bank) and that is it.  Primary schools have the School Journals, and senior secondary schools are well resourced with NCEA activities.

Dan has the Sport in Education class and has done a great job of orienting texts and topics for study towards the sports interests of his students.  When you look at the non-fiction resource Dan has created, you can see how he has used SOLO thinking to explicitly scaffold students into higher order thinking.  We did a lot of work on SOLO a few years ago in the English Department at Grey High, and while we still value it hugely, it hasn't had the same centre-stage focus as new initiatives and their accompanying vocabulary have come through, such as Learn-Create-Share and UDL (Universal Design for Learning).

I made a poetry resource.  The idea is that all students will develop their skills across poetry, prose and non-fiction, but they will be able to exercise choice about the order and the texts they use to develop their skills.

Our chosen shared platform for delivering the content to our students was workspace, part of the Hapara suite of tools for online classrooms.  Whereas I find blogging to be the most useful access (live and rewindable) point for my classes, Dan has honed his skills with Workspace and uses it effectively for all of his classes.  BUT...... Thursday was router change day for Grey High, with no internet for a chunk of the day, and unreliable access for other parts.  The photocopiers were running red hot across the school!!!!

We had a quick starter in my class with both groups together and then students could choose which task they wanted to do.  Poetry students stayed with me and non-fiction students went with Dan to room 15.  Some students wanted to stay as close as possible to their safe and familiar classroom, and expressed reservations, while others jumped with both feet and set up mixed groups for their learning.  My favourite new learning for the day was going through the poem (Mother to Son by Langston Hughes) with a young man who I'd only ever known in a duty discipline context before and discussing stairs and skateboarding.  I will look at all stairs a little differently after that thoughtful conversation.

It was the first paper session in a long time, and what frustrated me is that out of the session, I have no evidence of who completed what and with what level of understanding.  On chromebooks, whether we used forms, workspace, smartsharing into google folders, Socrative, Padlet or Kahoots, I would have information which I could use for identifying next steps in our class learning.

The class was loud!  But it was a cheerful learning noise and it was a start.

We collected some feedback at the end, using a method Jo Newton had used with my class a few weeks ago, that gave students a low stakes opportunity to identify which aspects of the lesson they had enjoyed and would do again (see image above).

Dan and I reflected afterwards that we had made a good start, and are now ready to make some modifications.  Our first activity was in substitution mode (using the parlance of the SAMR model).  We gave students enhanced levels of choice, and gave them more scope to tap into the social nature of learning, but our learning activities were the same as if we had been running separate activities.  Before next Thursday, we are going to research and come up with a starter which has students moving and mingling, and then think about how we can take advantage of having two teachers across a larger group (c.48 students) to give the students different opportunities to learn, to create and then to share their learning.

I would like to do some Socrative work across the larger group, and then run some team game tournaments.  Then we could get some blogging going, sharing our progress on digging deeper into texts and developing confidence with showing understanding in extended paragraphs.

Dan's class have explored using movement in their learning, and I'm keen to learn from both Dan and his class to get some ideas to literally spread our wings.

If you are reading this and are at another Manaiakalani Outreach cluster secondary school, please get in touch.  The primary schools have done a lot of successful work with Tuhi mai tuhi atu, but we have yet to make connections across schools in our junior secondary learning environments, and I'd like us to build some more bridges for ourselves and for our students.

It takes a village

Inquiry season is all go at Grey High this term.  We have a professional development programme of late starts every Tuesday morning for students so that teachers can attend professional development sessions.  The PLD committee work on aligning our annual plan with inquiry and teacher needs and then creating sessions and time for us all to extend our practice.  We work on incorporating teacher feedback as much as possible so that we are offering sessions which are what teachers are looking for in order to pursue successful spiral of inquiry work and be more effective in the classroom.

For my year 10 class, we have had two meetings this term where all the teachers of 10QI have met and shared our observations on the strengths and challenges in the class.  Like the other groups meeting to share their scanning so far, we used the Seven Principles of Learning as our lens.  From our work with the class, we knew that we needed to zoom into the 'Social Nature of Learning' and 'Emotions are Integral to Learning.'  After the first staff late start session, Jason (PB4L & Wellbeing specialist in our school) ran a workshop with 10QI in my lesson time where he collected a range of student perspectives to help inform our next steps on what the students wanted from their school programme.  We met again and discussed next steps across our classes and people chipped in to support each other with offers of watching lessons and sharing resources. 

Tomorrow we start some more activities where Jason leads a session on wellbeing with the class, sessions that teachers of 10QI, including myself, will carry on with and develop further.

I'm learning and experimenting all the time with this class.  It's not the classes which run smoothly which teach us the most, but those which surprise us, where the road is rockier and relationships and learning journeys require more preparation and re-evaluation.  Lots and lots of students in this class don't like reading, which is quite challenging when my big project for the year is about raising reading achievement. 

Last term we focused on a study of the novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, and during that time I had lots of requests for a film study.  This term we have started with the film Akeelah and the Bee.  Lots of interesting material on going outside of our comfort zones and of resilience and determination in both texts, and we have been drawing those elements out. 

I've been including some stealth reading activities amongst the film study, and I saw some good work on paraphrasing yesterday.  We have done some work on how to write a clear definition for a film technique, one which the reader can learn from.  If we can keep up the shift from jotting down key words to writing clear descriptions and explanations in complete sentences, we will have the necessary skills in place for tackling unfamiliar texts in year 11.

Our weekly focus on skills has been supported by Jo Newton, our RTLB who is running a sequence of lessons with a small group from 10QI to build up their reading and writing skills, with the idea of sharing what they learn in this sequence with other teachers and supporting transference across classes.  Jo has been using a School Journal on Bruce MacLaren which has been going really well. 

I have been developing resources to extend students while Jo is working with the smaller group, and familiarising students with Socrative at the same time.  I developed a comprehension resource on Maya Angelou's 'Still I Rise' (This link will work if you have a Socrative teacher account) which enabled me to collect information via the Socrative report function, showing me how students got on with the multichoice at a glance, and to read their paragraph responses.  At a glance I could see that I hadn't taught the terms "stanza" or "verse", which is easily fixed.  The paragraph work was slower reading for identifying next steps, but it is still really useful for zooming in on a few students per lesson and identifying with them how they can use the SEXY (Statement-Explanation-eXample-whY it is important) paragraph formula to show their extended thinking.

Next up: round one of our experiment with cross-class collaboration.