Sunday 29 September 2019

Successes & next steps

This year has been about stretching my practice in different ways, and sometimes that has involved me wondering how much I can stretch my sleep needs.  But, quite a few things have come together recently and I thought I would grab a few minutes to share them here.

Te Ahu o Te Reo
The first has been Te Ahu o Te Reo.  This has been a 13 week course delivered at our marae at Greymouth High School (Te Kura Tuarua o Māwhera) and I am really proud of finishing it, and growing in my confidence to use Te Reo in my classes and in my wider interactions as a teacher and person.  I've also learned a lot more about local stories and loved spending time at the marae at Arahura.

Our reading goals as a department
When we were crunching data (I like that phrase, like I'm driving a bulldozer and I can hear the stats move underneath me) last week, we were really thrilled with the reading data.  It certainly shows that what you focus on, you make a difference in.  More on my role in that later, but for now, the news is good.

Team Game Tournament
This is being used beyond my classroom now.  The key effect lies with opportunities to respond and a range of ways of looking at one (or multiple) texts.  My tool will make that really clear.

Collaborating for success
Jo Newton (RTLB) and I worked together on building relationships and accelerating reading with 10QI this year, and last week we sat down and recorded our reflection on the gains we have made, particularly focusing on how our approach has been collaborative, student-centered and 'alongside' rather than hierarchical.  You can listen to our discussion here and here.  We want the practice of collaborating to be something everyone sees as valuable, not the idea that RTLB support is for 'weak' teachers.  By recording our discussion, we want to be able to share that model more widely.

What's next?
My priority now is putting my work on using socrative and collaboration to accelerate reading achievement together online in a format which is user friendly for other teachers. 

Then, my pecha kucha presentation to the principals.  I want people to come away from that wananga with something that they can easily share with their English teachers that will make a difference to achievement.

Sunday 8 September 2019

From my head to my MIT tool

Getting the tool up and running involves me delineating the exact shape of my work, and that isn't happening rapidly.  The image I sketched in July of how my tool could look is no longer what I want at all.  This time I'm not just drawing squares in my book, but thinking about how another teacher is likely to access this tool and get the best use from it.  Dorothy has encouraged me to create resources for visual learners, so I think an introduction for each section needs to be oral.  So, screencastify -> youtube ->google site.  I will have some classroom footage as well.

So I'm going to work with three categories as a serious draft:
Why reading?
What is on-between-beyond the lines and how does it link to student success?
How can we use Socrative to develop reading skills beyond surface features?

I've put wellbeing and cooperation to the side for now in terms of website design.  I think these are super important parts of the equation, but I don't currently think that they are the aspects which would draw a teacher focusing on reading to dig into the site beyond the heading.  I've been looking at the tools developed by MIT 2018 teachers.  We discussed tools being either 'teacher facing' or 'student facing' at our last KPMG day, and that has been useful.  I've identified that my tool is teacher facing.  It's a support for teachers to dig deeper into reading comprehension with their students, with strategies showing them how to do this using Socrative, cooperation and competition.  You could use it any level from about year 4 upwards, but I have focused my tool and resource development on years 9 & 10, which is an under-resourced area in New Zealand.

I have been trialing different aspects of reading and Socrative throughout the year.  I expected to be launching straight into Team Game Tournament and doing that all year, but that turned out not to be the case at all.  My learner feedback took me in different directions as I found that they struggled with groups outside of friendship clusters but they did respond really well to scaffolded and structured reading and writing activities. Over time, I came to the conclusion that there are other ways to use Socrative to deepen reading comprehension which are valuable, and that I could see a gap in the 'market' in that in the academic literature and on line resources I could find, Socrative was being used for surface level thinking, and that there wasn't much around on using it for reading activities.  Thus, my tool will give examples which use New Zealand based resources, and it will give tips for teachers on how to make their own.

This afternoon I've drafted up a shape for the tool, and put together the why.  The resources I have created, trialled and refined during 2019 will be uploaded under the what and the how sections in the near future.

I've spent a while going back to make clear the why as before I put together the resources for the what and how.  This felt really important to me, so that I was anchored in my purpose for this project.  I played Simon Sinek's fabulous presentation on the importance of why for my Level Two class last week as part of our preparation for our speeches.  I think his work is relevant for every time we want to sell something, whether in the classroom or online or on a shop floor.


Starting with the why of adult literacy is super important, and comes from a session I ran as Literacy Leader at Greymouth High School a few years ago when we looked at the Survey of Adult Skills report for New Zealand, and considered how well equipped our students were for handling the depth and range of text in unfamiliar websites, and what that means for the extent they can participate in new experiences, whether in the workplace or in political life, or as volunteers or as members of families with complex legal or medical needs.  It took us away from thinking about how to 'get students through' the next assessment and into the serious need for life skills that are independent and flexible.  

The Literacy Learning Progressions and the New Zealand Curriculum English are Learning Objectives also flag clearly a need for a repertoire of reading strategies and confident, independent and flexible use of those strategies.  In my next post, I will discuss how these strategies link to the on-between-beyond the lines reading comprehension model and some 2019 resources I have developed to support this.

(There is more why, linked to learn-create-share, but I have to put this aside and do some senior exam marking so that my wonderful students can indeed make more progress on their Level Seven reading skills)



Thursday 5 September 2019

Progress check: it's about deep learning

How did that happen?  Blogging was working as a great way for me to track my progress with my project on accelerating reading.  But suddenly I blinked and it is almost eight weeks since I have actually posted (those drafts which were interrupted don't count!).

In August, the MIT team met at KPMG to share our progress so far.  It was a rich experience in terms of learning so much about our own work as we listened and gave feedback to our peers.  I already feel a bit sad that we don't have many more times together as a team.

I talked to these notes about where I was up to at that point.  I came away clear that getting more mileage in with my own classes and with other classes at my school is my next priority.

Next stop on the sharing back front was a Term 3 toolkit.  This went so much better than the first one.  I was shaking with nerves on the Term Two toolkit because I was utterly unused to presenting to people where I could not see their faces.  But after I presented my Term Two toolkit, I attended Dorothy Burt's toolkit, and got some tips on presenting from here.  For my Term 3 toolkit, I took care to set up a patter with each attendee as they signed in, and that helped me sustain connections throughout the session.  My focus for the Term 3 toolkit was on Team Game Tournaments, and I included some material on Socrative, as no one who attended my Term 2 toolkit was attending the Term 3 toolkit.

This morning, as my fabulous colleague Dan Hanson and I were planning for the Team Game Tournament we are running with both of our classes together next week, Dan shared that there was some discussion about Team Game Tournament at the South Island Sport in Education conference that he attended earlier in the year, and that the recommendation there was that it was best for Maths and Science and for surface knowledge.  Dan has used it for punctuation practise with success.  He and I both think it can be used for deeper level thinking, and that is part of our work next week with our classes.

My reading on the use of Socrative has indicated that it is most frequently being used in the tertiary sector and in STEM subjects.  I haven't seen anything that has really laid out how it is being used to develop deeper level reading, and so that is where my project has evolved to - how can we use Socrative to develop our skills at reading on, between and beyond the lines?  These are the skills needed for gaining Excellence in NCEA English, and thus for the year 10 class that I am focusing on, these are key skills that we are building our capacity with.

So far, the aspect of using Socrative that I think has prompted the deepest learning and engagement has been when we have written responses and then voted on the best response, based on a shared rubric, and analysed why that response is effective and what the next steps are.

My year 10 class are currently focused on dystopian novels, and everyone has selected their own novel to read, after we spent the first part of the term on Mark Smith's Road to Winter.  I was so excited yesterday to see really high levels of engagement, and students confidently using their own blogs to share their books and to explore setting and describe the protagonist and the protagonist's challenge.

In week nine, we have our termly reading comprehension test, and I will be interested to see to what extent our reading progress in class is reflected in the results.