Purpose & audience

Lots of recording going on at my house this holidays.  Tonight I completed a set of recordings detailing my process using Socrative to give lots of opportunities to respond in order to accelerate reading progress.  I've made recordings to support student learning before, but never a series with as many aspects as this one.
I've created three different types of resource:

1. A slide show with no sound.  Text heavy, with links to supporting resources.  This was my first step after my notes pulling together the process that I've developed, trialled and refined this year.  For me, a fast skimmer/scanner of written text who is impatient with sound recordings, it would have been easy to stop at this point.

2. A slide show which I used as the basis for my videos.  This is much more visually oriented, but with links in it that I think the video watchers will want to access.

3. A set of eight recordings of my 12 step programme for accelerating reading through opportunities to respond & Socrative.  There was a great deal of learning along the way.

The eight recordings are on my site - first time I've pressed publish on it.  There is more to add to the site in terms of exemplars and resources, but the opportunities to respond process is the most important element.

I haven't yet worked out how I will set it up so that the three resources are available on my site and it is clear how they work together.  If anyone reading has a chance to read and watch the resources I have made, I'd love some feedback.  I need to identify where I've made assumptions rather than explained with useful detail.

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)

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.

Sydney Edtech Summit Day Two

Day Two of the Edtech Summit was great.  We started with an inspirational talk from Kim Pollishuke about believing in the possibilities of the impossible.  One example which appealed to me was Carly and Charley's odd sock project, where two ten year old girls took their own distinctive style and turned it into a fun, ethical and successful business.

I went to a session by Dan Jackson on Flipping with Edpuzzle, and another by Kim Pollishuke on Flipgrid.  Both offered me some new tools and helped me in my thinking about my Term Three project with 10QI.

Then it was time for me to present.  Despite all those nerves as I juggled the busy-ness of Term Two school life, I had a great time with a fabulous group of teachers from (mostly New South Wales) as we all explored the possibilities of Socrative.  I focused on sharing how it can work as a teaching sequence in the classroom, including how we can use it to gauge well-being and strategies to lift confidence on feedback.  I'm pleased about this part for me personally as it reflects a big focus for me in my inquiry this year.

I've got my feedback on the session and have thought about the tweaks I would make if I was doing it again.  I would add some more information on Space Race and importing other people's quizzes in the notes section, and the part where I read everyone's answers out, I would just give a sample and then explain how I do this to build up student confidence in the classroom.  I'm realising just now that I didn't put a link to my blog on my presentation, and that if I was fully thinking about giving people a way to link to my teaching and reflection work beyond the presentation, that is what I would have done.  I don't think I had that kind of confidence before the session!

After that, one more ignite presentation, some prize draws and then we were done!  Twelve fabulous people who had been supporting each other, learning and laughing over the time of the conference, ready to hit Sydney City.  And what a beautiful city!  Joanne and I walked around the waterfront, checked out a late-opening art gallery, admired the sculptures and then met the rest of our MIT group for dinner.

I've got a sketch of what my tool will look like in terms of making a site to share the process with interested people, and a list of the next jobs on this for Term Three.  The time at the Summit really helped with developing that.

My huge thanks to Dorothy, Anne and Jenny at Maniakalani for giving me this opportunity, to Gerhard and Dave for supporting us on tour and to my MIT colleagues who have made this a really special few days.

Now, it's some more Sandra-the-tourist time!

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. 

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.