Discussions around my inquiry with an expert #1

Today I had the opportunity to sit down with Jannie Van Hees, our literacy expert to sound out my inquiry as I was feeling a little anxious about how to approach it.

Below is the dialogue that I had with Jannie.

Is it o.k that my inquiry is something I didn’t know about at the beginning and to say that?

• Novel/ Pioneer/ Original 
• No intervention
• It's o.k to say that I didn’t know what I was going to do until I did it.

Where can this my inquiry fit in the big picture with regards to the follow?

• Talanoa 
• Key competencies

How should I identify my group I want to do?  

Depends on the goals.  How pedantic should choosing the group be

• Choices:
• One that I have a relationship with
• One that I have no relationship with 
• Neutral

• Observations about the Water safety crew- individually (hows it going as a group) PMI
• Floundering away with the lack of knowledge
• They have a high level of compliance
• Not challenging - keep it confidential for now
• Hows it going as a group? What are the pluses? Minus?

Should I also look at how teachers collaborate to plan the course or should I just stick to the students?

You should be kind to yourself.   It's about managability’. You could look at collaboration as teachers and how they adjust.  Talk individually to the teachers.

In what ways can I collect data?

Video one focus group.

Look for the idea chain:

• One dominates idea chain
• Two quick to say oh yea thats good
• When someone grabs an idea and goes yes  but doesnt look at other possibilities
• Leave it with the group.
• Teach talanoa
• Video the group, let them look at the footage.  2 points that you are doing well and 2 not so well.
• I want to meet with the kids fortnightly
• Look at the footage and says what stands out?
• Format:  What are 2 stand outs going well.  What are questionable?

Put it into a shared space to see if the kids get a chance to review themselves.

You are learning to enhance your own learning capabilities through working with others who have a like mind and that more minds are better then mine.

Whats the trends across the group?  Whats the trends that I see?  What are the implications for you?

Then throw in the Talanoa.

Want the kids to experience learning in a collaborative way about something that matters to them.  

My intention is to see the journey and to discern from that new learning that will enable me to replicated.

If countries have the virus in Taiwan is low deaths (masks - bus full of tourists, compliment), Italy high deaths - high percentage of other people (slapping, hugging, kissing - don’t tell me what to do).  We think we are our own person but we are very cultured.

We came together as a group of teachers to do something different here because we needed to.  I asked myself ‘will this work for what we say is the needed journey for these kids if we want to make a significant change for the way we deliver learning 

Does project based collaborative ways of learning in a Talanoa environment, is this the persuasive difference maker for the learning journey’s of our kids.  

This would be typically how year 9’s do it.  This is how we’ve delivered learning in the past.  What were some of the issues arising.  This was the causality of why we needed.  But again, just because we are going to make a change, doesn’t mean it’s going to totally work. 

Genuine inquiry into a real situation of the unknown. 

Meeting #5 with Dr Jannie Van Hees: Thinking about our reading

My year 9 social studies class often struggle to understand what they have read because they struggle with the language and making meaning from text.  Dr Jannie and I have been working on ways to dive deep into text so they have the ability to increase their language capabilities.

Today we had a planning meeting for a lesson that we will be team teaching this week.  We talked about how to gather evidence from the students around their thoughts on reading and language.  The survey will support my inquiry as well as help me gage what the students thinking was behind their attitudes to reading.  We talked about a student voice survey that had both multi-choice questions and open-ended ones.  We then looked at an example of a text that we could dive deep into.  The thinking is to give the kids multiple opportunities to dive deep, so that they could apply it, transfer it, teach it to others and be the expects of their own understanding of text and language.   My challenge is to ensure that I constantly remind students the 'why' behind everything eg. why I am doing a survey, why I want to find out about their reading etc.

Jannie will then dive deep into a current event article, focusing on the first paragraph only.  Here is our draft powerpoint below.

I always get excited when listening to Dr Jannie, because there are little pearls of wisdom that pop up randomly in our conversations that I have to record.  Here are a few from today's meeting:

• We want the kids to practice 'mindful reading'.
• We can live a thousand worlds through reading...we could be sailing on the Pacific Ocean, we could be on a camel in Egypt, we could be at the top of Mt Everest...we can understand others and the world around us better.

Meeting #4 with Dr Jannie Van Hees and Ms Feps: Collaborative planning

There's never enough time in the day to really dive deep into anything really, let alone text!  In our attempts to find the time for my year 9 social studies class to develop language, Dr Jannie and I came up with the idea to collaborate with their English teacher, Makerita (Ms Feps) to collaborate and design a course that will build a rich programme of language learning and making, to help support our students.

Our initial brainstorming planning meeting was held 15th March, where we were pitched the idea to my year 9 classes English teacher Makerita.  We talked about themes and how it could look to both subjects and ways we could collaborate on the teaching and learning of texts.  After the meeting we went away to think about what we needed to have done individually with our separate achievement objectives and also ways to connect with each other. 

Today we had a google hangout session where we focussed on the plan itself.  We started with brainstorming, then talked about ideas for creating and sharing of the student learning.  I discussed the problems students had in connecting with their community and we unpacked what the reality was and how we could develop it further.  Here is a brainstorm plan that I developed from our meeting.

The blue circles underneath fit under each area of people, place and community so I didn't try to link them together.   We will discuss this further at our next meeting this Friday.

Jannie, Makerite and me on our google hangout (I'm sick by the way lol)

Team-teaching with Dr Jannie Van Hees #1: 'Languaging' social studies through re-energising the brain

Today we had our lesson with my year 9 social studies class.  Jannie and I have been looking at ways to address the challenge that our kids have had with understanding and applying key concepts in the context of migration.  For this lesson, we wanted to engage the kids through slowing down the language with active learning and discussions.

The lesson:  
We started by getting the class to re-energise their brains.  This was a term that Jannie suggested would help kids to kick-start their brains and to force them to use them.  After a slow start (ie kids were shy) Jannie took a slight detour and talked about how in our brains we have lots of neurons and if we don't use those neutrons and think and force our brains to make connections using the neurons, our brains will slow down and as the saying goes, 'if you don't use it, you lose it' (I noticed the kids were engaged when they were shown this, and I wonder, if the kids knew how their brains worked, would they feel more empowered to use them to learn and apply stuff?  I'm going to do a bit of research around this).

In our planning meeting, Jannie and I agreed that we would focus on teaching the concepts and how to develop students understanding of the concepts through case studied examples.  In reality, we spent the whole double period learning and remembering what the words were and what they meant.  We used lots of different ways to engage with the concepts - individual recalling, pairs, groups, modelling, students challenging each other to remember etc.  (I filmed some of the lesson below so that I could reflect on the techniques and the lesson itself).

Reflections:
As the lesson progressed and students grew more confident in their knowledge of the concepts, I could see how slowing the learning of the language helped them feel safe and empowered in their use of the terms.  By the end of the lesson, students were standing up to share what they'd learnt and I was pleased to see this, especially from the kids who were usually the quiet ones!

For me personally I found it hard to spend so much time on learning and knowing the concepts and I was not used to taking it so painstakingly slow.  I am used to telling the kids what the words are, having them learn the definitions, then apply them to an example, then move on.  Parts of the lesson had me anxious.  On reflection, I could see that I was driven by the pressures of time - that little voice was saying 'hurry up, we need to move on to the next bit, hurry up because we won't finish everything, hurry up we're moving too slow'!.  After seeing what happened during the lesson for our kids, I have to rethink my thinking and learn to remember the 'why' around slowing the learning.  I shared my experience with a critical friend who understood my frustrations but helped me see that it is better off to pause and slow down the learning when they're younger and we can afford to this in year 9. "When you unpack the language now, then you can get back to the agenda and the kids will fly".

What next: 
Big Picture: I have to think about the overall big picture and how to plan around lessons like this where we 'slow the learning'.  What do we need to make sure we cover in our social studies curriculum?  Which achievement objectives do we have to meet and how much time do we have to meet them?   Are there things that we are teaching now, that we don't have to teach, and take out to accommodate for this new learning?  How can I measure whether this will work or not?

Applying these concepts consistently:  Over the next few lessons, I want to see if the students can remember the concepts and apply them to different contexts.   I want to find a way measure whether spending more time on the learning and knowing of these concepts will help them engage better with their learning and hopefully help them achieve success in improving their literacy skills.

Meeting #3 with Dr Jannie Van Hees: Putting the lens on language

At the beginning of each week, my year 9 social studies class usually look at current events that are local, national and global.  We start with a socrative activity, where students have to answer 20 questions about events from the past week and then I get the kids to find an article on one of the events that they found interesting and summarise what happened, when and where etc.  Unfortunately I have found this exercise a bit of a waste of time, because many of the students still leave the classroom not knowing what they had read and some do not complete their summaries.

When I reflect on why this is, I find that they may not understand the language that has been written in the text and this becomes a barrier to their learning.  This then leads to a lack of engagement and a lack of motivation to complete the tasks set.

After discussing this with Dr Jannie, we focussed on designing reading tasks for the students in my year 9 social studies class that could focus on unpacking the language of current event article.  I have recorded our discussion and have written the key points below.  To understand the context, click on the link to the article below, then listen to our discussion video.

The article we discussed was "Man petitions to make 'Aotearoa' official, alongside 'NZ'".

My key takeouts:

• Get the kids to answer 'What's the point ' which is also important to hold conversation.  
• Support students to recognise complex word groups helps to build language capacity.
• In the end we want to lift up language.  If we don't put the lens on complex language, they'll never produce it.
• Although it might seem tiresome at first to slowing down the language, we can work together to inform each other. 
• Don't get too fancy with doing a whole lot with it, but what we do know is that they need re-encounters.   It may just be having students' in groups and at the end, they complete a table with labels such as 'the main was' and 'my opinion was'. 

My next steps:

• Design the lesson and do the lesson with the class.
• Put language on my walls
• Adjust my pedagogy in expecting the kids to have to write a proper summary of what they have learnt in class.

Meeting #2: Preparing for team teaching with Dr Jannie Van Hees

Today I had a meeting with Dr Jannie to prepare for our team-teaching lesson next Wednesday.  We discussed how to support our students with their learning with the focus being on understanding key migration terms.   We worked on a presentation and have agreed to work together to present the learning to the students.  We plan to use self-directed cues and to scan what is happening with the learners to know when to lead the class.  Below is the presentation we are using.

In my next blog post, I will reflect on how it went and what my key learnings were.

Meeting #1 with Dr Jannie Van Hees: Setting the platform

I have the pleasure of working with Dr Jannie Van Hees this year, who is supporting me and my learners in 'Languaging social studies'.  In our meetings in the past, I have been fascinated with the idea of looking more closely language but have not had the chance to sit down and unpack what that looks for me and my pedagogy with an expert such as Jannie.

At our first meeting today, we discussed language acquisition and what it looked like for the learners  in my classroom.  I talked about how they receive language (mainly from me and each other).

I wanted explore other ways to enable my kids to gain language, here are my notes:

• Young ones adding to their toolkit, their 'kete' of language.  Older ones teaching the younger ones.
• Conversations - language.
• Technology - engagers and facilitators of thinking.

There are 4 ways to enable learners to gain language:

• Acquisition - getting the language
• Development - making it better
• Sustaining - keeping it going
• Transfer - using it across more than one area.

In social studies, conceptual understanding of key terms is important, such as:  Change, society, social issues, values, perspectives.

My key takeouts were that language needed to be more of a focus in my classroom and in my department.  Knowing what this looks like now, will help me understand what the next steps are towards 'languaging social studies'.