Professional Development with Dr Cynthia Greenleaf

Today we had the privilege of listening to  Dr Cynthia Greenleaf a well known researcher who work has conducted research into children and adolescent literacy and translated it into teacher professional development.  We were given a number of challenges that were interesting and enjoyable and helped us to see different perspectives of the same issue.

Some of my key take outs were:

• What supports me in discussion and what gets in the way?
• Thinking about how to build knowledge through reasoning and thinking about evidence
• Evidence based argumentation which is different to persuasion.

If kids have abundant opportunities to collaborate together, they can rehearse having multiple perspectives in their head they can use it when they see fit - in-head reasoning skills - Dr Greenleaf calls it 'hedging'.   

Sharing literacy strategies at our Department meeting

One of our Social Science department goals is to raise the reading and writing levels in asttle for the students in our junior school and at each of our department meetings, we have looked at how to address this.  Marc Milford, our literacy expert, has shared some strategies that we have gone away to try in our classrooms.

At our last department meeting, I asked staff to share a strategy that they have tried in their classrooms (for either their juniors and/or seniors) and we put together a google presentation to which each team member talked to.  Each slide has links to the resources they'd used and a brief description of what they did to implement the strategy.

It was good to hear from each team member and it was reassuring to know that cool things were happening in their classrooms.  We decided that at least once a term, we will reflect and try out more strategies to ensure we have a bank of resources that we can use to support each other and our students to help raise their literacy levels.  We would also look at strategies that we will utilise more purposefully in our planning if they are proven to be effective.

T.C Careers Evening 2018 - Our Social Sciences display

Recently, our school held a Careers Evening to share with future students, currents students, parents and families what their careers pathways could hold.  As a department, we were excited to talk through these pathways and it gave us a good opportunity to connect with parents who wanted to know about our courses.  Our particular display went with the 'Wizard of Oz' theme, to follow the yellow brick road to success - and because my name is 'Dorothy', it definitely made sense!  Here are some photos from the evening!

The Yellow brick road

Some of my team in our group shot

Seini sharing some of the products that her students had made.

Yes please, choose Social Studies!

T.C as Connected Learners: Knowing why we 'Share'

At our staff PLD this week, Lenva Shearing from Manaiakalani, discussed the aspect of Share from our cluster wide kaupapa of 'Learn, Create, Share'.

Humans have been sharing since the beginning of time from the time of cave man paintings and it is not a new thing.  Although the mode has changed, our human instinct hasn't. 

"Creating and sustaining relationships is the key to sharing".  In the past, sharing was limited to the people in the classroom and around the learners but today there are no limits - sharing can happen anytime, anywhere with anyone.

When our staff were asked what our favoured medium of sharing was, the majority of our staff who used social media said facebook.  Some of the reasons people used social media was to share stories, keep in touch with family and friends and stay connected with the outside world.  When asked what our boundaries were, one staff member said 'if it's something you wouldn't show your grandma, don't post it'. 

A challenge was put to our staff and we were asked to blog about it.  The statement was that 'All this technology is making us anti-social'.

Staff really got into it and I could hear from staff around me some good debates going on.   I personally could see both points of view as I understand that different generations see social media in different ways and I guess it depends on how you define being 'social'.

I am thinking carefully about my blogpost.

Lenva reminding us the importance of blogging for our students

We were reminded of the benefits for our students to continue to write and share blog posts, most of whom have been blogging since primary school.  Lenva shared the amazing results of the summer blogging journey - that if students blogged at least twice a week, they could potentially go up at least two asttle scores.   This was evident in the results shown by the 5 students from our school who took part in the blogging journey and all made good gains in their asttle writing scores - blogging was their golden recipe for success and could be for the majority of our kids too!.

A few of our summer bloggers who made good gains in their February asttle scores.

My Hui presentation

The Manaiakalani Hui is an opportunity for our CoL teachers to share our inquiries with lots of different people who are invested in some way or form in or Kahui Ako.  This year, we made one minute introductory videos to our inquiries, which provided a taster for anyone who wanted to find out more.   Once our videos were played, we held a round table session for 10 minutes which allowed us to discuss our inquiries further.   Below is my video:

At my round table sessions, I spent much of my time talking about what I had found with my inquiry and I there was a lady who was also a social science teacher who asked some really interesting questions and comments.  I shared that a group of us teachers have met to look at using and teaching sentence structures that was adopted from the 'Write that essay' programme and how much students learnt from the strategies.  One question was whether I saw the benefits of using the writing strategies in a 'Tuakana Teina' aspect, where the senior boys could support the junior boys in their writing.  I said that was an interesting way to use the skills they'd learnt and I would look into how they could work.  It was refreshing to share our inquiries with like minded people who cared about the learnings of the kids in our Kahui Ako.

Presenting my ISTE experience to our B.O.T

Recently, I had the privilege to travel to Chicago ISTE 2018 and at our recent
Board meeting, I had the privilege to present my key takeouts to them.  Here is my presentation:

One of the biggest things I had learnt in Chicago was that being with the right people who are as passionate about the teaching and learning as you are, has made me feel valued as an educator.  Thank you BOT for this amazing opportunity and I know the benefits will filter through to supporting our kids in their educational journeys. 

My GAFE Auckland Summit Ignite presentation 2018

Today I had the honour of presenting an IGNITE session at the GAFE summit.  I was a bit nervous but excited to be presenting in front of like minded educators and people from around the country and the world.



I shared my inquiry from 2017 and hoped that the audience learnt a bit about my journey.  I felt the opportunity to present allowed me to grow more confident in role as a COL teacher.

Our Manaiakalani Staff Meeting for Term 1: Reflections

During our Manaiakalani staff meeting, our COL team presented to our staff how to tackle the big 'I' - INQUIRY!  We each presented different areas and I volunteered to present a section on 'Collaborative Inquiry'. I was interested in sharing Dr Graeme Aitkins presentation on what collaborative inquiry is and isn't.  He shared two visuals and described examples linked to them.

"We come into schools, we travel through schools, we jump out the other side and nobodies changed at all, us by being there, or you by our prescence…". When I shared this visual with staff, I used a little analogy of walking through the staff room, saying hi to someone and asking how the inquiry was going, then walking off none the better. Dr Aitken calls this 'superficial' collaboration. The idea that we know about each other and what the other is doing, but no one has benefited from it - this has been the reality of inquiries in the past.
With our shared achievement challenges, we can see that collaboration needs to be more then an individual thing that we just do and know about.  With 'sharing' our challenges, the need to 'share' our inquiry looks something like this - all the pieces fitting and integrating around our challenges so that we can have a sense of connection and collaboration that allows us purpose.  Although we are geographically far apart, we as a cluster are linked with our Manaiakalani 'Learn, Create, Share' model.
After the meeting, one of the teachers in my department said the idea of integration resonated with her and she shared an example of what integration meant to her. A student who has recently joined her year 11 class was returning after missing much of last year due to huge family disruptions. The teacher could see this student was disengaged and after class talked to him about what was going on for him and why he was disengaged. He told her that it was hard for him to get back into school and he hadn't made many friends. The teacher encouraged the student to share his interests and found out that he had been in the rugby team and really wanted to play. The teacher said that she would have a chat to the rugby coach and encouraged the student to keep coming to school as he could catch up with a little help from his teachers.
After the meeting, she looked up the students' timetable and emailed his teachers about the students' situation and invited staff to share ideas and strategies on how to support him in his learning. She found out that they too were having issues with him and were thankful that they could discuss next steps. She also tracked down the rugby coach and let him know about the returning student. The next time she had the student, she noticed a change in his behaviour and found that he was calm and engaged in his learning. He told her that his teachers were supporting him by giving him time to get work down and he said he'd felt valued in his lessons. By sharing information about a learner across to other areas of his life, both inside and outside the classroom, this teacher felt that real valued 'integration' had taken place. As a teacher, the idea of integrating lay with everyone being on the same page and supporting each other.
I was really encouraged by this teacher sharing her journey with me and as a COL leader, my next steps are to support and encourage more purposeful sharing and working collaboratively on our inquiries. From our meeting, we met in COL groups and I will discuss how these meetings went in my next blog!

Informing teachers across our cluster about NCEA

Every year, the Woolf Fisher research team presents to teachers and leaders across our cluster reading, writing and maths asttle results from the previous year.  From these statistics, we saw results that presented a number of challenges, particularly in year 9.  Because these statistics only share results from years 1- 10, I collaborated with Russell Dunn to share with schools our senior results.

Here is the presentation:

 

  It was important to explain NCEA as some of our primary school colleagues may not know much about it.  The SOLO framework was also important to emphasis because it helped us to share the key language of learning we use to prepare our students for NCEA and to allow our colleagues to think about what language they could use in the primary schools as linked to SOLO.

At the end of the presentation, a number of staff approached me about coming to talk to their school staff meetings about NCEA, which I am looking forward to.