Inquiry Question #2: Inquiry Focus

Inquiry Question2 : From what you know already about your classes and your school’s profile and leadership goals for the year, share a possible inquiry focus.

My initial inquiry draft#2 is:

How does taking teachers on a journey of growth in Tapasā affect their pedagogical implementation?

Our school is made up of at least 68% Pasifika students.  We have strategies that we think we know and use around how to be culturally responsive to the needs of our students but there hasn't really been an inquiry to show how we can better adapt best evidence practice when engaging our Pasifika learners.

Part way through 2020, after reading a document containing student voice from our school, I decided that I wanted to turn that voice into action.  From this has came the Tamaki College Pasifika Initiative.  There are multiple levels of the initiative and one key aspect has been to implement the Tapasā into our teaching and learning.

I have been thinking about how to support those staff who are not Pasifika in implementing the Tapasā.  In saying that, there is an assumption that Pasifika teachers know how to teach Pasifika kids and although this may be true, relying on Pasifika staff to 'deal' with our Pasifika students.  So I'm am broadly thinking about who I would want to work with.

My inquiries in the past have focussed on a class and how I would implement interventions to accelerate achievement.  And these have usually been positive.  From my experience, I have noticed that as a Pasifika teacher myself, the students can relate to my teaching style and therefore respond positively.  I feel I am 'good' at teaching Pasifika students and therefore doing another inquiry whereby I teach the students I am inquirying into isn't condusive to the bigger picture.  We know that students engage with people who look like them and can connect with them.  My wonderings are: how can staff who don't look like me (ie. Pasifika) teach kids who look like me (ie. Pasifika).

I feel as a HOD and a passionate advocate of Pasifika education at Tamaki College, I would like to support non-Pasifika staff to connect with our Pasifika students better using the well documented and value added strategies shared in the Tapasā.  

My style of teacher support is to understand my teachers underlying assumptions and beliefs and to collaborate on a ‘framework’ that will allow them to look at their perceptions of our Pasifika students differently and build a repertoire of skills to support the learners in front of them.

Although our specific blogpost is supposed to frame our focus as a desired change in student learning and NOT a change in teaching, I am still working out how supporting our teachers will enhance and/or accelerate student learning and whether this needs to be a focus.

Initial Plan

My initial Planning will be to:

• Invite staff to join my inquiry
• Share with them the purpose of my inquiry and how it could support them
• Make a plan to regularly catch up with them
• Capture learnings through voice recordings and/or video observations.
• Pick out and align learnings from the Tapasā. 
• Document carefully our meetings
• Look at the different models that we could apply such as the growth mindset and the iceberg model.
• Identify trends and patterns from our meetings and share with my team.

Inquiry Question #1: Collaborate

My task was to collaborate with my school's leadership team and colleagues to identify areas where my inquiry will make a powerful contribution to the wider school and cluster goals.

Goal number 4 of our school goals for 2021 is: 

All teachers at Tamaki College will be well supported so that their practice meets the needs of their students. 

We have aligned our department goals to this school goal:

By the end of the year, we will have developed relatable practical teaching and learning resources to support the varying teaching needs of our team to meet the learning needs of the students in our Social Science classrooms.  There is a focus on our Maori and Pasifika learners.  We will construct a Social Sciences framework with which we will apply the learnings from the Standards for Profession teaching using the Tapasā as a lense, to enable all Social Sciences teachers  to have a kete/bank of strategies to support our learners across each year level.

My draft #1 Inquiry focus that I discussed with my school’s leadership team and colleagues was:

Can I develop the capabilities of my staff to accelerate learning through understanding and applying the Tapasā in a year 10 Social Studies class?

At this stage, ‘develop the capabilities’ relates to:

• Me understanding in depth the Tapasā
• Understanding where my team are and know about culturally responsive pedagogy
• Understanding where my team are and know about the Tapasā
• Wondering if kids can learn in an environment where the strategies from the Tapasā is prevalent and at the forefront of the teaching and learning/

Specific Outcomes:

• A ‘collaborative framework’ for staff in my department to develop with my guidance and support
• A ‘framework’ for success in collaboration with students
• A positive shift in achievement data related to PAT or asttle writing (possibility)

Wider school goals: 

• School goal:  Focus on school goal #4, on teacher wellbeing

Cluster wide goals: 

• Manaiakalani Achievement Challenges
• Challenges identified by Woolf Fisher at our cluster wide meeting specifically reading 

Through formal and informal discussions, I have talked to the following people:

My school’s leadership team: 

• Our School Principal (Senior Leadership team).  
• It is an inquiry that is paramount and embedded in your practice
• This is part of core business and will help staff develop cultural awareness 
• It will be useful to the growth of the department meaning that it will shift achievement in some way.
• You won’t be reinventing the wheel and should not be more work then what you are currently doing.
• Heads of Department (related to curriculum).
• How can what you learn apply to other subject areas.
• Positive in the way it can support our students.

Colleagues:  

• HOD in another department
• The more strategies the better especially around managing behaviour.
• It would be good to support staff in having restorative and meaningful conversations
• Teachers in my department
• How much more work is required?
• Can it work in my classroom? Strategies and tasks that you can see works.
• We would like support in how to scaffold collaborative groups because we don’t do it enough.
• Teachers from other curriculum areas
• I can see the value in working across curriculum areas.  How would assessments and reporting on the class look?
• Sharing ‘knowing the learner’ in a consistent centralised place important

Professional Colleague with Language and Inquiry Experience:  Dr Jannie Van Hees

• This is in two parts and maybe too big to do.  For the meantime, don’t worry about affecting learning and achievement as yet. 
• Uptake of the journey to somehow be evident in the pedagogy and then we make a projection (after analysing blogging, logging, student voice and discussions) to see what are some trends.
• Think about how you can collect evidence and measure this. 
• I think It will be interesting to see how they (not giving them do this do that) but saying from that piece of learning, I might try this and I might try that, alright go for it.  With regular checkpoints, the support will be there.

After discussing with the SLT and a number of colleagues and experts my draft#1 inquiry, I have decided to reframe my inquiry to focus on the capabilities of members of my department.  My Draft#2 of my Inquiry is along the lines of: 

How does taking teachers on a journey of growth in Tapasā affect their pedagogical implementation?. 

I will attempt to discuss this further in my next blog.

Addressing School Goal #1: Raising Maori Achievement

Our first school goal is around raising Maori achievement.  This goal has been a focus for our school for a long time and in discussions with my department we felt it was important to invite our teacher in charge of Maori Whaea Ruiha to share her insights into how to address raising Maori achievement.  One of the ways was unpacking what we taught and whether it was relevant.

The new Aotearoa Histories curriculum is one that schools are planning for and one of the key big ideas is the need for communities to know the history of their place.  We needed meaningful discussions to start immediately as the plan originally was to have a year 9 curriculum in place by 2022.  Scott our teacher in charge of History, suggested we start by bringing in knowledgable local speakers such as Russell Stone who has a wealth of knowledge on the European history of our local area.

Whaea Ruiha suggested we visit Waitingi and possibly go across to the west coast and visit a new museum Manea the footprints of Kupe which explores the journey of the Great Kupe who was the first Maori explorer. 

Other ideas were: 

• Drawing in common history of Maori and Pacific.  
• Maori settled in N.Z but stopped in at many places on the way.
• Researching the Historic Trauma of our area.  
• Creating a whanau/aiga culture in the class
• Look for a day to plan for our Aotearoa Histories.  
• Looking at local wars and international wars. 

We will look at ways to put our ideas into actions and I felt the meeting was a good way to start the conversations that needed to be had and hopefully will be actioned.

Manaiakalani Secondary Schools Connect Presentation

Manaiakalani provides opportunities for Secondary School teachers in our wider cluster to share the awesome things happening in our schools.  Our kaupapa was how to engage students through digital technologies in Social Sciences.   

My presentation talked about how we connected and collaborated with my students and their whanau during Covids level 3 and 4 or ‘lockdown’ as we loosely call it.  I tried to add rewindable clips to the presentation to help clarify some of what we got up to.  I was a bit nervous but once I got going, I think I was o.k.

The recording will be out soon.

The ease of using MIRO for planning in Senior Sos

My level 3's have been using MIRO as part of the assessment.  They need to collaborate on a campaign of Social Actions which meant planning and discussing how to run the campaign.  I asked a few students who were working on a MIRO what their thoughts were on the platform.  Here is the interview below (please turn it up as the sound isn’t great).

Using the PAT reading data to find interventions

After our PLD with literacy expert Mele Suipi-Latu, I set about applying our discussions to my inquiry on finding data that related to the learning needs of my year 9 Social Studies class.  

On the NZCER PAT site I found my class and found the item report on the test questions that were assigned different text types. 

I then noticed that 3 of the text types were relevant to Social Studies:

• Explanation (Questions 7 - 10)
  
• Report (Questions 21 - 25)
  
• Persuasive (Questions 37 - 42)

I then had a look at a few of the questions and found that for each question, the report showed for each question, what each student had selected.  The interesting thing was that it showed it highlighted certain students this way: 

The key showed that based on student's overall result

• has high expectancy to correctly answer this question
  
• was not expected to correctly answer this question
  
• was not expected to incorrectly answer this question
  

Then I noticed that out of the 3 text types, persuasive language had the lowest percentage of questions correctly answered.

Why persuasive writing and language is important in social studies:

This text type can be incorporated into the talanoa as a debate topic and current issues when you have to argue why your perspective should be believed.  

Politicians use persuasive writing and language, advertisers and media people.

On closer examination of the questions, I found that question 38 ‘what is the main reason…’ only 21.4% of students got it right, question 40 only 17.9% could answer ‘according to the author, why…’, question 41, what is the main argument the author is trying to make only 21.4% got it right and question 42 ‘Which statement makes the strongest attempt to appeal to the reader's emotions?, 32.1% got it correct.

The last column above compares us to the national norm and it highlights which question in particular students struggled with.

What’s next?

Discuss the steps more purposefully with my department.

At the bottom of the report, I clicked on ‘more resources’.

Looking at the Recycling is Essential (level 5)

Understanding STAR and PAT data PLD

One of our school goals is to raise student reading and writing literacy levels in our junior school by the time they get to the end of year 10.  As a department, we have developed some good strategies to engage students in their learning but on reflection, we identified the need to find more effective ways to support our junior students better.  

One of the aspects that we use to know our learners is data.  Students are tested at the start of the year and again at the end and between both tests, we try our best to shift student achievement.  But just knowing the results of their tests is not enough as it limits the depth of the support that we could offer to each student who have different learning needs.  To understand how to interpret the data better and use if more effectively, I asked Mele Suipi-Latu if she could take my department through some PLD to share her learnings and research with us in order to better understand what data is important to know, what it means and how to create some actionable steps.

Below is the recording of our PLD and the powerpoint used for the presentation.

As a department we will sit down with the data and brainstorm ways we can utilise it better in our planning for teaching.  Our goal is to ensure we design differentiated tasks to suit the learners but also challenge them to shift in their achievement.  Watch this space!