Designing Learning with the End in Mind

 This tool is designed to draw together the High Leverage Practices, the Digital Affordances and recommendations from the Milestone Reports that Woolf Fisher have produced for Manaiakalani over the past few years. It also shows the Learn, Create, Share pedagogy used my schools in the Manaiakalani Programme. 

Facilitation Role

 This month I have been travelling and using Google Meet to present to the Manaiakalani Clusters about their Student Achievement Data and where to from here. It's been great meeting all our wonderful facilitators and principals around all the different clusters.

Interesting Skills

 

2020 was a changing landscape for all of us. I felt our people were able to do well because the learn, create, share pedagogy is able to be used so well, even remotely. Interesting to see others catching up with some of the work we have been doing for a while now in Manaiakalani schools.

Maths Vocabulary

 We are doing a hands-on unit on probability at the end of this term and to start we are doing a range of vocabulary activities. This is important for my students for them to be able to talk about the trails and outcomes that they will be completing. One of the things we have done is to bookmark a link to a child friendly Maths Dictionary. This was recommended by Marie Hurst earlier in the year and has been an excellent resource for the students to be able to understand the vocabulary and therefore the concepts.

Reading PLD

Panmure Bridge and Glen Taylor school had the opportunity to work with the fabulous Sheena Cameron and Louise Dempsey on providing a balanced reading programme. 

It was great to be able to have the time to step back and reflect on the components of the reading programmes we are providing for our students.

My main takeaway from the sessions was to plan for more shared reading opportunities. This is usually done 'on the fly' as we look at a text. This teaching strategy allows for students to: explore more difficult texts, work in social groupings, encourages discussion on the text, and the strategies used to comprehend. 

Collaborative Art

Really enjoyed putting this together with my class. Great discussion starter on collaboration; What is it? What does it look like?

Reading - Looking at opinions

This week we have been working in thinking groups to look at two different opinions. Since we have come back from lockdown it has been important to re-teach co-operative and collaborative skills as we get used to be ing back in the classroom.

For this learning I chose a context that all students are familiar with, the end of year school prize giving. We looked at 2 different texts, one written for students by Kiwi Kids News and the other article from the NZ herald.

We followed parts of the reciprocal teaching model and pulled out the vocabulary that we needed to explore and then we could use in making a decision for ourselves. We collected vocabulary and ideas on post it notes to pull together the ideas from each group.

We posted our ODL to our blogs once it was completed.

Art

Really pleased with the way my instrument art turned out. This links into our unit on light and sound.

Maths Coaching and PLD

Really enjoyed the Maths PLD session this week with Marie Hirst. A great range of activities was shared and we all had a fun time working on these. 

I enjoyed the coaching session too, it is always nice to get a different perspective on what we are doing in our classrooms. Being able to discuss learning progressions and next steps for individual students is valuable learning.

Google Meet

Room 5 had a Google Meet every morning during lockdown. As we were still in the process of getting 1:1 devices for my year 4 class, it was tricky to get everyone up and running. This day we managed to get 21 out of 28 students on-line together. We used the Meet to share our experiences, check in on the previous days learning and discuss the current learning tasks. Everyone got a chance to speak and we were able to share artwork (and new babies) over the Meet. There was some good contextual learning about lighting, sound, and framing that came up as we got better about meeting online.

Sheena and Louise - Retelling PLD

During lockdown Sheena Cameron and Louise Dempsy ran a workshop on using the retell strategy for reading comprehension. This was a great session with lots of practical ideas to implement in the classroom with students. Two of the ideas I was able to implement once lockdown ended are excellent for my TAide to work with some of my ESOL, high needs students on.

Stick puppets to retell Traditional tales

Copying Nursery Rhymes onto ice cream sticks for organising and retelling.

Building trip to Christchurch

As part of the Tamaki redevelopment we need to ensure that our schools remain the school of choice for our community. As our buildings date to the Social housing boom of the 1950's there is a lot of scope to improve. We visited 3 schools in Christchurch and saw some amazing buildings and pedagogy at work.

High Leverage Practises

Love listening to Aaron Wilson about how we can best get shift in reading with our students. Starting with a provocation and making sure we provide lots of opportunities to read and discuss texts. Thinking about the activities I use in the classroom and how to get my students engaged in the text enough to talk about it in a discussion.

Manaiakalani Staff Meeting

The Manaiakalani Learn staff meeting gave us a chance to reflect back the opportunities we offer our students to experience Modification and Redefinition in the learn part of our pedagogy. W are all capable using these tools to create, but what experieces can we plan in this space?
In our syndicates we are planning our Science unit around light and sound for next term.

Maths PLD

Session 1 with Marie focused on the students who are working on making 10. This is a good reminder about the value of using materials, and imaging to embed concepts for our students.
Giving students a problem like - Ben has some strawberries and picks some more. How many strawberries does he have altogether? - this allows students to focus on the language of the question first, rather than get distracted by the numbers.
Once students have the concept numbers can be added to the question for them to solve.

Woolf Fisher feedback 2020

As always, the Woolf Fisher feedback provided an opportunity for lots of professional reflection. It is timely as we plan our learning for the start of the year that we reflect on the things that make us effective digital practitioners.

Maths PLD - Teacher only day

The growth mindset messages have been around for a few years now but these Videos shared by Marie Hurst at our teacher only day are a wonderful way to share the messages with our students. This on really resonated with me and my class. A great way to approach the start of the year.

Appraisal PLD

Recently Chantal and I did some Appraisal PLD with Evaluation Associates.
A very worthwhile day and good to know we are doing the right things for teacher attestation.

Reflecting on my Kahui Ako Inquiry

My inquiry this year was based on research more than ever before. I think that the students and I have  a good understanding of 'talking about text' now and I have tried different things with my teaching and learning this year. The original idea came from Aaron's research. As I attend different PD sessions over the year I included more ideas into the sessions with the students. One of the most memorable was including the image of a 'conversation chain' from Jannie van Hees. Most recently the PD session with Cynthia Greenleaf in looking at a text and using it as the basis of a critical thinking conversation.

I think I now need to consolidate all the learning over this year and really spend time working with groups across the whole class to implement 'taking about text'. I believe that all students can benefit from doing this activity. In doing so they are building their oral language skills, as well as being able to give opinions justified by information in the text.

The focus on reading comprehension through oral language was a new area for me to explore and I have leant some good skills in being able to let the students lead the discussion. I found myself needing to ask less questions and being more of a prompter when students got stuck.

One of the interesting side benefits for me has been more regular collection of student voice. This is son easy to do both via google forms and informally with discussing progress using running records. I was pleased to note that the students were proud of the gains that had made over the year.

Where to next - I would like to continue using these sessions across the whole class to build students skills not only in oral language but also in comprehension and critical thinking.

Testing results and some conclusions made

We have just completed the end of year testing this week and have our results in. While the standardised testing results were a mixed bag, I was very happy with the on-going improvement in the Probe data of my target group.

The students made excellent progress with shifts of between 1 and 4 years.

I think that one of the reasons that the students did consistently better with the Probe testing rather than the PAT of STAR testing is the focus on oral language. The students started the year very reluctant to talk about what they were reading but by the end of the year they were able to answer questions much more readily.

I made quite a few tweaks and changes to what I was doing with the students over the year. I modified the group, the recording sheet twice and finally changed the mode of the text.

Looking back I think I would start at the end, and begin the year with discussions around an image. I don't know if it was all the practise through the year but the discussions around an image seemed to flow the best. I think there are a number of factors that made this easier for the students: they had the image in front of them, there were no wrong answers just what they could see, they didn't need to flip pages to find information to justify what they could see. When we expanded on the discussion to what might have happened before the photo and after the photo, they were all able to come up with ideas that were plausible from the image in front of them.