Linda from PB4L came in today to talk to use about our programme. We are currently a Tier 1 school. I loved how she explained that PB4L is somewhat based on the Whare Nui. She talked about how in each Whare Nui, the tukutuku patterns are reflective of the local peoples and their history. In such a way, each school should make PB4L reflect their own people (students) and its own history. It is not a cut and paste programme, it should be moulded and made your own.
Part of PB4L is the triangle model.
Tier 1 (green) - 80% of school population - Most of the school population responds to the standard initiatives implemented across the school.
Tier 2 (yellow) 10-15% of school population - these students need extra focus as they are not responding to what the 80% responded to, possibly because they are on behaviour programmes, learning support etc etc.
Tier 3 (red) - 1-5% of school population - These students are then referred to agencies because they don't respond or can't fit within the school system anymore.
The first thing we did was look at a map of our school, and use post its to reflect on 'problem' areas - where incidents happen, what happens there, who is typically involved, why we think this might be happening etc.
Active Supervision
Pre-correction - front loading expected behaviour before students they even go outside. Encouraging desired behaviour. This only works when done often and consistently - yes, those children who fit into tier 3 might need 1:1 discussion about this, but everyone needs to be on the same page.
Active supervision is moving, scanning and interacting.
Movement should be constant, unpredictable, planned/purposeful, targeted, designed to increase contact opportunities.
Scanning techniques
- target both appropriate and inappropriate behaviours
- target known problems areas, activities, groups and individuals
-uses both visual and aural cues
-extends ability to supervise large areas
-increases opportunities for positive contact
Interacting
- positive greetings should be non specific in contact e.g. "hi everyone, its good to see you" rather than "gidday guys, what are you making there?" (these get you stuck with that group, hindering your ability to move and scan)
After that, Ottilie and Sally talked to us about how PB4L relates to our school values, and what expected behaviour we have for our students related to those values. Here are two values -
Overall it was a great session and I definitely learnt a lot. Thanks Ottilie for sharing your knowledge about PB4L!
This afternoon we had a staff meeting with Sue Pine, our maths PD lady.
After having a great observation and getting lots of testing done throughout the day, I was ready and eager to learn from her.
Now if you are anything like me, when somebody says 'algebra', you think of this...
This is exactly what I thought of - ala year 12 Calculus..
So, how the heck does this happen for my 8 year olds?
We started with this blue piece of paper. The questions at the bottom are
-how much does a T-shirt cost?
-how much is a drink?
Sue told us NOT to use algebraic equations to solve, so I used trial and error which made the most sense to me.
I first started with a t-shirt being worth $20, hence a drink being worth $2, based on the first equation. The second equation then didn't add up to $30.. so it couldn't be that..
So, I made the cost of the drink higher. I tried $17 for a shirt and $5 for a drink.. again, it didn't add up for the second equation. This time it was too much..
So I made the cost of the drink less.. this time $3 and the t shirt was $19.
Again, not enough for the second equation. So I made it in between - $4. and hence t-shirts cost $18.
Booyah!
Another way we could have solved it was by using what was the same in each equation - each one had one t shirt and one drink. Half of $44 is $22, so one shirt and one drink cost $22 together. In the second equation, you are left with $8 so each drink here costs $4.
Then we talked about the maths progressions and put them in order..
I see stuff like this all the time, especially on my Facebook feed where people fight over the answer. I now realise, this is algebra! This isn't just some silly game.
Have a go yourself!
I found this meeting with Sue very useful, as it broke down what algebra actually looks like for different aged children. It's not all about equations, (well not for the age of my students anyway..)
This morning I had my final observation from Paula Were (our literacy PD lady) on writing. To be honest, I was not feeling overly great about it - I was just feeling very tired, have pressure from uni assignments etc etc. Just not excited about it, ya know?
But I decided that whatever will be will be, and tried to just move on with my day.
I wanted to show Paula how I have been using videos in writing as I have found it so effective with our target students. Archana was with Paula (as she is the head of literacy) and the syndicate leader Aireen came to watch as well. Here is my planning for this lesson. My goals from previous lessons were
Teacher goals:
co-construct SC
teacher model how to write
scaffold through prompt
take a video of lesson as evidence
Firstly, we talked about the WALT and co-constructed the SC. This included me giving them an example sentence 'the girl went down the stairs' and the students recorded their suggestions about how to add detail to make the sentence better to get their head around what 'detail' meant.
Next, I introduced our video prompt. (0:00-0:20 only)
I played it once through, and asked the students to record whatever thought they had about the clip.
We went through the clip again, and I paused at particular parts I wanted to emphasise.
At these points I would scaffold the students to realise something the hadn't, use particular words (e.g. reflection), make them think deeper about a particular point (e.g the characters feelings).
After we had brainstormed lots of detail about the character, we then formed sentences which would make a paragraph. I wrote the first sentence for this to show students how we can combine ideas from different people and write it TOGETHER (i.e. teacher modelling).
Here is what we wrote together.
After this, I asked the students to go back to our WALT and SC and tick the things they thought we had done - they did this. One student pointed out that although we wrote we should include a simile, we didn't actually include one. I agreed, and said that can be our next steps for next time - making sure we do include one.
After this, the kids watched the rest of the clip (they were interested and hooked into this character and wanted to find out more..) and I went with Paula, Archana and Aireen. We interviewed a couple of the kids to check their understanding of the lesson (did they understand what the aim was? did they know how to achieve it? did they know who/what helped them?).
After that, Paula, Archana, Aireen and I discussed my lesson and checked it off against a teacher criteria for effective writing practice (I will link this doc here once I receive it).
Things to celebrate about this lesson
Using a resource that students all could connect and relate to
there was a lot of conversation about their own gaming consoles and the games they play
the character was the same approximate age as the students so they could connect to his daily experiences
Co-constructing the SC and ensuring students were able to refer back to it and check for themselves if they had achieved it
Referring back to the WALT throughout the lesson and making sure we only focused on that one aim
the students made spelling/punctuation/etc mistakes, but I purposely ignored these as it was not the focus of the lesson
one student also kept trying to jump ahead to the problem section of the narrative, but I kept him focused that we were only writing about the character
Getting positive feedback from my peers (sometimes teachers don't celebrate each others success explicitly, which did happen today and was awesome to hear!)
Next Steps
Have a specific vocabulary in mind that students will learn through the lesson - not just using words they already know
Ensuring ALL the students are equally actively involved (in the lesson one student did say a lot less than others)
I would love to hear your feedback on this lesson!
This afternoon my final session was called Accelerate the reading progress of your Äkonga using culturally responsive practices and digital technologies".
Here is the description from the booking sheet..
"We are based in a low decile school undergoing rapid change, with a vision to raise student engagement and achievement. Join us to:
- find out how you can take action to accelerate progress in reading for your ELLs and target students using digital technologies (Chromebooks & iPads)
- explore culturally responsive practices to develop learner agency
- capture student voice in your class learning and assessment programme
- discover tools that can support you to implement a targeted and personalised learning environment"
I enjoyed this session, was it reaffirmed a lot of work my school has done to build positive culturally responsive culture, and also touched on many things I have been looking at for my literature reviews and will be doing for my dissertation next year. In this, most of the content was not 'new information' to me, but was interesting and thought-provoking none-the-less.
One highlight was this image they shared -
It perfectly illustrates how culture should be taught and talked about. Typically, we talk about those things at the top. Clothes, food, games, drama, stories, cooking and holidays of a particular culture. These are very surface level features. When in reality, we should be talking about the things at the root of the culture - notions of fairness, definitions of kinship, world views, how decisions are made, who holds power, the role of religion, community vs individuality. Those are the things that make the most difference between people - not who eats what food. Who cares...
When we are teaching in a culturally responsive way, aiming to accelerate reading or maths or whatever it is, these things need to be taken into consideration. The 'root' of a culture is far more important than the leaves of a culture.
This afternoon I am going to a session run by OMGTech.
Originally, I was supposed to go to another session, but I have been getting very into Coding and seeing how I can use science and STEM subjects in schools more and more, so I was naughty and skipped my session and joined in on this one.. no regrets!
One of the first things I heard when walking in the room was...
"Coding is hard and you should fail"
What a great start! Immediately setting up an atmosphere, not that it is okay to fail, but that in fact, you shouldfail. You should fail. It's good for you. That immediately takes the fear out of not knowing what to do, and the embarrassement out of other people judging you (or you thinking that they are...)
The session was then split into 20 minutes chunks, where the partipants were split into four groups, and spent 20 mintues at each 'station' before rotating around to spend the next 20 minutes at the next 'station'. The four 'stations' were Robotics, 3D printing, coding, and unmaking. For each of these you 'made' or 'did' something - it was very active learning.
Robotics
For Robotics, we were seated at a laptop which had a programme open which allows you to add code that controls a robot. We were given the challenge of programming said robot (we had one each) to drive from point A, over a wooden bridge of pretend ruble to point B to save the injured person, then drive them to point C. All of this had to be done using code such as
leftTurn(1000)
goForward(500)
goBackward(1200)
rightTwist(200)
The numbers e.g. (200) are used to indicate the amount of time spent doing that action, not the distance to be covered. That made it a little harder.
I did pretty well, I must admit.. Watch the video to see how my robot went!
3D Printing
The next station was 3D printing - we logged onto computer which had this open..
Then we just played around with all the functions that allowed you to create a 3D shape. There were generic shapes, letters and numbers from which to choose. You could change the size, location, height away from the ground, colour, distance away from other objects etc. It was hard!
I found an ear type shape and decided to make a bunny. It didn't turn out that bad... I found it quite hard to get the eyes/nose/ears/whiskers actually attached to the head. As I was looking at in in a 2D mindset, from my point of view the pieces were almost 'layered' on top of each other and hence looked like a bunny. However, when I changed my view, it was a different story. Both eyes were different distances away from the face, one ear wasn't attached and I don't know what I did but somehow the nose fell off onto the ground? Well, that made me have to really think about the way my object would have been printed. If I had printed it using the 3D printer that they had there, it would have been all seperate pieces, instead of one bunny head with pieces attached.
It was fun to play around with the model maker, but interesting to note that the guy running this 'station' kept saying how 3D printers aren't actually that great for schools, as they take hours and hours to print something tiny and somebody needs to watch it the whole time. If nobody is watching, and something goes wrong, it can wreck the entire printer which costs a LOT of money...
Unmaking
Un-making is exactly what is sounds like. What is the opposite to making? Taking apart.
This was not done for fun - it is for trying to understanding how something works and see for yourself the parts involved and how those are connected to each other.
We started off with these...
Yeap, old CD/DVD players.
The guy taking this 'station' talked about all technology has evolved. His example, was the record player. An old technology, seen by modern peoples as ridiculous and pre-historic. Yet, when you compare the record player to the floppy disc, and the floppy disc to the CD/DVD player, they are essentially, at a nuts and bolts level, the same thing. Admittedly, they do get a lot smaller, a lot more powerful and able to handle much more data - but the way the data is held and pulled off is the same way. People just don't realise it.
These were the four things we were asked to 'find' in our CD players once we had un-made them. On the left, the unicorn, which holds and moves the CD; in the middle, the laser and its mirrors, which are used to get the data off the cd and transit the data to the data reader; and the squishy things (yes, really). These are used to hold the laser steady.. I think? Not really sure what they do really, but they were fun to play with..
Coding
The last station was game coding using Scratch. Matthew talked us through the main 3 steps of game design
1. have a character
2. have a problem
3. have a goal
Each of us then designed a game using these three steps. I made my own game way to hard, and kept dying when I tried to play it and film it.
From this photo of making my game, you can see the actual game screen on the left hand size (the maze looking thing) and the gamers code on the right. What you do in scratch is you drag and drop different commands for the various characters or the game map itself, into a particular order so that the game follows a particular sequence.
This session is called Raise achievements of Pasifika students by empowering parents through Ako Fakataha. (Learning Together).
Here is the session description according to the booking sheet..
"Students’ values are reflection of their whanau and families’ values. When parents feel that their children are succeeding, they are empowered to do more and are willing to engage, participate and collaborate in their children's learning. This is how the relationship between parents, teachers and children will work and Pasifika Success will happen. The nut will crack."
This session was actually run by two teachers from Manaiakalanai school St Pius, Ana Tui and Sharon Middleton.
Sourced from http://www.saintpiusx.school.nz/1/pages/16-home
As part of their curriculum review in 2015, Ana, alongside her colleagues and with some guidance from Cognition, began Ako Fakataha. The idea behind this programme was to involve parents of Pasifika students in a way that embraced and celebrated their culture, and was accessible to parents so they felt comfortable and confident to act as themselves.
To start the programme, Ana approached some of her Tongan students parents about forming a group in which they could help each other, alongside the teacher as equals, to help their children learn. After some initial reluctance, Ana succeeded and 7 parents agreed to be a part of the programme. Their first meeting was in her classroom, where they talked it out and agreed on shared values and ideas that would guide their group, including the name Ako Fakataha, which means learning together. They agreed to meet in one of the parents' garages every Monday night.
In these meetings, they would start and end with a prayer. This really reflected the parents values and the teachers awareness of the importance of this for the families. Next, the teacher would take one of the kids and model for the parents how to talk to the child about their learning. Ana discussed how typically, Pasifika parents tell children what to do and children listen, but when it comes to learning, parents need to listen and children need to talk. Its literally the opposite. So, it will take a lot of work to change. After this, the parents would listen as their children talked to them about their learning - with Ana helping out, offering advice and sentence starters, reigning in distractions and more. After their closing prayer, in typical Pasifika fashion, they would have a feed!
After 25 weeks, with a meeting in the one parents' garage every Monday night, Ana reflects on her programmes' journey thus far. The parents in her group had actually formed a social group without her knowing. They had been going for walks with their kids altogether every Tuesday, walking to school together and for enjoyment. The mums in the group had also began meeting up for coffee groups, each week each mum bought with her $50 which they would then pool together, and give to one of the mums. Over the long period of time, they had each been the recipient of the good will of their group members. Ana did not know about either of those things before the end of term 3; in fact, she felt quite cheated that they didn't tell her about it!
Interesting questions were raised at the end of their presentation, such as how can Pakeha teachers get the same success when they don't have the same 'hook' in with parents, as they are not Tongan as the parents are Tongan (in Ana's case); how can parents who typically do not engage with school, be targeted?; what are ways to use the children to get the parents invested?; how can the digital technology in our schools also be used to hook parents in? I loved how these questions were discussed, as people from the audience as well as Ana and Sharon built onto what each other had said, supported, celebrated and encouraged each other.
Ana and Sharon tell the narrative of one, i'm sure of many, stories which aim to promote success for Pasifika as Pasifika (just like Te Kotahitanga encourage Maori to succeed as Maori). It is talked about a lot that we need to build relationships and engage with our parents to help their children succeed; nobody that I know of has taken it as far as Ana has with her Ako Fakataha programme. To get successful outcomes for these students, we need to meet them where they are..
And yes, sometimes that does mean meeting them literally in the neighbours garage.
This mornings keynote speaker is Michael Fullan.
Michael Fullan is well known for his ideas about Deep Learning.
He has three key points..
Humans are innately wired to connect, wired to create and wired to help humanity.
From the moment we are born, we connect with our parents and those around us, wether we realise it or not. So how does our school system encourage us in these? Well, mostly, it doesn't.. So how can we change our education system?
Michael believes that to change our system, we need to focus on these three things..
New Pedagogy Partnership - CONNECTION CREATIVITY HELPING HUMANITY
Six key things, called 'the 6 C's', that define what kinds of students we should be producing in the new education system.
Key Competencies in NZC align with these 6 C's.
WHOLE SYSTEM CHANGE STRATEGIES
Negative Alignments
-accountability
-don't obsess with targets/assessments
-system culture (promising success)
Positive Alignments
-focus
-capacity building
-breakthrough leadership - respect and reject the status quo, be an expert and an apprentice at the same time, experiment and commit.
Another thing to consider when you think about changing education, is social media. In todays world social media is everywhere and almost everyone is on it. It is hugely powerful.
-it is ubiquitous
-it weakens hierarchies
-distribution and concentrated connection is the new power.
-the young are the most connected and least committed to the status quo
-humans, especially the young, find helping humanity to be an intrinsic value
-the above conditions cause learners to outrun leaders and researchers
-the job of leaders is to help leaders run better (as students are now running ahead of us)
-the job of education is to produce better citizens for tomorrow, today - it is an agent of change.
In the future, we don't need lots of good leaders. We need good citizens, and the leadership will be embedded in them. 10 ways to die in deep learning.
1. if you haven't experienced deep or powerful learning yourself
2. if you are unwilling to reimagine the grammar of schooling 3. if you don't respect your students in the present as opposed to the future 4. if you don't give students some choice 5.if you don't live by 'less is more' 6. if you aren't willing to admit you don't know the answer
7. if you don't normalise failure and create opportunities for revision and improvement
8. if you don't help students feel like they belong in class or in your domain
9. if you aren't willing to set the world a little askew.
10. if you don't realise that creating deep learning is a countercultural experiences.
Don't change your ways to fit the framework. Make the framework fit what you want to do.
I found these sketchnote online, which were made for a different conference, but still reflect the key ideas Michael presented today.
Today the MDTA's were invited to the Manaiakalani Annual Hui, held at the Panmure Yacht & Boating Club. It was a great day, with lots of different speakers having their bit, all coming together to share the message of the work Manaiakalani has done over the past year.
First up were the student ambassadors from each of the 12 schools. They each shared part of their learning which demonstrated use of digital affordance, the learn create share pedagogy, amazing teacher creativity or student creativity with their blogs.
Next up were the Manaiakalani Innovative Teachers, sponsored by the SPARK Foundation. They each shared about the research they have been conducting this year. I created this sketch-note to help myself remember key things that different people presented that I thought were awesome/inspirational;/thought-provoking.
After morning tea was the team from the Woolf Fisher Research Centre presenting data collected from the 12 Manaiakalani schools and introducing the next set of ideas and goals to work on. Again, I created a sketch-note to record my thought process while they talked.
After this, Russell Burt, prinicipal of Point England School, put things very simply. We know how to move the 'bottom' students to the 'middle', and only some of us are doing that, and now the team from Woolf Fisher had just told us how to get the 'middle' students to the 'top'. Russell's message - JUST DO IT! It is for the benefit of your students. You as a teacher choosing not to do the things we know will work because you don't like them, agree with them, whatever, is to the detriment of your students, so get over it, and do it for your kids.
After lunch, Dorothy talked the crowd through the Manaiakalani Outreach clusters. These are groups of schools around the country which want 'our recipe' for success with low decile low achieving students. Although it is not that simple, these outreach clusters are now on a fast-tracked 3 year programme modelled from the Tamaki cluster so they can accelerate their students as well.
I created another sketch-note the record snippets of the discussion as it went along.
Overall, it was an awesome day at the annual hui. I learnt a lot about Manaiakalani (when I thought I knew everything... ha!) and definitely got some food for thought to reflect on for my own practice.
This afternoon we had a staff meeting about CYFs and how it relates to us at school, mostly about procedures we should follow and what to do if one of our students reports abuse to us.
First of all, it is a huge deal for a child to speak up about abuse they might be enduring. For many children in these situations, they grow up with the abuse so see it as normal, hence they don't understand what they experience on an everyday basis is not acceptable, and that they even should tell somebody. They don't tell, because they don't know any better.
If they do disclose abuse to us, as teachers, our role is then to gather information. Asking open-ended questions is good, and asking statement questions such as who was there, when did this happen are also good. What is not helpful to anybody involved, is when you use questions like did you see uncle hit mum? That kind of questioning puts ideas into the childs' head and then their answers cannot be trusted completely. We need to ask blank question so what they say is truly their own words.
Next, we talked about what the procedures are IF a child does disclose abuse. I made a flow chart to help organise my thinking.
The lady taking the meeting also talked us through the changes that are happening to the Ministry, mainly the rebranding to the Ministry for vulnerable children (In April 2017) and changes to the Vulnerable Children Act.
The meeting was very helpful and informative. One thing that I personally reflected on was how much effort and planning goes into a childs case before CYFs or the Police even get involved. With my experience with my parents being foster parents, it always seems to be such a quick process, with children being uplifted from their homes and delivered into foster care within 12 hours. But really, there are weeks or even months of work that goes on behind the scene - gathering data, confirming stories, working with various agencies, meeting with parents and extended whanau, etc etc etc.
One thing my principal Rhonda Kelly was pushing on us, was the importance of discussion. If a child says something to their teacher, record it absolutely, but talk to the siblings teachers, to this childs teacher from last year, to the SWIS worker, the nurse, etc. All these people can add to, or negate something a child has said. What could seem like nothing actually could turn out to be huge, or something that could seem huge could actually turn out to be a misunderstanding.
Discussion is so important! We need to band together around these children we love so much and work together to protect them.
This afternoon we had a staff meeting run by Sue Pine, our maths PD facilitator.
She reminded us that as teachers, we are never in the position of uncomfortable learning and the 'unknown', i.e. the learning pit. We are always the ones who know everything, and yet we expect out students to be comfortable being uncomfortable.
Sourced from http://francinemassue.weebly.com/the-learning-pit.html
We discussed different things we were struggling with in maths, that were leaving us 'in the pit'. It was refreshing that a lot of us were struggling with the same things.
She then introduced some ways to encourage students to talk within themselves productively about their learning.
For both terms 2 and 3, the senior syndicate has done the Week of Inspirational Maths upon Sue's recommendation. This is a great way to build class norms about how we act and think in maths.
We discussed..
What do good maths learners do?
They...
Ask questions when they don’t understand
Explain their thinking so others can understand
Use different ways to represent their solutions (visual,
equipment)
Revise their thinking when they learn new information or
strategies
Understand that mistakes are learning opportunities
Value a deep understanding not speed
Check that their solution is sensible
Check back in with the problem and what it is asking
Support other mathematicians to develop their understanding
Sue reminded us that we need to explicitly talk about those things in our classes, and have it displayed somewhere in our class so students and us as teachers can always remember.
Next we discussed how we can support our students to be those good maths learners we want them to be..
A few key ways are
ensure groups are mixed ability (not 'smart' groups and 'low' groups)
ensure groups are not larger than 4 students
giving students roles within the group (e.g. in picture below)
giving students question prompts to use
explicitly teaching group/teamwork skills
One key thing Sue talked about that really resonated with me was the idea of the 'low status of learners'. This means, that there are some students with low self-efficacy, no confidence, etc., so they sit and don't try in group work. Even when they do, other students see them as 'low status' and often don't even listen to what they have to say, assuming they don't know anything and/or are wrong. This resonated with me because this is exactly what my case study for uni was about. I noticed four of the students in my own class had very low self-efficacy in maths, so I wanted to increase that. One gem moment from my case study was one of my students Lopiseni. He often sits back, doesn't try, doesn't engage in group discussions and lets others do the work. One day however, as I was browsing from group-to-group, I found his group were very confused on their problem. The girl who was scribing was leading the group down the wrong track, and none of them seemed to realise it. I asked Lopiseni what he thought, and straight away he offered a helpful strategy that would bring the group back to the right path. He knew all along, but either didn't want to say, or his group wouldn't listen. He then kind of took over the group, with his confidence boosted, and together they found the answer to the problem. This is exactly what Sue was talking about - finding those opportunities to lift up those 'low status' students, so they can fly on their own. That moment definitely was a highlight of that day.
Something that really challenged me was Sue's idea that we act as if maths thinking is private. In all learning areas, students are encouraged to talk, think, connect, predict etc. In maths however, we seem to expect them to just think and write and know. Why is there such a difference? Why is reading knowledge so social, so discussable, so debatable between students, but maths isn't? Why is maths always 'this' answer or its not. Why is it so individual, when no other curriculum area is? Sue challenged us to think about the way we think about maths, because that influences the way our students do. If we can be comfortable in the learning pit as teachers, this is how our students will learn to do the same. We need to challenge ourselves to change our own conceptions about maths, brought about by the rote-learning we all did as kids. Why did we do that? Was it helpful? How did it effect our overall picture of learning, or what makes a 'good' learner?
I came away with lots to think about from Sue's PD today. Some of it a celebration of my students success, some of it questioning my own personal experiences and beliefs about teaching maths.. Food for thought anyone??
For this weeks Digital Immersion, the MDTA's are joining the other first year teachers within the Manaiakalani teachers at Panmure Bridge School. We first discussed....
Connecting with each other: WWW of Manaiakalani Goals
How can I see the Manaiakalani goals in my school/classroom/teaching?
What is working?
What isn't working?
What do I need help with?
Including Sharing begins with us - how do we Share
Dorothy then asked us, in our school groups, to discuss how we share our personal, social and professional lives, and the boundaries between these.
Screenshot from https://sites.google.com/a/manaiakalani.org/digital-immersion/digital-immersion-plgs-2016/plg-august-2016?pli=1
Our group, mostly made up of first year Tamaki Primary School teachers, discussed that we don't actually know what our school policy is around teachers sharing information publically, or about sharing personal information about themselves.
Teaching as Inquiry Speed Dating
Next we took turns discussing our teaching as inquiry projects throughout the 35 people in attendance today, in a speed-dating type format.
Then we each recorded our reflections on this slideshow.
(Note that this slideshow belongs to Dorothy Burt)
Learn Content: Woolf Fisher Research on Summer Learning Journey
After morning tea, we discussed the research done into Manaiakalani schools by Rachel Williams.
There was some stunning results...
She found that the 'summer drop off' was HUGE (the red line) when students did not actively learn or practice their previous learning over the holidays. The blue line was students who participated in Rachel's research, a summer-long activity based around reading, writing and blogging.
This youtube clip explains it in a very concise way.
This supports the Manaiakalani statement that our students turn up to school at 5 years old, with the knowledge and skills of a 3 year old, and EVERY year, EACH student needs to make one and a half years progress in one school year, in an attempt to catch up.
Implications for sharing in our classes and schools Dorothy asked us to share our ideas onto a Padlet (below) as to how, why, what we should be sharing with our learners based on the 'summer drop'. Here is what we came up with...
A real focus for TPS this year has been collaborative planning in maths. It is a focus because we are receiving Professional Development [PD] around the problem-solving approach in maths.
This term, our syndicate has really taken the collaborative planning aspect on board. This means, that the whole syndicate, roughly 100 students, aged between 7-13, will be working on the same problem. The only difference between classes, is that the numbers in the problem may change to reflect the level of students, or even new and harder concepts may be added.
This is the plan for week 2.
The yellow sections are for EVERY class.
The green section is aimed at Level 2, year 3-4 in school (my class). These answers focus on using halves and quarters.
The blue section, introduces fractions such as thirds and fifths, and are aimed at Level 3 of the curriculum (years 5 and 6).
The red section is for the year 7 and 8 students. This question is even harder again, as thirteen students cannot easily share six chocolates - each person gets six thirteenths of a chocolate bar, which is way more demanding and difficult to figure out.
As noted in the top of that image, we have a shared focus for the whole syndicate - "finding fractions of a region". This is what we are ALL focusing on for this week, just at varying levels. How this works, for example with my own class, is that they will start at the beginning. If they understand concepts around halves and quarters, and identify patterns about how many friends and how many chocolate bars, we will challenge them by asking them the blue questions (aimed at year 5 and 6). It pushes them to think beyond their year 4 knowledge, which reinforces a growth mindset. If they show understanding at this level, we will push them even more with the year 7 & 8 section. Each section is not exclusive to its own year group - each teacher can take the parts of the question their students need and use it.
Today we used this question with our class.
They originally only received the top yellow, and green sections.
Lets see what they did..
Cutting the chocolate bars in 'half'
Some misconceptions evident very quickly.. (It is actually 3/4, and the opposite to groups)
Giving one 'half' and one 'quarter' to each of the four people.
One student drew the three chocolate bars, then straight away cut them up into quarters, giving three pieces (coloured) to one person. Note - this is what I would have done as an adult!
Then we came together as a class and talked about how to solve it. Students gave Archana their ideas and she recorded them. Here you can see some confusion about how to add one half and one quarter - she had to reiterate that one half IS the same as two quarters, therefore you are just adding three quarters.
Students who don't typically engage with maths tasks getting involved - YAY!
For the second green question, students think about how six chocolate bars can be split equally between eight people. Again, they cut up the chocolate bars and give each person one half and one quarter each.
Each of the eight people receiving one half and one quarter.
This group drew the chocolate bars, cut them up till each person had half, then two bars were left over. As the question clearly says that no chocolate can be leftover, they cut the leftover bars into smaller pieces and shared these out as well.
A bonus question - how much chocolate does each person get, if there are 12 chocolate bars shared between 16 people..
12 Chocolate bars shared between 16 people - one half and one quarter each.
A different group, again showing one half and one quarter for each person.
Tomorrow we will give harder questions (the blue ones, aimed at years 5-6) to most of our class, who clearly showed they understood how to find fractions of a region. With the others, who did not show the same understanding, we will have in small groups with both myself and Archana, and use DATs (Direct Actions of Teaching), to help them fill in those gaps and get them to the level of understanding they need.
