Digital Learner Stories? Learner agency and Self-Reported Grades

Hattie states that Self-Reported grades have a noticeable effect on learning.
EdTalks discuss Learner agency as part of their top ten trends in education in 2014.
Watch it here:

Ten Trends 2014: Agency from EDtalks on Vimeo. So there's lots of information out there - how to we bring about these changes in small steps?

Digital Learning Communities

I really wanted to call this post 'brain explosions' as I really feel as though what's in my head is overflowing tonight. I'm really learning this year. 

I'm sure I learn every year, but in my role as co-leader of e-learning as well as facilitator of learning in our classroom (with an e-learning emphasis) I've been thrown: 
* into the Pit
* onto the silly bridge
 * out of my comfort zone

However you want to put it - I'm a learner again in the true sense of the word and it's exciting to be undertaking this journey alongside my students.  We are redesigning learning; together, and as a team. Co-constructing, it seems.

 Today, Saunil Hagler (iseeteaching.com) from Cyclone came to Gisborne to work with us on the next step in our e-learning journey.  (The whole idea of e-learning journey is an interesting one really - as many of us feel that the technologies we're using are simply tools for learning - there is no e-learning anymore, just learning).  We defined, we critically analysed, we discussed, we theorized, we idealised, threw aspirations around and developed and refined plans.  It's an exciting journey.

By the end of the day I'd learned everything from how to fix my GMail problem to how to shut all tabs to the right on my busy browser, to how to create links to learning to autonomise learning for our students in a digital learning community.  Never, have I been part of such a huge paradigm shift in education that has taken place over such a short space of time.  True, my "e-learning journey" began last year, but the bulk of my shifts in practice and pedagogy have taken place in the few short weeks since the beginning of term one.  Seven weeks.  The critical thinking I'm engaging in, the designing I'm doing and the collaboration and reflection in effect throughout this process is phenomenal.  I've never been more excited about my role in our classroom, in education in general.
Daily, life is chaotic, blurry and overflowing with learning.  Daily, I have to mentally 'shut tabs' in my head that force my brain to work overtime.  Daily, I am invigorated by the learning that I am doing.  I'm so encouraged by that, because I know that in order to be enthusiastic about learning, my students need to see I'm enthusiastic in my role as facilitator of that learning.

Saunil was knowledgeable, a patient teacher and an engaging facilitator.  We began the skeleton of our learning community.  As a staff and for our students, this platform could open up learning to all of us.  How effective would that be in terms of shifts in our practices as both teachers and learners.  Giving the steering wheel back to our students means they will regain autonomy in their learning.  It's scary to let go of that wheel for some of us.... but I'm excited about the journey - where will our students' learning journeys take us? I can't wait!

Priority Learners

So my main focus this year is on engagement in the classroom.
To be perfectly honest I don't feel that engaging at the moment.  Our classroom feels more like a warzone some days with the behaviours we're coping with and I'm not sure how we're going to remedy it.

However, my main focus is on engagement, so my learning philosophy screams at me that if kids are engaged, they will be focused and the learning will be happening.

Priority learners are always at the forefront of this engagement debate, because engagement doesn't happen for all students in the same way.  Learners are diverse and as such, the strategies we employ to attempt to engage our students will need to be diverse too.

Technological tools have been suggested to improve engagement, but I think they probably only improve engagement if used in targeted ways.

This article suggests some of the ways these tools can be used for engagement.
One of the most difficult groups to engage are often our boys.

I've just finished watching this video about the impact on learning of culture - there is so much learning here!

I want to keep looking at Manaia Kalani and the practical methods of bringing te ao Maori, tikanga and reo into our classroom to improve the achievement of all our learners.

This video is about boys and writing and I think it's probably pretty relevant to my boys - it's hard to engage them all, but a lot of it is about getting to know them.
I'm hoping our blog can help us do that too.

Teachers as Learners

Teaching through learning and learning through teaching.

Getting involved in education for me.  My learning matters.  Choosing to get involved ourselves in education.

EdCamp
Google Summit
Facebook Cluster Meetings
TeachExpo Gisborne

What can we do so everyone can get involved and people learn from people.

Edcamp looks so cool!

This video is pretty awesome:


and there's a Wiki to help organise an EdCamp.
Lots of interesting things to think about for TeachExpo!

Speaking of learning, Mind Lab starts next week!  So exciting! We got at email the other day with our Unitech log in details etc.  I'm so looking forward to the pedagogy behind this - looking forward to getting involved in some learning myself.

The past couple of days I've:
mentored teachers in creating their blogs, 1 on 1
run workshops for teachers on Blogger and Google+ and
met with parents around how to use technology from our classroom at home to make sure learning is happening.
Its' exciting, it's invigorating and I'm enjoying the journey that teaching is taking me on - speaking in front of others, presenting ideas, sharing and talking and learning from each other.
It's exciting!

Best Evidence Synthesis

Taken from the Best Evidence Synthesis Website:


"The ten research-based characteristics of quality teaching derived from the research are generic in that they reflect principles derived from research across the curriculum and for students across the range of schooling years in New Zealand (from age five to eighteen). How the principles apply in practice is, however, dependent on the curriculum area, and the experience, prior knowledge and needs of the learners in any particular context. The body of this synthesis provides examples from the research on learning and teaching to illustrate the principles for different curricular areas across schooling from junior primary to senior secondary classes.

The ten characteristics generated out of the synthesis are summarised below.

1. Quality teaching is focused on student achievement (including social outcomes) and facilities high standards of student outcomes for heterogeneous groups of students.

Research-based characteristics

• Quality teaching is focussed on raising student achievement (including social outcomes).
• Quality teaching facilitates the learning of diverse students and raises achievement for all learners.
• The teacher establishes and follows through on appropriate expectations for learning outcomes and the pace at which learning should proceed.
• High expectations are necessary but not sufficient, and can be counterproductive, when not supported by quality teaching.

2. Pedgogical practices enable classes and other learning groupings to work as caring, inclusive, and cohesive learning communities.

The learning community concept has arisen out of the research literature and denotes both a central focus on learning and the interdependence of the social and the academic in optimising learning conditions.

Research-based characteristics

• Pedagogical practices create an environment that works as a learning community.
• Student motivation is optimised and students' aspirations are supported and extended.
• Caring and support is generated through the practices and interactions of teacher(s) and students.
• Pedagogical practices pro-actively value and address diversity.
• Academic norms are strong and not subverted by social norms.
• The language and practices of the classroom are inclusive of all students.
• Teachers use class sessions to value diversity, and to build community and cohesion.
• Teaching and tasks are structured to support, and students demonstrate, active learning orientations.
• Teaching includes specific training in collaborative group work with individual accountability mechanisms, and students demonstrate effective co-operative and social skills that enable group processes to facilitate learning for all participants.
• Students help each other with resource access and provide elaborated explanations.
• Pedagogical practice is appropriately responsive to the interdependence of socio-cultural and cognitive dimensions.

3. Effective links are created between school and other cultural contexts in which students are socialised, to facilitate learning.

Research-based characteristics

• Teachers ensure that student experiences of instruction have known relationships to other cultural contexts in which the students have been/are socialised.
• Relevance is made transparent to students.
• Cultural practices at school are made transparent and taught.
• Ways of taking meaning from text, discourse, numbers or experience are made explicit.
• Quality teaching recognises and builds on students' prior experiences and knowledge.
• New information is linked to student experiences.
• Student diversity is utilised effectively as a pedagogical resource.
• Quality teaching respects and affirms cultural identity (including gender identity) and optimises educational opportunities.
• Quality teaching effects are maximised when supported by effective school-home partnership practices focused on student learning. School-home partnerships that have shown the most positive impacts on student outcomes have student learning as their focus.
• When educators enable quality alignments in practices between teachers and parent/caregivers to support learning and skill development then student achievement can be optimised.
• Teachers can take agency in encouraging, scaffolding and enabling student-parent/caregiver dialogue around school learning.
• Quality homework can have particularly positive impacts on student learning. The effectiveness of the homework is particularly dependent upon the teacher's ability to construct, resource, scaffold and provide feedback upon appropriate homework tasks that support in-class learning for diverse students and do not unnecessarily fatigue and frustrate students.

4. Quality teaching is responsive to student learning processes.

Research-based characteristics are specific to curriculum context and the prior knowledge and experiences of the learners.

• Teachers have knowledge of the nature of student learning processes in the curriculum area, can interpret student behaviour in the light of this knowledge and are responsive, creative and effective in facilitating learning processes.
• Examples of teaching approaches that are intended to exemplify this characteristic are the dynamic or flexible literacy models, the numeracy strategy focus and the Interactive Teaching Approach in science education.
• Classroom management enables the teacher to be responsive to diverse learners.
• Responsive teaching is important for all learners and particularly critical for students with special needs.

5. Opportunity to learn is effective and sufficient.

Research-based characteristics

• Quality teaching provides sufficient and effective opportunity to learn.
• Management practices facilitate learning (rather than emphasising compliant behaviour or control).
• Curriculum enactment has coherence, interconnectedness and links are made to real life relevance.
• Curriculum content addresses diversity appropriately and effectively.
• Quality teaching includes and optimises the effective use of non-linguistic representations by teacher and students. (This assumes the concurrent and rich use of oral language and text as central to literacy across the curriculum.)
• Students have opportunities to resolve cognitive conflict.
• Students have sufficient and appropriate opportunities for practice and application.

6. Multiple task contexts support learning cycles.

Research-based characteristics

• Task cycles match developmental learning cycles of students.
• Task cycles enable students to engage in and complete learning processes so that what is learned is remembered.
• Optimal use is made of complementary combinations of teacher-directed groupings, co-operative groups, structured peer interaction and individual work (including homework) to facilitate learning cycles.

7. Curriculum goals, resources including ICT usage, task design, teaching and school practices are effectively aligned.

Research-based characteristics

• Curricular alignment: The use of resources, teaching materials and ICT is aligned with curriculum goals to optimise student motivation and accomplish instructional purposes and goals.
• Curricular alignment optimises rather than inhibits critical thinking.
• Pedagogical strategies are evaluated in relation to curricular goals.
• ICT usage is integrated into pedagogical practice across the curriculum.
• Quality teaching is optimised when there is whole school alignment around evidence-based practices.
• The school maintains an 'unrelenting focus on student achievement and learning'1.
• There is whole school alignment and coherence across policies and practices that focus on, resource and support quality teaching for diverse students.
• Pro-active alignment across the school supports effective inclusion of diverse students within the school community.
• Whole school alignment optimises opportunity to learn, particularly in language immersion, literacy, ICT, social studies and health.
• Whole school alignment enables a common language, teacher collaboration and reflection and other synergies around improving teaching.
• Whole school alignment minimises disruptions to quality teaching and sustains continuous improvement.
• School policies and practices initiate, and support teachers in maintaining, school-home partnerships focused on learning.

8. Pedagogy scaffolds and provides appropriate feedback on students' task engagement.

Research-based characteristics

• Tasks and classroom interactions provide scaffolds to facilitate student learning (the teacher provides whatever assistance diverse students need to enable them to engage in learning activities productively, for example, teacher use of prompts, questions, and appropriate resources including social resources).
• Teaching develops all students' information skills and ensures students' ready access to resources when needed to assist the learning process.
• Students receive effective, specific, appropriately frequent, positive and responsive feedback. Feedback must be neither too infrequent so that a student does not receive appropriate feedback nor too frequent so that the learning process is subverted.

9. Pedagogy promotes learning orientations, student self-regulation, metacognitive strategies and thoughtful student discourse.

Research-based characteristics

• Quality teaching promotes learning orientations and student self-regulation.
• Teaching promotes metacognitive strategy use (e.g. mental strategies in numeracy) by all students.
• Teaching scaffolds reciprocal or alternating tuakana teina2 roles in student group, or interactive work.
• Teaching promotes sustained thoughtfulness (e.g. through questioning approaches, wait-time, and the provision of opportunities for application and invention).
• Teaching promotes critical thinking.
• Teaching makes transparent to students the links between strategic effort and accomplishment.

10. Teachers and students engage constructively in goal-oriented assessment.

Research-based characteristics

• Assessment practices improve learning.
• Teachers and students have clear information about learning outcomes.
• Students have a strong sense of involvement in the process of setting specific learning goals.
• Pedagogy scaffolds and provides appropriate feedback on students' task engagement.
• Teachers ensure that their assessment practices impact positively on students' motivation.
• Teachers manage the evaluative climate, particularly in context of public discussion, so that student covert or overt participation is supported, scaffolded and challenged without students being humiliated.
• Teachers manage the evaluative climate so that academic norms are not undermined but supported by social norms.
• Teachers adjust their teaching to take account of the results of assessment."

This challenges me because so much of this could be done without technology.  But I feel strongly that students are so engages by technology now and it's such an integral part of their lives now that it's vital to integrate the use of e-learning in order to bridge the gap between student lives and school life.  How do we do that in a way that is collaborative and creating a culture of learners where learning is valued and shared?  I feel this must be the next part of the equation. 

Persistence

At this time of the term, I'm having to model for my students what persistence really looks like.  It's hard to keep up with everything.  It's hard to be patient.  It's hard to feel like we're moving forward when there's so much to do.  But we are moving forward.

I have to persist in trying to find time for everything though.

I had two blocks of release today.  And although I got lots done, there are always more needs that keep popping up - more to keep up with - more to feed back to people about, more to teach and infinitely more to learn.

It's cool though, that in my job I am actually learning loads - and it's compulsory.

My priorities are challenging:
Meeting the needs of a highly challenging class.  I think they're wonderful.  I still find them challenging  - daily.
Meeting the needs in my role as a practicing facilitator of e-learning for my kids.
Finding ways to get e-learning to be practical and useful for them.
Meeting the needs of whanau around my core group of learners.
Meeting the needs of the school in terms of e-learning, when we are still relatively new to the opportunities around us.  Digital learning has been taking place for years.  I wonder if it's ever been so accountable and had such high expectations placed on in - to be the be-all and end-all of everything.

So I persist.

I persist in filling in endless forms and records around my kids.  Having endless meetings with specialists and parents, conducting endless Reflection Room visits and having many conversations with students about their choices.

I persist in trying to find time for e-learning myself.  To be able to back up what I'm saying with pedagogical evidence of what I'm doing!  It's all urgent and busy and requires patience and persistence.  I'll get there.

In the process, I'm learning what if feels like to be the real learner again - out of depth and frustrated with high expectations and too little time to make sense of it all, but persisting in embracing that feeling.  Because it's what my kids feel.  I'll have to throw up my hands occasionally, like them and say, "Miss! I'm in the pit! And I'm learning!"

Failure

I could have given up today

Put my lesson down to one learning curve

of something not achieveable with a classroom

of thirty students.

I could have put my enthusiasm aside

cast down my determination to give my students

a voice

and a purpose in what we're doing this year.

Exclaimed that it was just too hard.

That it couldn't be done.

That I was doing my students an 

injustice 

by forcing them to 

struggle through

this difficult space

we have nicknamed 'The Pit'

that I was 'wasting their time' 

or

'letting them down'

But I persevered.

And I will persevere still.

Because when we spoke of the outcome

I saw light in their eyes

and I will chase that light

even though it's hard.

Because if they should fail

along this road of learning

they will simply learn that 

failure

is a necessary part of learning

nay, of life.

And failure is just one step in the long journey we call

learning

and life.

Amie, 2015

On reflection, speaking with a teacher later, who had visited last week and then took some of this learning back into her classroom, she shared with me her experience of starting out with Chromebooks.  About how she said she won't apologise; for noise, for frustration, for it being a bit chaotic to start with.  That they would muddle through because they were learning.  We talked about resiliency.  About how easy it is to ensure there is so much scaffolding for our students that they can't 'fail'.  About how now, they have become so helpless that when they approach a computer and it won't work, they throw up their hands and exclaim, "It won't go!" before walking away.  About how she then asked - "What have you tried?"

What a great opportunity we're now giving our students. 

To struggle...

To try...

To fail...

To try again....

To persevere....

To succeed....

To see the relevance this has to life.

And I saw the light in her eyes too.

We are learning.  Together.  I can't think of a better space to be.

Professional Leadership

Leadership.  

It's interesting what this entails sometimes.  It leaves me wondering if we shared it with our students - our journey - that they may have some insight into where we want them to head?

Today I sat through a photoshoot for my new profile shot for TeachEXPO which I'm presenting at in July.  I find it hard to fathom how I've come a full 360 degrees from where I was at last year.  From struggling to see how my sense of self fit within my teaching persona, to now, feeling that I'm more comfortable and excited about my role than I've ever been.

It's not just the technology.  The e-learning is fun, and important.... but I think it's the fact that through this I feel learning environments are now becoming more relevant to the real world and how it's altered over the past 50 years.  I no longer feel like I'm in the classroom asking students to do something irrelevant.  Now I'm looking for more and more ways to link what we're doing to relevant tasks because it's easier to do so.  I no longer feel I'm asking them to do the impossible... I'm now working through relevant and challenging tasks alongside them and we are all winning.  I'm doing what my Leadership Challenge book suggests - I'm handing over to others in order for them to develop their leadership.  And it's opening up ideas and passion for learning that I thought I'd lost.

I'm thinking about how I'm formulating my profile and thinking about how we could offer students leadership to do the same.  Could we get our students involved in this planning process?  How much more would we get buy-in if we could have students create the learning.  Get them to find the tools, build in their passions, create the plan, develop their profiles and present.  How cool would that be for developing leadership.  Giving our students a real voice.  They could then take this to a class and teach their lesson.  The teacher could be present and they could then learn too.  Maybe we could start with small groups.  My student could be released to work with that class's specialists and the teacher and they could take the lesson back to class too.  Wow.  Potential.  How to make it happen?