DFI Day 6

Connecting with Manaiakalani
Today we explored more about visibility in the Manaiakalani pedagogy, taking the learning out of just the head of the teacher and allowing learners to be able to see what they're learning and where they're going. One of the quotes that really struck me was:

Success means knowing what the teacher is thinking.

It's something I've heard many times before and again, this really was something that affirmed for me what we do with our facilitation and our Learn, Create, Share pedagogy.  Future learning needs to be about moving away from the knowledge all being in the teacher's head and learners feeling like their ideas are only valid if they're the same as the teacher's.

We looked at a video of Will I am, visiting Point England School in Auckland and how he was there supporting STEAM learning within their school.

Deep Dive: Multimodal Learning
In the beginning weeks and months, the learner's own device seems to be enough to hook learners into learning.  It engages them simply by having their own device.  In time, when this wears off, the potential is that we ruin the engagement of having the device simply by using it for learning if the learning is not engaging itself.

Multimodal opportunities for learning is important and Woolf Fisher suggests that multimodal literacies are important.

Behavioural engagement and Cognitive engagement are both important.  If we don't have the Behavioural engagement learners won't even engage with the learning at all, but for many the cognitive engagement comes AFTER the behavioural engagement has occurred. The cognitive engagement comes alongside MultiModal texts.

I was really excited to see how the multimodal text has been transformed from just links, to a richly visual text including the multimodal texts, which was far more engaging.  I've seen these type of multimodal texts in text docs before, and was worried about how boring it was. So this is awesome!

I'm excited to start creating some of these of my own.

I know many of our teachers will have appreciated the affirmation that core texts are still vital.  Guided browsing on Hapara is so useful



Chalk and Talk and Google Sites
Here we revisited how to build our sites and add buttons etc.  As I use this tool daily with the teachers and learners I work with, nothing here was new.  As usual, I'm caught between keeping sites quite simple and 'clean' so learners can navigate them easily but also keeping them attractive and engaging.  I wonder how the best way would be to do this with our younger learners, who really seem to get confused otherwise.  I'm always looking for more ways to do this.


Levelling Up:
Today we used a Google Slide deck as our basis for a MultiModal Google Site.  Today our slides were to do with Gardening in Schools.  Our team worked on a site for Year 9 and 10 learners and we looked at three unit standards that could apply to the learning these students could do around horticulture relevant to our place.  It was challenging being part of a collaborative process with a short amount of time, because the planning of a site is fundamental to how useful it will be for our learners and that planning process took up a lot of our time.  It would be great to have longer to revisit these and get them finished off.  Some examples of what our site looks like can be found below.

There's definitely a lot of extra work to be done and it makes me reflect on how we might need to do that when I'm looking at how to collaborate with our local community resources in the project I want to do with Google Innovator. The purpose of these sites would be to lead learners and teachers through the exploration of our local resources and related resources that could support undertanding around this, but it's challenging to decide what content is most useful to everyone and relevant to as many learner age levels as possible.  Possibly there will need to be a site for each topic and pages for each of the different age levels?

Today's reflection questions:

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

Exploring how multimodal texts have been developed - moving from the Google Style multimodal texts that are found in the Google Certified Educator Level 2 content was really exciting.  That sort of thing really interests me - how we can think carefully and design for our learners.  The analogy to the shop window was really useful.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

Some simple tips I learned today were to preview my Blog to ensure I've copied text over properly.  I felt a bit touchy about this today, so it was interesting being in the learner seat and noticing how I react to the way feedback was delivered and how I felt about that process.  Sometimes when we're tired we react differently and in my new role, I'm always conscious of the people I work with throughout the process as well.  The learner seat is an interesting place to be when you're feeling challenged.  Particularly when you're playing two roles in a space... of the coach and the learner at the same time and doing them both justice.

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?  

Multimodal texts are great! I love the idea of content being presented in many different ways and using visuals and graphics that help keep kids engaged.  It's not easy to keep learners interested in tasks these days with all the other stimuli they're used to.  Trying to meet this need and still keep the learning integral to the process is a great challenge.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

Reflecting on blogging needs and ideas and technique and making sure I check up on the formatting and preview my site will help with a lot of the blog work I do in other areas of my life too.

Math and Learner Agency

Daily at the moment I am having these amazing math sessions with our learners.

Why is it amazing?
The kids are engaged, stretching themselves, seeking help and expressing their enthusiasm through their voices and faces.  As they are enthusiastic and stretching themselves, we're able to see how they're learning, how they're challenging themselves and to have important learning conversations around how that's happening and the impact it's having on the whole class.



Why are they doing this?
I can only offer an opinion on this one but I feel like they're doing it because many of them have already come with a great foundation.  On top of this though - we're providing explicit opportunities to learn, we've built on this learning from their assessments (IKAN) and are showing the application to real life and thus, demonstrating its relevance.

In fact, two of our boys stated that when they could see the question (context), they could see WHY they were learning about (for example, how to convert between fractions, decimals and percentages; or how to divide by ten by moving the decimal place).  One of them threw up his hands in horror at the idea of working with fractions or percentages, but when applied to a context he knew (buying and selling Speedway Stock cars) he intuitively knew an answer.

Following explicit opportunities to learn, and links to relevant real life contexts, we are also talking a lot about the process.  We have discussed what's important in math.  We've talked about how sometimes we feel nervous, decide we can't do it before we start, read a problem and read it wrong and so misinterpret it or make an error and decide that that x instead of tick means we can stop the learning there, instead of returning to the problem and reworking it.  So we are developing a culture of accountability, expectation, challenge (I know to learn I need to be in the PIT and it will feel horrible but that is where I learn  - so I'm going to choose a hard problem to challenge myself and if that's too easy then when I'm finished I'm going to choose another one!

Why is this working?
Again, I can only offer an opinion, but I'd like to put this back to the kids to answer sometime in the future.  Perhaps it is because our feeling successful is not just dependent on our right or wrong answer, but is in fact partly determined by our willingness to build our learning habits and as such, our agentic practices.  Also, we are building our knowledge slowly through games, activities, problem solving etc, so we are having many opportunities to practice our learning habits and our new knowledge.

It's exciting seeing our nervous learners making progress and being willing to share their challenges and their progress.  Smiles and lightbulbs all round!

Inquiry Reflection Update

As part of my learning around Learner Agency I've been looking at ways to help the kids to develop their ability to know where they're at, self-assess and how to move forward from here. On reflection, one thing I was confronted with quite strongly was that I was not providing enough formative assessment opportunities for our learners, so they were quite negative about assessment processes.  They often walked away from a test feeling anxious and that they had not been prepared well, even when I felt I had prepared them.

I've been working on finding short, sharp modes of assessment that enable the kids to have checkpoints in their learning.  One example of this is that following a couple of days of learning around a topic, I've begun the lesson with a little formative assessment where the learners pick the level they feel they can stretch to and complete the task, assessing as they go.

In working through the answers, I used our student name cards (a set that is laminated and put in a container by my front computer for ease of use) to select students for answers so most people had a turn even if it wasn't at their stage.

After a while I just went around the room asking kids in turn and the positive mood improved.  When Jasmyn nutted out a problem beyond the stage she was working and I congratulated her on "the stretch" she was visibly excited by her ability to move forward.

Following this, I worked with those kids who have set Fractions as their goal based on their IKAN assessment results

and we made links between fractions, decimals and percentages, celebrated how using intuition helped the boys to solve problems, discussed how our attitude to a challenging subject helps / hinders our learning and demonstrated how applying a context (fractions) to a real-life subject (% off the price of a Stock Car) helped Seth to grasp the relevance of fractions and be willing to have a go...... and was successful instantly.

A $50,000 stock car is 75% off - how much will you pay?

This was an awesome math session with Malakai, Seth, Daniel, Josiah and Tapa - lightbulb moments were going off everywhere! Loads of the boys were saying "I get it now!"
My heart is happy.

Reflection on Reflection

Wow it seems such a long time since I've updated this blog - which doesn't bode well for my upcoming appraisal and attestation.  However, I think it will be obvious why when viewing my Team 17 blog and Agency to Learn blog - there has just been so much learning going on!

At the beginning of this year, my goals were wide and varied.  I had no real idea what the year was going to bring with:

• Mind Lab Postgraduate study
• e-Learning Co-Lead role (facilitating professional learning)
• a busy class of Year 8 learners
• commitments to Teach Xpo and Google Summit

My goals included:

Goal No. 1

Make learning visible to parents to encourage home school partnerships and increase impact and effective learning programmes.

Goal No. 2

Get students more involved in creation of learning in order to ensure greater depth of content knowledge and greater collaboration (who is working the hardest in our classrooms?)

Goal No. 3

Create positive classroom tone for all members to feel safe and secure.

Goal No. 4

Create a classroom where students are involved in facilitating their learning and have ownership over their learning.

Goal No. 5

Ensure adequate time is available and time management is well-planned in order to manage and balance:

Class learning

Team commitments

Any necessary professional development workshops for ICT/Chromebooks

MindLab commitments

Google Summit commitments

TeachXpo commitments

I remember when meeting with my lead teacher, Rae Black, at the beginning of the year, that Rae was concerned that there were too many goals on my list.  At the time though, I felt they were all viable and important and so persisted with them.

Reflections on these goals can be found on my Professional Goals document

One major reflection I have is that it's been challenging to be updating these regularly with all I've had on as my learning has raised new and interesting sidelines for me and I am not secure in my Inquiry Process. So that is one need to address next.