MIT - The Journey Has Begun

Two days of retreat at Kuaotunu and a follow up day of continued design thinking has ensured that my Manaiakalani Innovative Teacher journey has a strong starting point. We gathered together as a cohort in the Coromandel, to get to know one another and start building relationships as an inquiry team. Ten of us from far and wide, with diverse backgrounds and teaching situations. A great bunch of teachers with a strong commitment to improve learning outcomes for students.
I enjoyed meeting my colleagues, and getting to know them. I am excited about the year ahead of us. I am grateful for this opportunity, and the support of the Manaiakalani team, in particular Dorothy, Anne and Jenny - also to Justine from KPMG in Auckland.

Design Thinking Pathway

Dorothy and Anne used a design thinking process to kick start and strengthen the foundations of our inquiry. We used our colleagues  "How might we..." sticky notes to prompt deeper level thinking about our inquiry story or problem. Their prompts helped to identify what works for the target students; what might be the causal factors to the problem; what strategies and supports might work with these students?

Ideas and thoughts included: finding teaching styles that suit the students; research proven deliberate acts of teaching to address the cause of the problem; how to involve other students; thinking about what resources would have a positive impact on learning for the target students;  and how to celebrate and share success.

The  purpose of the "Ideate - Crazy 8s" activity was to encourage thinking "outside of the box". In the first instance we were to think laterally from our initial two prototype ideas, and generate more, wide ranging alternatives to what might have a positive impact on learning for these students.

After putting our thinking sheets up, others were able to vote for ideas using sticky dots and special stickers. Interestingly, the others liked my more "out of the box" ideas... including using lego with learning; and identifying and using David Walliams type thinking to engage students.

Back at school, I jumped upon the Lego Enthusiast train, and conjured up all sorts of ideas on how I could link learning to use of Lego. I brainstormed ideas, talked to colleagues at school, and started to look at the availability of resources. As time passed, my thinking changed... and in the end I realised that Lego may provide one exciting context for some of the learning that takes place in the classroom, I needed a more robust model of what would actually make THE difference for the students.

Our hui at KPMG provided opportunity to work in a small group. Thanks to some great discussion with Santi and Hannah, I was able to rationalise my thinking about the challenge and the possible prototype to address this.

MY TEACHING AND LEARNING CHALLENGE - underachievement in Literacy learning for a group of Year 3 and 4 students. MY PROTOTYPE builds on my teaching strengths, and the deliberate acts of teaching that are proven to accelerate learning. It involves enabling these students, by using working with them at the beginning of each week (Monday/ Tuesday) to set them up as the experts for our STEM learning on Wednesday. We already have the STEM programme in place with whanau joining us when they can, so this might is a great opportunity. Then Thursday and Friday can be used to consolidate, share and celebrate our learning.
MY PURPOSE is to improve engagement in learning; enhance the students confidence in themselves as learners; and provide a rich and authentic context for learning and using improved vocabulary, talk and language structures.
MY HOPE is that this will accelerate reading and writing progress for the students.
MY GAPS to consider, include thinking more about student driven contexts related to the STEM learning - including Science and Maths contexts, as well as Engineering and Technology. I also need to record current student voice about their learning. AND I need to develop a tool to map progress in thinking and learning using student talk, student reflections, the class reflection book and our class blog later in the term.
MY POINT OF DIFFERENCE - there are two. A strong focus on Science and STEM is not prevalent in primary school settings. But with my Science background, and the work we have done in Science in our school already, this is a logical context. The second point of difference with my Inquiry, is my desire to develop a tool to monitor and track the quality of student talk, as learning progresses. My hunch here, is that the quality of talk will improve. My current thinking involves the use of SOLO taxonomy to assist with this. That is my next challenge...