MIT Session 3 at Auckland - 12th August

It was great to get together with the team at KPMG again… our first gathering since the Sydney Summit. This time there was an opportunity for us all to share the progress we were making with our tool development. Everyone presented their tool in its current stage of development, and discussed how it was being used with students. It was valuable to hear everyone’s stories - including the things that are working well for them, and students, as well as the challenges. The change for collaborative critical inquiry into both the tool, and our development process for me is invaluable. The opportunity to be involved in a professional learning community that extends beyond my own school provides a greater scope for challenge with regards to how I might change my practice to improve outcomes for my students. During this gathering, we acknowledged that the time away in Sydney together has strengthened our relationships with one another. I feel this has helped to nurture a high trust between one another, which was present in open and honest discussions about both our tools and the next steps in our development journey. We were more prepared to challenge and stretch our thinking about what changes need to be made.
I shared my first SOLO poster and analysis tools to our MIT session in Auckland to share with the rest of the MIT team. It was good to get initial positive feedback about the concept and the tool - especially as a way of adding to the stories we can tell about student progress.

MIT Tool Development - SOLO For Student Talk

My focus for my MIT journey is to gather and use student voice collected from interviews, written reflections, classroom oral reflections and student blogs alongside student achievement data, to establish links between the quality of student voice and improved student achievement.

I planned to create a tool, using SOLO taxonomy, to measure the quality of student talk. I wanted to create a tool that could be used to gather measurable data, so that shift could be seen, monitored and celebrated as part of the story of improved learning for target students. I was particularly interested in doing this, as it is often challenging to demonstrate shift using  normed assessment tools. Teachers will often observe changes in engagement and improved student talk during learning that assessment data does not show. These teacher observations form an invaluable part of the narrative of target student progress.

I have been gathering student talk about learning, as part of our class reflective journal since the beginning of the year. Our “NZ Enterprise 2019 Kea Class Captain’s Log” records afternoon plenary sessions. The students take turns with being the Captains. Those of you that are familiar with Star Trek, will understand the concept! I act as the recorder of the entry notes as the captains use named stick in a jar to randomly select students to answer questions and prompts about their learning from the day.

Initially my idea was to create some way of analysing statements using SOLO vocabulary, with a particular focus on verbs and adjectives used to describe learning. After the Sydney conference, I realised that I was over complicating what I needed to do. I had forgotten the KISS principle!

I then thought of developing a simple rubric to unpack what the learning talk might look like/ sound like at each SOLO stage. I developed a simple Google Sheet to record this data over time. I then used my trial rubric to analyse student statements from our class, and record it in the data sheet to track progress for individual students. I took these tools to our MIT session in Auckland to share with the rest of the MIT team.

Te Hiku Cluster Schools Teacher Only Day with Christine Rubie-Davies

Our learning focus with Christine Rubie-Davies at the beginning of the year had been on "High Expectations and Classroom Climate". Key themes included: teachers having high expectations for students; grouping for learning; setting a positive classroom climate; goal setting with students; teacher self-reflection and monitoring student learning.
None of this was new at the time. I was already using mixed ability grouping in Literacy and Mathematics, and had been doing so since returning to classroom teaching in 2016. But I did make some goals at the time prompted by her session:

• To purposefully plan opportunities to build positive peer relationships;
• Review groups on an ongoing basis to make changes that would enhance and improve effectiveness of group teaching and learning; 
• To plan station activities that would provide choice and/or challenge to enhance student agency.

Since then I have regularly reviewed my classroom programme, either personally or with the students, to check on its effectiveness for students - especially my target learning students. Most recently I changed my target groups to being a "boy's group" and a "girls group" and planned for learning tasks and activities appropriate to this. The boys like a competitive edge to some tasks and activities. Whereas the girls seem to prefer tasks related more to social aspects of learning. 

In Christine's session on 22nd July she continued with this theme. She spent quite a bit of time going over what she had covered with us back in January. Some of the data, the research and the solutions she presented in this session seemed dated. In addition, much of her data related to her research which was conducted primarily within urban settings, and with a large proportion of the teachers presented in her data being secondary based. Most of the teachers in the Te Hiku cluster are primary school teachers who use either chrome books or i-pads with their students as part of every day teaching and learning - we haven't used tools like on "OHP" for quite some time...

It was a frustrating day - I guess it is comforting to know that teachers in the Far North are well and truly on track with the professional learning that encourages improved learning outcomes for students. I sat at a table with three other teachers. We had in excess of 100 years teaching experience between us. We were a little bemused by the notion of cultural bias with regards to our students. Most of the teachers nearby had classroom with the majority of students on the roll being Maori. We acknowledge the strong cultural bias within our education system. A great example of this, is the assessment tools we use to track and monitor the progress and achievement of our students. These tools are primarily white middle class assessment tools. And yet, as we sat and talked at our table we came to conclusion that we didn't actually use ethnic labels with our students, or think about their achievement from this angle. We might consider other circumstances and issues that relate to specific children, but not use a "Maori" label to explain lower achievement. Target students in my classroom are simply that - students who need an extra boost with their learning, in order to help them to be on track to achieve at the same level as their peers.

However, at the end of the day I did find a couple of good "takeaway" points to consider, and think about in terms of both class and school-wide programmes. For the classroom there were several things I came up with to continue to develop a "high expectation" climate within Kea classroom:

• In our Captain's Log plenary - continue to model and prompt questions related to what students are doing well with, or are pleased with.
• Create a classroom brag wall for display of work - in addition to the class blog, as the students do like to see their work on display.
• In the RE corner have a gratitude wall space - this could also be added to morning prayers, or included in Captain's Log (or instead of). Time for students to acknowledge the things and the people that make them feel grateful.
• Spend regular time focusing on different role models or special people. The examples from the RE day with Richard Leonard would be a good place to start.

With respect to the whole school. Christine made passing mention to the notion of  mastery goals that focus on the development of new skills, rather than just performance goals, which are focused on beating something or someone. Assessment goals often focus on the latter. I have noticed in my classroom than many students often lack basic skills - art skills, craft skills, life skills... I have also noticed that they enjoy learning new skills, and are really pleased when they have opportunity to show their learnt skills - for example in our Google Doc Ninja activities! I think we do need to think more about this, and what types of skills our students need to become resilient future-oriented learners. There is a big gap in their learning here, that we need to consider. Are there ways in which we can plan to teach some of these skills that students need to master in order to be fully creative amazing 21st century learners?