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?