Holiday thoughts

Time to recharge the batteries

Often we hear people talk about the amount of holidays teachers get. I certainly needed mine this time around. A new school, plenty of travel and courses and lots of learning meant that by the time I got to the end of term I was ready for a break. I spent the first few days just reading and baking (something I do to procrastinate) and felt I needed those few days to get myself into a frame of mind where I could do some work, both for school and for home. A large karate tournament for my own children took out a few days in the middle of the holidays, so time went very quickly. I know there was so much more I wanted to achieve, but sometimes you just have to accept it won't get done. Rome wasn't built in a day.

Prep for Term 2

Working on resources for students and looking at ways of getting information and work out there takes time and thought. I have been setting up OneNotes for topics and learning more about some standards I either haven't taught yet, or taught a while ago. Keeping up to date with changes is important and new versions of standards are fairly frequent so even thought I taught some of these a while ago, there were some changes to look at. Rewriting tasks for the cohort I have this year is fun, I enjoy looking at different scenarios and working with ākonga to support their learning.

MLEs

Modern Learning Environments - those huge spaces with lots of students in them. So many teachers really dislike them and find them difficult to work in. I get it. If you try and teach the way you have always taught, they would be a nightmare. They are not made for teaching large groups of students with a teacher led style of learning. The environment has changed and the teaching has to change to reflect that. Breakout spaces are there for staff to be able to take a group of students in and teach them specific content if required. The open spaces are for students to work in and for staff to roam and be facilitating the learning. This is a whole different mindset and requires students and staff to learn new skills to enable them to get the most from the space and the learning. Many of the conversations I have with teachers start with "but how do you teach in those spaces" and the answer is, we don't - well, not in the way they are thinking.

Reading

I am always reading new articles around education and learning.  This is continual Professional Development for me, along with Twitter and Facebook groups that I subscribe to. I am continually searching out articles and watching talks. There are some fascinating schools out there doing different things including a school learning through roleplaying. I looked this up further as I was keen to find out more about LARPing! You can read more on Sue's Education Page on Facebook where I post a lot of my articles so I can refer back to them, but also to share ideas with others and get people thinking.

Term Two

I am spending some time in the other hapori this term in my role as the Specialist Classroom Teacher (SCT) and am looking forward to seeing how learning is delivered in the younger age groups. This is an area that I have a lot to learn about and I am keen to get started. I have been doing some reading around National Standards and Bilingual Provisions in schools and am finding it very interesting. I am looking forward to learning more.

Musically there is a lot going on this term, with many competitions and groups keen to rehearse. I am working on getting more performances around the kura and in the community by our students. Getting groups motivated and organised can be a real challenge and there is pressure to get things done for a specified date. 

Our work in Ihutai (the Year 11-13 hapori) is developing every day and we have a great team who are motivated to support our ākonga. I am really lucky to be part of this group and working alongside these kaiako and kaiawhina is a real joy. We learn so much when we work together and I can't believe how different it is collaborating with others as opposed to the traditional single cell classroom. This can take some time to get used to for some people and can have it's challenges but I'm in boots and all and would not want to go back to working on my own again. Collaboration is awesome!

Loving it at Haeata - bring on Term Two.  

TeachMeet 0.3

I love going to these TeachMeets. I always come away being inspired by something and getting excited by little bits of information, or a new tool, or just hearing about what others are doing in their schools. Today was certainly no different - including the awesome food put on by our host school, Villa Maria College.

These are just my notes on today and I have just done a quick summary on each presentation. You can also have a look at the tweets made today using #TMChch.

Aidan Harrison (Middleton Grange School)- Christian Bicultural Learning 

Aidan gave us a quick digital korowai before taking us through his learning as a bilingual teacher. He went through a short Cultural Narrative for Villa Maria College, reminding us all that every school should have one and we should all be aware of this. I thought at this time how lucky we are at Haeata to have had time to explore our Cultural Narrative and how much it underpins all that we will do there.  He talked about Tātaiako - Cultural competencies for teachers of Māori learners and I found this reinforced the learning I have been doing at Haeata over the last few weeks (see other posts on my blog for more info on this). He mentioned about the challenges for staff around not feeling confident with Bicultural learning and he offered support for anyone wanting to know more.

Schira Withers (Our Lady Star of the Sea School) - Facilitating the teaching of Character Strengths using Positive Psychology and enhancing Wellbeing

Schira spoke about promoting wellbeing though Character strengths. There are 5 schools in a cluster on the southeast of Christchurch who are using the VIA Institute Character Strengths to promote wellbeing in their schools for staff and for students. They get everyone to do a survey to start with (on the site) to help them discover what their strengths are. The school focuses on 2 strengths each term (there are 24) for example, Bravery and Persistence and they look at topics such as the Olympics or books on these topics. Their school musical production is based around Creativity and Confidence. This approach works on being comfortable with who you are which I like.

I decided to do this test and it was surprisingly correct for how I see myself so I was pleased to see my top 6 character strengths were Honesty, Kindness, Leadership, Judgement, Fairness and Perspective. 

She also told us about the World Character Day which celebrates these character strengths. This site also has a huge range of resources that can be used to develop character. I had a look at a few of these and was amazed at how many there were and how easy it was to search for one of the 24 character strengths by age and media. What a great resource.

Jenni Williams (Redcliffs School) @nzgirljen - Quick and easy collaborative online tools

Jenni took us through 4 online tools she uses.

AnswerGarden from the TeachMeet

Answer garden - She found out about this at ULearn and I must say it looks great. She asked us "What do you enjoy about being part of TeachMeet?" and we had only 20 characters to answer. A really good way of getting quick brief feedback to get the most popular theme or idea and you can also export to Tagxedo or a wordle, send to Twitter!  The About AnswerGarden page is really useful to describe this in more detail. 

Padlet - This was a reminder for me as I have used Padlet in the past, but one new thing for me was that you can now share it with a QR code. It's really good for collaboration and some of my students have also done presentations with it in the past.

Coggle - This is a simple collaborative mindmap which you can add photos and images to. She got her students (use gmail account to login) to put pictures of themselves and then add information they wanted to share. Jenni used it for students to get to know others and to put in ideas about careers. I do like how it is set out.

Trello - I have seen Trello at a TeachMeet before but this was a good reminder of this project management tool. Jenni uses it for groups of students such as the magazine team or the formal group so they can gather information in one place about what they need to get done. They then have boards for to do, doing and done lists. I want to look into this a bit more and see how it might work for projects at school for myself and ākonga.

Snippet

Just before the break we were shown nGram which shows how many times words have been used in literature over a period of time. We were challenged to think about how this could be used in a classroom. At the end of the TeachMeet, Matt Davis shared his ideas with Pauline Henderson and myself and I got very excited about how you could use this tool to ask the "what if" questions. It also got us thinking about what happened in the past and what effect it had on literature and society. It certainly created a lot of discussion with us at the end of the day. Some of the searches that had interesting results were:

• forces, energy, speed - interesting to see what happened over the 1920-1940 time period and also the 1960s when space travel changed the scientific thinking (see the image here)
• AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ethics -showed an increase in books in 1980s - why?We wondered about  the implications of Moore's law in some books and we wondered about cloning on the effect of ethics. One thing was the AI increase in the 1820's - maybe a book on the future, or maybe AI meant something different then!

Duncan Bond, Nadene Brouwer, Richard McBrearty (Burnside High School) @bondteach - Collaboration in a Secondary School Curriculum Area

This school started with single cell classrooms then cut walls so they could cater for approximately 90 students with 3 teachers.

They made it optional for their faculty to be involved. The timetable had to be changed around so that all the classes were on at the same time and they have ended up with 2 trios at yr 9 and 2 trios at yr 10 - about a 3rd of their students are going through this style of learning that has a skills emphasis rather than content focus. They meet once a fortnight to plan next fortnight and their non-contacts are aligned with each other so they have the time to do this.

There have been many positives from this including their continuous discussions around teaching and learning, and also the great relationships between both staff and students. Some of the challenges were around having conversations when the people you work with do something you don't like, the planning time and the noise in a larger environment.

Lee Nanai-Stewart (Catholic Cathedral College) @Nanaistewart - Culturally Responsive Practice

Lee introduced us to the Educultural wheel which was devised by Angus Macfarlane in 2004 which she learnt about in her Post-grad studies at the University of Canterbury. She talked about how to understand the culture of the child, you have to understand your own culture. Lee encouraged us to share our background with our students and get to know our student's background. We need to demonstrate that we care in actions, not just words. The four parts of the wheel go together to create a culture in your school but are not designed to be taken in isolation. There is a blank version to record examples of when/where the concepts have been present in your class, or not present as the case may be.

She gave us some further reading to do:

Sociocultural Realities by Macfarlane, Macfarlane and Webber

Discipline, Democracy and Diversity by Angus H Macfarlane

Kia hiwa ra / Listen to culture - Chapter 8 - strategies for teachers - by Angus H Macfarlane

Article: Creating culturally-safe schools for Māori students - Macfarlane, Glynn, Cavanagh, Bateman

If anyone that attended has other comments to add about what they heard today, please do so in the comments below. These are just my thoughts and what I took from the session, others may have different takeaways from this. 

I can't recommend attending these TeachMeets highly enough. It is an opportunity for teachers to share what they are doing in everyday practice and I always come away with a taonga for my kete. Exciting.

Haeata - Week Four

Almost November and the term is going very quickly. We are slowly seeing more staff arriving at our temporary base, the old Burwood School site. As the new staff arrive, we gather even more views and conversations about each other and education as a whole. We are so lucky to have this time together.

Day One

Today started with a look at another Essential Agreement - Hauora. The wellbeing of staff and students is such an important part of how Haeata will work and it was good to spend some time talking about how this may look here.
We talked about Te Whare Tapa Whā and the four quadrants Wairua - Spiritual, Tinana - Physical, Hinengaro - Cognition and Whānau - Family/Social. We then split into groups to look at how we could communicate this to our ākonga and whānau. Our group liked the idea of having a circle, as it also linked to the Circle of Wellbeing that we are using for our enrolment process.
Our graphic was a natural circle with simple symbols, a bird for hinengaro, plant for whānau, water for wairua and a fish for tinana. We layered this over our Dispositions and Principles so they would be linked to each part. Each group then presented their ideas to the whole staff so we could get an even better picture and feed into what the SLT are working on in this area.
The next session was looking at the curriculum and inquiry learning models. We had an interesting discussion at the beginning over what curriculum means to each of us and came up with some notes around the positives and negatives of our current curriculum. Then we discussed in groups and at this time I was part of a discussion around the NZC and what subject areas were compulsory or not. This led to me finding this article written in 2013 which talks about the pros and cons of making subjects compulsory.  It made me think about why we have some compulsory and some not - what is important to our community?
We were then split into groups and each group looked at a different inquiry model and then we shared each model in different groups.
Project based
Philisophical
Personal, interest based
Integrated
Play based
Issues or problem based
 I found this really interesting as each model had positives and negatives and we felt as a group that they could all be used a various ages and stages of inquiry dependent on the needs of the ākonga. Our group got quite carried away and related it to baiting and setting traps for students to fall into and then supporting them through it. Also having it being all about knowing the creature you were baiting (Possum vs lion), capture and study them, tag and release. We also talked about having the right habitat for each creature - not putting a camel in Antartica. Yes, we are all a bit mad.

Day Two

The day started with a workshop on Collaborative Practice and Karyn asked us 3 questions around collaborative teaching.

What excites you the most? My immediate reactions to this were around working with others with similar mindsets, being able to pool thoughts and ideas and being able to bounce ideas off each other. Getting other points of view and working on the fly together around student needs had to be a plus. Some of the other comments were around getting to know students from different perspectives and being with "yes" people.

What is your biggest fear?

Not having space to think - always being around people and the fear that we may not work well together - although that doesn't seem likely so far, as all the staff are so awesome - seriously! Some others mentioned the fear of letting go of power and control. I thought about this and from my work in the School of Apps and the School of Music I felt that I had managed this a while ago and it wouldn't be quite as much a factor for me.

What are your questions?

My questions were: How do you create an open, honest group? How do you define Collaborative teaching? This was later answered by teaching models.

We moved into looking at words that mean collaboration - teamwork, sharing, togetherness, conversations, reciprocal, being flexible, taking risks, disagreeing - and then to the opposite - individual, segregation, independent, solitary, one dimensional, own agenda.

(Friend, Cook, Hurley-Chamberlain, & Shamberger, 2010)

One thing that came up was the difference between collaboration and cooperation. We decided that cooperation is passive and has power on one side to go along with it, but you can still work as a silo. It has a feeling of niceness and agreement. Collaboration, we all have input into a goal in our own way, moving on a developing something together. This can make you question yourself and create something bigger.

Team members do not have to be best mates but there needs to be a sense of harmony. 
We then had a look at some team teaching models and although I have not seen these labelled as such, I have certainly used some of these in the past. All have their place in collaborative teaching and we can incorporate this into our planning. We can do this by asking ourselves "Which team teaching model are we using for this part of the teaching?" Karyn also made the comment that when using team teaching you need to talk at the end of the day for 10 minutes to just go through what happened during the day before getting into planning for the next week.  Just so everyone has the chance to say "This is what I feel or have noticed about today."

The stages of team teaching were interesting. Our staff have a wide range of experience in this area. Some have had no experience, and can count how many times another teacher has even been in their class, right through to those that have been collaborating for years. Stages of team teaching that you go through are from Organisational to Cohesiveness. We need to be aware of each stage and make sure we move from each stage to the next, rather than being in a cycle or holding pattern. As new kaiako or ākonga arrive, this stage will shift. Agreements will always need to be made on things but not to the detriment of the next step. Everyone needs to be contributing to the greater good. We need to be asking where are we in this and what do we need to do to move.

We also had a discussion around Pedagogy vs Andragogy vs Heutagogy and I found this article on the difference between these to be very interesting. If we can support students in self-directed learning then we will grow people who will be lifelong learners.

Leaders need to give permission for the implementation dip to happen. Initial data may fall as things are changing and being innovative. Collecting data over time may show that dip but with new innovations, this can take time to come up.  It can happen with achievement, mindsets and relationships and we need to be aware of it and work to move through it.

In the afternoon I was involved in a meeting around Augmented Reality and some possible ideas around how this may be used at Haeata. I am excited by the possibilities that could open up for our ākonga and am looking forward to seeing where this may lead.

After school I went to a lecture on the Pedagogies of Surprise by Professor Peter O'Connor and I have written a separate blog on this that you can read here.

Day Three

The Essential Agreement we looked at today was Te Ao Māori. We revisited our Cultural Narrative and had a look at how we could use the information in that narrative, how it would influence action and how it would inform our planning. We looked at our Cultural Landscape and filled out a sheet that has been developed by CoreEd which was titled "What do we know about our kura and the cultural landscape it belongs to?" There were sections to fill in about possible Horopaki ako, Localised stories, Landmarks, Tupuna, Iwi/hapū events, Waiata, Marae/hapū and iwi, Reo (one specific local difference in dialect being the change from using ng to k), and many more.  I found this to be a really interesting exercise that gave me a lot of insight into where this community came from, what was important and how this fitted with Haeata. I have since spent more time looking at the websites we were given, learning so much more about our Māori history and how it relates to our kura. Here are a few sites that I found really interesting. Ngai Tahu, Tuahiwi Marae, Christchurch City Library for some local history, specifically Tī Kōuka Whenua, and Kotahi Mano Kāika (KMK) .
We looked at our bilingual provision and how that was going to be at Haeata. Getting our heads around the different levels of provision was really helpful and Mel facilitated some role plays where our kaiako were students and she took the class at differing levels. This was a useful way to get our heads around what might happen in our hapori. I know from this that my goal for myself is to be operating at Level 3 of this immersion process for next year. I have a lot of challenges around this, learning about our history, learning Te Reo, but I feel this is the best environment I have had to enable me to do so with support and everyone else in the same waka. It has been a humbling and emotional process that I am very excited about.
The afternoon was spent looking at reflecting and how we do this as well as what we do to learn more and improve practise. As a blogger I find this relatively easy as I am used to writing my thoughts and I read a lot of articles through blogs and from Twitter. I put more personal thoughts on another platform, but a lot of my reflective practise and documenting learning happens in a blog. At Haeata we have a Google site for our reflections and Practising Teacher Criteria (PTC). What I like about this site is that it is split up into our Dispositions and our Essential Agreements for us to place evidence under. These have already been linked to the PTC so we are really focussing on what the underlying Values are for Haeata. The other thing I am really enjoying is getting feedback on my site. We all have one of the SLT as our coach and they make comments on our reflections and evidence. This is a new thing for me, but has been affirming and rewarding as I feel that what I have to say has meaning and is heard. Such a great feeling.

Day Four

Today we had a late start. Nice to be able to take stock and for me, recover from a very exciting evening where my daughter was named Dux of her school. Their kapa haka group has grown so much over the last year and it was good to hear them perform at such a high standard. This had me thinking about kapa haka at Haeata and what that means for ākonga. This led me to an article by Paul Whitinui "Kapa Haka counts: Improving participation levels of Māori students in mainstream secondary schools". This gave me more insight into kapa haka in schools and his views on culturally responsive teaching. I know that I will certainly be a huge supporter of kapa haka at Haeata. Often at Prizegivings you tend to daydream as the other year lists are read, and this one was no exception. I found myself analysing the evening with a Māori lens on and wondering about what an end of year event would look like at Haeata. 
The rest of the day was spent in our hapori. We started with a debrief on yesterday's session around Te Ao Māori where we shared how we felt. Our hapori then joined with Korepo which is the Year 7-10 hapori and we broke into groups to look at what a unit might look like across the kura for our first term. Our group came up with the idea of a celebration of identity and we had some robust conversations around community engagement and what this could look like. It is great to have this time to have these conversations and be able to build on ideas together. Another idea from a group was built around Kī-o-rahi. This was new to me, so I did a bit of research around the rules, history and opportunities. Great game and fun learning!
The next part was around our Principles and Dispositions that related to Te Ao Māori and talking about which we had a strong connection to. I really felt connected to Inclusive:

Inclusive

Ensure all ākonga have opportunities to participate in all aspects of our kura

Everyone will have access to Te Ao Māori and supported in their learning journey.

This really resonated with me as I go through this journey for myself. Haeata has been amazing in it's support and participation of Te Ao Māori and I really have felt at home here. We then wrote collectively into a document around our needs and skills in Te Ao Māori. This will be invaluable as we move forward with our learning.

Day Five

Our morning started with a Community Cafe. Many of the agencies that work with students in our community were invited in to meet with us and talk about what they offer. A great opportunity to meet with a large number of people. Andy gave an overview of where we are at this stage and some background to what our Values are. We were split into cross hapori groups and each met with four of the agencies to find out what they offered. The groups I met with were  24/7 Youthwork, Te Ora Hau, He Waka Tapu, RTLB and GenZ who will be running our After School programme. It was so good to talk to all of these groups, find out what they do and make contacts. During kai I also talked with people from Cyclone and Linc-Ed, connecting the dots from previous communications with both companies. We then shared our thoughts with our hapori, so between us we covered the many community groups that were there. So exciting to see what they can all bring to Haeata and I am looking forward to connecting with them all again once we have our ākonga.
Our afternoon was  a time for well-being and there was a fairly fierce game of netball or three and then some time relaxing and talking at The Bower, supporting our local businesses.

Once again the week has been amazing. Four weeks down and so much learnt and so much more to learn. My Māori made easy book by Scotty Morrison arrived today, so I know what I'll be starting on this weekend!

Using OneNote in the Classroom

My inquiry project for school this year was about using OneNote in the classroom. This is a short summary of what I did and how it worked out. My focus question was:

Does OneNote help students with organisation, note taking and collaboration?

I noticed that students often lose paper, have left notes at home or say they cannot find or access documents. For the School of Apps this year I set up a OneNote classroom notebook and wanted to see if this was a better way for students to be organised and also collaborate together.

I used this as the sole resource document for the class and was trying to have no paper resources where possible. All their resources and their written work was done within the notebook.

I also trialed this in the School of Music, although I was only in there part time.
See my blog on Schools within Schools for how these schools are set up.

My Findings:

I kept a track on how students used the OneNote and what they were using it for as well as putting in resources for them to use.

I surveyed the students from both classes to get feedback on how they found it and what worked well for them over the year. I spoke with students about if they felt it was useful and if they thought it helped with collaboration.

School of Apps:

We used OneNote exclusively as our resource base and also for all collaborative work, and for the students work. From the beginning of the year students were told all their work would be in that one place and that they would use this exclusively. This was for the full 20 hours a week that they were in class.

I found it worked really well in this class. Students were focussed and positive about it and some are now using it for their own personal notes and organisation.

Positives:

•              It gave me a central area to store resources for students. This included video, links, audio – anything I wanted to put there.
•              They had a space to organise work and also to collaborate with each other.
•              I was able to see work they had done at any time and it wouldn’t get lost.
•              I could see what they were doing in English and Business Studies as well – giving an overview of all their subjects, not just technology.
•              Students enjoyed seeing what others were thinking about and what resources they had found and were sharing. They all felt it helped them work productively together.
•              They said it was easy to keep organised titled pages and easy to find. All of them felt it made a difference in the organisation of their schoolwork.

Negatives:

•              Sometimes they felt it was frustrating to navigate, but that it got easier as the year went on.
•              One student felt it needed a better offline version.

School of Music Yr 12 and Yr 13:

My main use for OneNote in Music was for supplying students with links and resources for music theory. Everything I gave them to do was linked into OneNote and all the flash cards and theory sheets were there as well. Answer sheets were loaded on to save on paper and to give them 24hr access.

 I found that OneNote was great in some aspects but not in others within these classes. Some students used it and others didn’t bother. Many just used GoogleDocs and were not motivated to check the theory notes online. Those that used Google Docs said they found it difficult to navigate, while those that just used OneNote said they found it easy and they enjoyed using it. Because I wasn’t using it as frequently with them, and other staff weren’t using it either, I think that they weren’t as used to it as my Apps class were.

Positives:

•             It gave me a central area to store resources for students. This included video, links, audio – anything I wanted to put there.
•             They had a space to organise work and also to collaborate with each other.
•             I was able to see work they had done at any time and it wouldn’t get lost.
•             I could see what they were doing in English and History as well – giving an overview of all their subjects, not just Music.

Negatives:

•       Getting students to write music notation was best done by hand, so resources had to be printed out, although I put most docs online so they could access them if they lost them.
•       Some of the students used the collaborative area in English but said that students were sometimes making silly comments. This would need to be monitored by staff to enable this to work well.
•       A couple of students said they lost work which I found interesting as I haven’t had that happen to me, or to students in the Apps class. I’m not sure that students had a full working knowledge of the application.  
•       I don’t think it will fully work unless other staff use it for all their notes and assignments. If the School of Music is going to go this way, then all staff have to be on board.

Where to from here?

The students who used it frequently and embraced it got a lot from it. It definitely worked in the School of Apps and I will be using the same format for 2016. I will continue to use these with any class I teach and look forward to using it in a different Music class next year to see if it works for all areas of Music, not just theory. I want to use it for reflection of their performances and compositions and also look at other online ways of storing data for students.
I am absolutely certain it helped the Apps students with organisation, note taking and collaboration and believe it could also work in the Music class if more staff were on board.

Using Office365 and OneNote in particular is something I believe we should be using in all classes and with all teachers. Using the student’s school email, using OneDrive to store work, using OneNote for classes and getting students to use all the amazing apps (Video, Sway etc) in Office365 would be great. I am starting this process next week by providing our department with PD in using OneNote so they can all get on board for next year. I am also planning to run PD sessions each week next year to support staff and students.