These are my notes from the call.
We started with the 2019 cohort as well, good to have more people there to chat and talk about our challenges and opportunities.
Kaila Colbin talked to us first and about Boma being there to help people and she talked about navigating through this disruption, applying exponential thinking to create learning outcomes for students. There are many questions at this time. What does education look like now and not just the NZ education system? How do we engage and connect with others? We have the opportunity now to connect with others all over the world and having a global conversation about education. She encouraged us to dream big and think outside our own schools with our projects.
We went into breakout groups (nice feature in Zoom, although I have read many articles recently about not using Zoom - something else to think about) and talked about our challenges and opportunities.
Challenges:
switching to virtual meetings - screen fatigue
for me - the challenge of hearing online and getting bluetooth to work on Zoom (I'll work on this!)
Teaching diverse learners
holidays vs work - being conscious of other people's wellbeing but still having to roll things out when we are technically on holiday
Lots of anxiety from students about missing school, Gifted and Talented students stressing
Making easy tasks that are clear
Hard to keep brains on one thing
Impact of relationships on parents at home while getting students to do school work
The language of learning
We need the capacity to be generous with timelines and potential assessments, some students are now doing childcare or are essential workers
We need to have a presence, not pressure and engage with them as a person
How much of school is part of home school?
Are students doing OK or not? What can you do if they are not checking in? How do we recreate those systems?
How do we cater for the inequity that is coming through? Colouring in the white spaces by Ann Milne and Colouring in your virtual whites spaces blog
Teachers - getting them into a mindset and knowing that it is OK if something goes wrong
Not just shifting face to face to online but evolving practice. What is the expectation of us a a teacher? Need to provide just 3 or 4 things that will aid in the short term.
A lot of us have different roles (teacher/SLT/HOD/consultant/family) can be overwhelming, easiest to focus on the students first.
Opportunities:
Secretly excited about the opportunities
Use of different platforms - example of the Tik Tok maths going on
You can choose when you do your work, do it at your own pace and plan around other things you need to do
For those that are self managing it could be enlightening to take charge of their own learning, those that aren't are a concern though
Glad that some staff are finally being forced online, they can't avoid it now
Some schools have great intranet and they can just add face to face video to it
Parents get to see that home learning is actually learning
Build confidence in staff for technology, making YouTube videos for example
How many parents are involved? Equity issue here too
We can have a different look at NCEA - Maurie Abraham has been advocating for this for a while. You can read his blog here
(Have a listen to this clip with Maurie Abraham and Claire Amos about what happened with Hobsonville Point Secondary School around how they coped with lockdown and the time beforehand. I like the idea of a 4 day school week for students plus 1 day for projects, 5 days for staff - what could this look like?)
Dealing with authenticity in a different way - working with other ways of testing what they know.
We have a country that needs to operate within. We can't get out or in so what will happen with industry in New Zealand? Tourism? Students need to go into new pathways.
How do we prepare students for jobs that are online?
People are on board - we are losing stuff from courses that wasn't really necessary
Not having to enforce uniform
Students now have to be tech savvy so lots of progress is being made
Time to do projects and delve deeply into one thing
Some comments:
Review teams are pushing through to bring forward radical change - will people cope with more change?
How equitable will it be between schools, each one will look different.
Sometimes you need crisis to make change
Some schools are being blindsided and are not prepared with access. Need calm forward thinking staff.
Will business come in and we will have more PPP?
Parents are realising the way they were educated may need changing
We have hesitant colleagues, need professional learning to support them
Study Time site being used for NCEA
Our next breakout was around reflecting on what the world would look like in 2022
April 6 2022:
Not much will change - we will still be in shock
Great to see ideas but our group felt not much would change and we would fall back into the 'norm'. Potentially if NZQA and the ministry make decisions then things might change but if all systems stay the same then there may not be any change.
Pockets of change
Global network
How can we cloud knowledge and have people in and out of other spaces, imagine having specialists from overseas in our classes
Collaboration - some people are still very siloed, teachers will collaborate better and be brave and share best practice and engage across year levels and subjects.
Physically schools might not change. Trial different pockets of online learning, want to see examples.
Ask students how they best learn
Last year the Boma Fellows felt the power of the 10 of them was empowering, Felt they could impact change.
Not one size fits all - we can do more than we think.
The 2019 cohort then left our conversation and the 2020 group had a discussion about our projects and where we were at. I think we all were finding it hard because we were not at school and we had no students in front of us. The stress of this situation was also difficult. We did talk a bit about how not going on the trip was affecting us. I know that I learn a lot through informal chat, not just calls or workshops and I think others felt the same way. A lot of people are also overwhelmed by everything that is going on. We are certainly in a different situation now and in some ways we have more flexibility as we can do things individually or collaboratively. It was disappointing to lose the face to face time in meetings and also the trip, but we also have the opportunity to do things quite differently now.The next part of our call was to do our own version of an Ikigai. We then shared these with each other.
So much of mine was pointing towards teaching and helping others, it was a bit scary but also very true. I do feel that I am probably very lucky to be absolutely passionate about what I do and never feeling I don't want to go to work. I love teaching and I love creating and helping, it's my work, my passion and my mission.
Doing this brought me a bit closer to what I want to do for my project - I'm going to flesh it out a bit more but it comes back to supporting diverse learners again and again.
We then had a discussion about what the rest of our year might look like as Boma Fellows. We are going to catch up more frequently but for less time and we still get to do an online workshop with David Clifford from the Stanford d.school on Liberatory Design Thinking which I am really looking forward to!
Time to get into more planning of my project...
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