Way to go Zahra!

Secret Santa round two!?! #nzsecretsanta pic.twitter.com/8vIK5X8vYQ

— Jacinda Ardern (@jacindaardern) December 20, 2017

NEXT Foundation and the Summer Learning Journey

The Summer Learning Journey for NEXT Foundation from Next Foundation on Vimeo.

What an absolute privilege to be a part of the launch of the Summer Learning Journey today at Panmure Bridge School. A huge thank you to the NEXT Foundation and Rachel and her team at the Woolf Fisher Research Centre for inviting us to take part. Very proud of all our Learning Space 2 students who feature throughout this footage. 

Meeting our Global Audience

This week we welcomed Gian Paolo and Gabriela to LS2. Gian Paolo is a teacher in Zurich who is on a sabbatical in New Zealand from the KV ZH Business School to compare the education systems in NZ with those in Switzerland. It was very exciting to not only meet some of our global audience, but to also have the opportunity to show Learn-Create-Share in action. Ofa and Sanujan shared their blogs and took them on a tour of our LS2 site and shared how they access the learning. Both Kiri and I were very proud of how confidently our students talked about the learn-create-share process and the importance of being cybersmart. 

Impact Bursts...

A huge THANK YOU to everyone who was part of the Manaiakalani Community of Learning. This afternoon the CoL teachers shared our impact bursts. It was really interesting to listen to the shared struggles, innovations and successes our inquiries presented as we worked towards accelerating the learning in our classrooms. It has been an absolute privilege working alongside you all this year. I look forward to growing the connections I made, as I have learnt so much by listening to your feedback and following your inquiries.

Reflections and Questions...

Over the year there has been a noticeable shift in the amount of dialogue each reading lesson presented. Learner engagement and agency increased through the co-construction of scaffolds and shared ownership of the learning. Participation moved from passive acceptance into active questioning as the knowledge of how to dig deeper into a text moved through the stages of mastery. The scaffolds initially introduced in reading were repurposed independently by a wide number of students across all learning areas, and grouping became more cohesive and collaborative as confidence levels grew.


Strengthened connections to vocabulary, content and comprehension strategies have enabled significant shifts in reading age across my whole reading group. The graphics below represent the shifts made by my target students. What excites me about this picture is that 3/5 students made an 18 month shift in reading age, 1/5 students made a 12 month shift and 1/5 students made a 6 month shift when tested on both fiction and non-fiction assessments.

  

Aside from being able to make sense of more sophisticated texts I noticed their reading behaviours changed. My learners moved from trying to simply recall facts and re-reading a text in entirety, to skimming and scanning for key words and phrases when searching for evidence to support their thinking. The quality of the responses increased as they were able to make stronger connections to language of questioning. Simply put, this meant they knew what the question was asking them to do. I know this because I asked them to think aloud while they were processing the task ahead.

Over the year we have used talk to explore and unpack strategies and scaffolds that have helped my learners strengthen their understandings and connections to a wide variety of texts. A large part of this focussed on personalising the language of instruction and making sure that this was explicit. Making use of rewindable learning opportunities enabled my learners to see through their own eyes what they were doing right and where they still needed support. I actively planned for opportunities for talk to take place and used student created exemplars to spark their curiosity and explore new learning in context. 'Repetition without boring' was the key here as we repurposed and tapped into the known to help us access the unknown. 

Disconnects with vocabulary have been our biggest stumbling blocks this year. Moving forward I will be looking at how I can continue to break down the barriers between new words and new learning by capitalising on my 2017 learner feedback to keep the talk going with my learners in 2018.

Revising structure and proof reading in context...

As teachers we always strive to set our students up for success by giving them the tools to make sense of the learning. Along the way some of these tools get used over and over again, while others are left unused and the knowledge of how to use them gets lost along the way. 

Writing is one area where this happens a lot. Once we master how to use a language feature, a punctuation mark or more sophisticated vocabulary, we use it over and over again to cement it's purpose in our own knowledge ketes. However, for many of our students the contents of their 'proof reading kete' are often sparse. I think that in many cases these students try so hard to get their ideas on paper, or on the screen, that they overlook the fact that what they have written often does not make sense to others. If you have used up all your creative energy completing the task, then there just isn't enough fuel in the tank to go back and check it. So what did I do about this? I adapted and repurposed a few of the ideas I had learned at the Jeff Anderson PD I went to earlier in the year. 

My learners had responded really well to the power writing and the 5-7-10 writing I introduced last term. With this in mind I got creative with today's task and introduced our 

10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 timed writing challenge. The thinking behind this was that by breaking down the task into bite sized chunks it would add a 'fun' element to skills I needed my students to practise using. 

I have learned from my Reading inquiry this year that if I actively plan for front-loading opportunities, stronger connections are made to the learning. This is why I allowed for a total of 19 minutes of talking and planning. I tapped into aspects of the paired writing program so that each pair had a more able person who was able to guide, question and prompt. We agreed at the beginning of the lesson that this was to be a collaborative piece of writing, so must have input from both people to be done correctly. Initially the more able students took control so I intervened and included a role swap each time a new timed challenge began. This worked really well as it gave both parties an opportunity to record, read, notice, change and re-read along the way.

8-7-6-5 and 4 provided an opportunity for the structure and writing of an explanation to be practised, while 3-2 and 1 opened up the doors for proof reading to be revisited. This was derived from our LS2 adapted DRAFT process. The later part was where we got the most mileage today. It was empowering for me as a teacher to be able to hear the negotiating taking place as each pair took the time to look closely at their writing.

Once this was done I paired up the pairs and revisited the 3-2-1 again to allow our new audience to see if our learning intention of writing and DRAFTing an explanation that makes sense to the reader, had been met. I always find it interesting how tough my learners are on each other when they are giving feedback. They notice the small details in other's writing that are often overlooked in their own. Unfortunately at this time the bell rang so I wasn't able to capitalise on the immediate responses to the suggestions made. We did do this later in the day, but I think it would have been a more powerful learning opportunity if it was done straight away. 

Looking at the finished writing I can say this was most definitely a successful and 'fun' way to revisit learning. 

NOTE: I repurposed an activity I found here by adding the language of our classroom to the word bank. Each pair was given a word bank (that could most definitely be added to) and a blank framework (with no images or written prompts). I modelled how to use the word bank to craft paragraphs then let the talk flow. The reason I provided the content was that the learning was about structure and proof reading, and not on the ideas.

Learning from my colleagues...

During the 'iPads in a Chromebook class' toolkit last week lead by Fiona Grant, I saw how valuable Explain Everything could be to me as a teacher in a Chromebook classroom. Explain Everything (EE) is a tool the junior syndicates across our cluster have been using for a number of years, but not something I have used in my class. Fiona showed us how effective using EE as a digital modelling book could be. The simplicity and efficiency to provide an immediate form of rewindable learning hooked me in immediately, so I arranged a time the following day to observe Chantal Millward using EE as a modelling book with her Year 2/3 class.

I saw first hand how valuable this was as a way of capturing student voice and teacher evidence. The subtle way Chantal used the record button meant that the conversation she captured was real and in the same place as her written teaching prompts. This was then uploaded to the group's EE task page before they had even returned to their seats, giving them immediate access to their guided session should they wish to revisit it.

My next step is to collaborate with Fiona to create a 'how to' DLO to show other Chromebook teachers how EE can be used to strengthen rewindable learning opportunities in their classrooms.

Celebrating our PBS Holiday Blogging Challenge

         
Congratulations to all our PBS Holiday Blogging Challenge participants and winners! As I mentioned in a previous post this was a student created and student managed initiative, right down to the creation of the certificates. Special congratulations to Mele who was our overall top blogger, and to our awesome school leaders who stepped up and seized this opportunity to grow their leadership. A huge thank you to Rachel from Woolf Fisher who came and presented our prizes.

Manaiakalani Outreach Wananga 2017 Presentation

Today I was invited, along with five of my CoL colleagues, to share my inquiry with the principals and leaders from the Manaiakalani Outreach schools, the Manaiakalani School Leaders and Researchers from Auckland University. As a Community of Learning we are collaboratively inquiring into six achievement challenges to accelerate student achievement. 

My link to my presentation with the speaker notes that summarises my inquiry to date is here.

Preparing to share...

“What has happened as a result of the changes in teaching, and what are the implications for future teaching? At last week's CoL meeting we were asked to prepare an impact statement to share what has happened in our inquiry, what evidence we have to back this up, what we did and what wonderings we may have as a result of our inquiry.

To explore this further and gather the evidence I will be revisiting Matrix 4 on the Evaluation Associates 'Student Capabilities Matrix': Promoting Further Learning to gauge my learner's perspectives on the shifts they feel they have or have not made in relation to their active involvement in our lessons.

What I have noticed is that my learners are now more willing to seek and implement feedback when they feel they need further clarification or guidance during learning time. My target group (along with the other members of our reading group), understand that we all make different connections to a topic and know it is these connections that we make, that inform our own perspectives, perspectives that may differ from others around us. Actively planning and scaffolding these learning situations has been an important part of this increased knowledge and confidence. I have watched rich learning conversations take place as each person tries to justify their own thinking through the language of argument. The biggest shift that I have observed is that my learners are intrinsically motivated towards our learning and feel confident enough to suggest the direction our learning might go in. 

Moving forward I know I need to keep this talk going. The fast approaching assessment week will help me to see where the gaps are, but providing opportunities for genuine peer to peer modelling to take place, is what will help me to fill those gaps.

Keeping my learners engaged through talk...

Adrienne Dines' phrase 'talk is the action of learning' really resonated with me as I saw this as another way I could encourage my learners to keep talking about their learning. So as we start the term two of my groups (this includes my target students), are going to self manage their own learning conversations. To do this they will be working with revolving ‘Book Buddies’ so that they can talk about the texts they are reading. What I mean by 'revolving,' is that each text change comes with a buddy change to allow for different perspectives to be shared and heard.

The thinking behind this is that my learners will feel empowered as they continue to learn how to explain their thinking about event and character development in longer texts. The reason I have put the ownership of the learning back on these students is because they are all at the reading to learn stage, whilst one of my groups needs more guided attention as they are still moving towards the reading to learn stage. This does not mean I will be sitting back and leaving them to it; just that they will not have as much guided teacher time as the other group.

After asking my learners what content they wanted to see in our reading program at the end of last term, I created our Navigating Narratives challenges. Our texts were selected together and there is no set order the follow up tasks need to be done in as I have found learner choice leads to a stronger buy-in. The idea is that these tasks will be done in pairs. This means each pair can choose their own text, and after reading for 30 minutes (our reading blocks are 90 minutes), will decide what they want to explore at a deeper level. The follow up frameworks are consistent with the work we have done throughout the year to help to maintain and build on the connections to the learning that are already in place. The challenges have guiding questions to get the talk going and plenty of opportunities for peer led feedback to be given and listened to.

I didn't begin by introducing the site page in detail, instead I simply shared the link and asked them to explore. This strategy generated a lot of talk as each person was able to make their own connections. When I asked my learners to choose their buddy I found that this had already happened. My target group have opted to pair up with each other, but completely unexpected was who chose to work with who. I assumed the boys would work with the boys and the girls with the girls as that has been the norm so far, however this time it appears skill set with skill set have paired up.

I am excited to see where this takes us as we head into the assessments this term.

I have included the link to the site page above for anyone who would like to use any of these ideas.

PBS Holiday Blogging Update

Wow! Just Wow! I can not believe how well our leaders and bloggers stepped up to this challenge. Last term I was trying to think of a way to keep the learning conversations and achievement gained over the term in our class, going over the holiday period. To do this I came up with the idea of creating our own holiday blogging challenge that was loosely based on the Woolf Fisher Holiday Blogging format. 

I know my learners and I know that if true buy-in was to take place the task design needed to be created by my learners for my learners using the language we use in our learning environment. As mentioned in my previous post our student leaders were challenged to set this up for their peers. We decided to go on a virtual trip around Auckland visiting the Sky Tower, Rainbow's End, Kelly Tarlton's, the Museum and the Zoo. Each task required my learners to use their smart searching skills to find and use the information provided on each of these websites to create a DLO or respond to a question that was then posted on their blogs.

This was not sold as a compulsory task but rather a way of strengthening their 2017 learning journey. 27 students signed up to take part and out of those 23 completed the challenge during the holiday break, with 5 more students electing to complete the tasks this week. 2 students took responsibility for not taking part and emailed me their reasons and 3 decided not to complete the challenge. Once again we had a significant number of boys take part. Our leaders had organised who would monitor which day and our participants had to take responsibility for adding their links to our Holiday Blogging Record. This worked extremely well and has given me a wonderful piece of learning evidence. 

The focus of my CoL inquiry this year has been to see how I could get my learners talking about their learning. In total our learners published 208 blog posts and between them made 924 comments on each other's blogs. From a teacher perspective that is 924 times that someone read a blog post, noticed the successes and errors, and gave their feedback and feed forward. Many of these comments are part of a thread which means learning conversations have taken place and are embedded in our learning culture!

Screenshot of the student managed blog post and comment record

PBS Holiday Blogging Challenge - created for our learners by our learners!

Our wonderful student leaders were challenged to create and manage our own mini holiday blogging challenge. They have done an amazing job by creating activities that will take our holiday bloggers on a virtual tour around Auckland. There was a wealth of rich discussion as tasks were created and a lot collaborative problem solving to decide who will be responsible for which role in helping to manage the commenting and feedback. 

This challenge has been put in place to grow our leaders and strengthen our literacy skills. To make managing this task easier we have created a spreadsheet where bloggers will post the links to their blog posts and record which blogs they have commented on. 

This morning AJ and Mia introduced the challenge to those who have chosen to take part. What impressed me was the engagement of the audience and the clarity of the instruction. We have borrowed the points system from the Woolf Fisher Summer/Winter Learning Journey that runs over the December and July holidays, so will be giving out prizes to our own holiday blogging challenge champions (and managers). 

Anyone who would like to copy and repurpose this resource is most welcome. Link

Manaiakalani Boards Forum presentation

Last night the six of our Maniakalani CoL teachers presented an overview of their inquiries this year at the Maniakalani Boards Forum. The purpose of our presentations was to highlight how we are working towards each of our achievement objectives. Donna Ryan from Sommerville Special School, captured the common theme of the evening in her blog post. What stood out for me in these presentations was how clear it was that we had all very much been on this journey of shifting student achievement together. Everyone has willingly opened the both the physical and virtual doors of their classrooms allowing us all to learn from and with each other.

Photo credit +Fiona Grant 

Here is my presentation from last night.

This year as the in-school CoL teacher for Panmure Bridge School I have been looking at how I can strengthen my learner’s connections to content and accelerate shift in reading through talk. I call this talk having a learning conversation. Simply put this means I encourage my learners to use evidence from the texts we are reading, to agree and disagree with one another to help them strengthen their understanding of the text.

In a typical learning situation I noticed my learners tended to accept what was said, even when they don’t fully agree with the opinions or facts shared by others. This often results in mismatches between what is correct and what is incorrect. As teachers we are always looking at different ways we can help our learners move through the learning levels. To do this we look at assessment results, think about what we have noticed in the classroom, listen to feedback from our learners and seek guidance from our colleagues.

When thinking about talk, shyness was one of the biggest hurdles I needed to help my learners climb over. Many of them lacked the confidence to say what they think, and why they think this way. I felt this shyness could be overcome if I took the time to show how to talk about their thinking.

My inquiry this year has reminded me to make sure the instructions I gave were very clear. I made sure I gave them the tools that would help them carry out the learning successfully, taught them how to use these tools and planned for opportunities for these skills to be used in real learning situations. We call this scaffolding as it is the term used for the support systems we put in place in our classrooms to allow our learners to have a go at new learning without being afraid to fail. No one, regardless of age wants to make mistakes in front of their friends.

I broke down the hard words by linking what they were asking them to do, to things they were familiar with. This is called making connections. As a result my learners now know that talking about their thinking is important and they know how to do it.

We don’t get it right every time so we revisit the same learning in different ways. What has excited me as a teacher is that the learning conversation skills we have been exploring in Reading have been transferred by my students to other learning areas. Why? Because it helps them make sense of new information.

Confidence levels have risen, and as a teacher I have been able to introduce more challenging learning opportunities as my learners have the skills to break down the challenge, to help them make sense of the new information.

As I mentioned earlier I listen to the feedback my students give me. This has helped me to design learning tasks that meet their learning needs. Our classroom is rich in talk because my students know how to talk, listen and challenge each other’s thinking.

Collegial Observations

This morning +Karen Ferguson from Tamaki College visited Learning Space 2 to observe a few of the ways we build connections to literacy in our Maths lessons. Karen has written a detailed account of the teaching and learning she observed on her blogpost here.  

 

Karen taking part in our timed challenge

                

                     Purposeful group challenge to help strengthen connections to the vocabulary

                                                                 

Tapping into cluster expertise...

Today I visited Room 8 at Saint Patricks School to observe their in-school COL teacher, Adrienne Dines. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting her students and talking with them about how talk has helped them with their learning journey this year. 

Adrienne uses a multimodal approach to help her learners make connections to their learning, and talk to strengthen these connections. What I saw when I stepped back and watched was a table of learners fully engaged in a dialogic discussion. Adrienne reminded them at the beginning to use their 'why' voices to question, explain and clarify their understandings. 

 

To help keep the talk flowing Adrienne uses prompt cards that she places on the table. She then checks in with them using these prompts as the connection or provocation. 

I roved around the room chatting to each group about what they were doing and how talk had helped their learning. What was really interesting was that her learners and my learners face the same obstacles when it comes to talking with others. I have followed Adrienne's inquiry this year as it aligns closely with mine. In talking to her I have found that it has taken us both a similar amount of time to build our cultures of talk. We have both used scaffolding strategies that are personal to our learners, and both realise the importance of using written, spoken and visual texts to aid comprehension.

One student said that talk helps if them engage. Another told me that it helps you clarify as you have to say why you think the way you do, and if don't understand something you can ask questions or listen to what others think. I asked them what they did if someone said something they didn't agree with. Almost everyone I spoke to said they ask questions to help them understand why they think that way.

I really enjoyed my time in Room 8. My takeaway from this visit will be to vary how I use my own scaffolded prompts, and has prompted me to revisit the reasons why talk can help strengthen our connections to the learning. 

Maniakalani Hui Poster Session

Today our CoL teachers took part in a poster session to showcase and talk about our inquiries at the Manaiakalani Hui. We have all been carrying out inquiries that fall under the umbrella of the Manaiakalani CoL achievement challenges. This was a great opportunity to share our journeys with a wider audience. There was a lot of rich discussion all around as new connections were made and existing ones strengthened. 

My inquiry falls under achievement challenge 4 which is to increase the achievement of Years 1-10 learners, with a focus on Years 7-10, in reading, writing and maths, as measured against National Standards and agreed targets. 

The presentation below is a copy of the written content on my poster board. It is a summary of what I have inquired into, why I chose this inquiry, the actions I have taken, the setbacks I experienced, and the changes that have been made by myself and my learners as a result. For a more detailed account of my inquiry please click here.

Connecting with The Education Hub

Last term Dr Nina Hood, founder of The Education Hub, came to meet with Kiri and I to talk about how the Summer learning Journey had benefitted our learners in LS2. The Education Hub is a 'not for profit fostering improvement and innovation in education by bringing together people, resources and ideas'. 

Today Kiri and I took part in a focus group run by Nina at Auckland University. This was a great opportunity to contribute our thinking to an initiative we see will become an extremely valuable resource. 

Self Evaluation and Rewindable Learning

Yesterday I wrote a blog post about seizing an opportunity to film a learning conversation in action. Today I began by asking these learners to think about yesterday's reciprocal reading lesson. We talked about what they liked, what went well and what they might do differently next time; and then I shared the  footage I captured. I asked my learners to look closely at their own contributions. Initially their were a few giggles but as the footage progressed I listened to the conversation that was taking place. This was rich and authentic. Afterwards I sat down to have a debrief with them. One student chose to write his observations down so was quite detailed in his responses, one was eager to share that he noticed he was really good at working collaboratively, and the others were keen to tell me that they had all been active participants. 

I asked each person what they would do differently next time to make the most of the learning talk. Click here to read Daniel's blog post about his group's collaborative evaluation of their learning.

Today I repeated the process with another group. Our screen was in use and I wanted to harness the power of capturing today's footage as this group were keen to watch themselves, so I simply replayed their movie on my phone. Click here to read Jeremiah's blog post about his group's collaborative evaluation of their learning.

This is not a tool I would use all the time as the power of the novelty would wear off. However it is definitely a tool I will use to help my learner's see what their learning looks like when I need them to notice and evaluate their own learning.

Learning from each other

I am always looking for ways to continue to strengthen our learning conversations during Reading. As a teacher in an ILE I have observed the ongoing success Kiri is having with reciprocal reading in her reading sessions, so today invited Fridoon (from Ms Kirkpatrick's group), to share his expertise in reciprocal reading with one of my reading groups. He was an amazing 'teacher' and was able to show a group of my learners how to unpack a text using this process.

 

The clip above is a short snippet of their learning conversation. I saw their 'talk' evolving but was working with a different group at this time, so handed my phone to another student to film. I love the collaboration and support they give each other as they work towards making sense of a new text without any guidance from me. 

Having watched the whole clip myself I was able to see the true power of tapping into the strengths of my own students to grow the learning. Fraidoon's clear and explicit instruction and this group's willingness to share their thinking, made this a rich learning conversation that allowed my learners to use talk to strengthen their understanding of newly aquired knowledge.

My take away from this is that I will be definitely using reciprocal reading to provide further opportunities for purposeful learning conversations to take place when we unpack a text. 

GEGNZ Student Summit 2017

Last week I took a group of students to the GEGNZ Student Summit at Ormiston Junior School. The confidence and pride I saw from each of the presenters in each of the breakout sessions, highlighted how much talent our young people bring to their own learning. This was a great opportunity for my learners to see first hand that we learn best when we learn with and from each other. I was extremely proud of Team PBS not only for the presentation they created and shared, but also for the respect they showed as audience members throughout the day.

The day was closed by Suan Yeo, from Google who reminded us all that if you're not sure, ask questions; if you see a problem, try to solve it and most importantly try to be the best you that you can be. 

A huge thank you to the GEGNZ team for their organisation, Ormiston Junior School for hosting us and to everyone who took part in the day. 

CoL Sharing with the PBS Syndicate teams

We were asked at the last CoL meeting to meet with our staff and encourage each person to select one Achievement Challenge that aligns with their Teaching as Inquiry for 2017. We then explored the blogs of each CoL teacher who has focused on the same Achievement Challenge as we have.

At Panmure Bridge School we chose to do this in syndicate meetings. This afternoon I met with the senior syndicate, and will be meeting with the junior syndicate next week. What was really valuable was the rich discussion that evolved as people connected with ideas that resonated with their own inquiries. Having a designated time to explore the cluster inquiries was a great professional development opportunity. Thank you to my fellow CoL teachers for making such a rich resource available.

Here are our responses.

Winter Learning Journey... WOW!

Congratulations to all our Panmure Bridge Winter Learning Journey bloggers. We are so proud of you!

The images above reflect the participation in the Winter Learning Journey from Panmure Bridge's Learning Space 2. Congratulations to Daniel, Oh Hsen, AJ, Alex (LS1), Ofa and Eric our main prize winners; Nazella who got a special mention; and everyone who took part. Our top two bloggers, Oh Hsen and Daniel each commented 500 times on fellow blogger's posts!

A huge thank you to Rachel and her team for creating an exciting learning adventure that took our students on a virtual tour around New Zealand, and for the many, many comments made to everyone who took part.