T3 PBS Teacher Inquiry Check-in...

Today I met with all our staff to talk about their teacher inquiries. I asked everyone to share with me where they were at now, what changes had been made to their teaching practice and how I could support their inquiry moving forward into term 4. These were rich conversations and provided a great forum for sharing successes and bouncing ideas. 

The list below reflects the common themes and recurring ideas when teachers discussed the changes made in their teaching practice to help us accelerate shifts in our learners from Year 0 to Year 8: 

• Teachers modelling/gifting language they want students to use in context across curriculum areas
• Increase in time spent to unpack vocabulary
• Timetable changed to cater for late students
• Phonics programmes implemented in all classes
• Changes/adaptations made to the way data is recorded to give a clearer picture of micro shifts
• Drawing connections with visual scaffolds
• Use of mentor texts as exemplars
• Incorporating elements of critical literacy to help strengthen connections
• Shifted locus of control to give students a more agentic experience in the classroom
• Increase in instructional time
• Revisiting learning when connections are not strong through rewindable opportunities and further instruction
• Making connections to prior learning
• Differentiation is needs based and can be supported with upskilling of TAs
• Adapting teaching DLOs to meet the needs of learners
• Planning for talk time
• Making use of collegial expertise

This was a very valuable opportunity as it showed that as a staff, we are all on the same page. No one apportioned 'blame' to students where innovations tried had not been successful. Our conversations instead, focused on changes or adaptations made when these speed bumps appeared. 

Insightful...

During our staff meeting with our literacy facilitator Nadine Sorrensen (Evaluation Associates), we were presented with a selection of quotes to help us think about change theory. This one really resonated with me as in order to accelerate student learning we need to first see ourselves as learners who reflect, upskill and make changes. After all as teachers, we encourage our learners to try something new, adapt their thinking, use their new learning and take risks to clarify the unknown each time we introduce new learning. 

Change brings about the need to accept failure both in ourselves and in our learners.  In order to go forward, we often take a step or two backward first otherwise, we settle for maintaining the status quo instead of challenging ourselves to rise to the levels of difficulty that come with change. 

My takeaways from today:

• If I want my learners to persevere when trying to master new learning I must make sure I take the time to notice what it is they are doing and give them explicit feedback on why they were successful and what it is they can do to move past their initial failures.
• I need to take the time to reflect on lessons to think about what went well and/or what didn't go so well, then ask myself why. It is the latter that will inform my steps forward.

Putting my new learning into practise... Awesome!

Last week I went to my first session of maths professional development with Bobbie Hunter. What a fabulous opportunity! So much of what she said made so much sense to me with light bulb after light bulb going on as the session progressed. This year it would be fair to say that the low levels of mathematical ability in my groups have challenged me week after week. I have gone back to the drawing board so many times as I endeavour to help my learners make the important connections to the skills and knowledge needed to allow them to operate at the Year 7/8 level. However despite my continued efforts I have remained completely perplexed with this situation.

A discussion I had with Bobbie forced me to take a step back and think about how my low expectations were affecting the outcomes in my maths lessons. I am very aware of the need to provide learning opportunities that my learners can resonate with, but for some reason I have overlooked the obvious when thinking about what needed to change. Me!

She suggested I let go of the desire to build number knowledge to a level that I felt my learners could cope with and actually provide learning opportunities that ticked the Level 4 boxes of the NZ maths curriculum. By lowering my expectations I was actually hampering my learner's progress. Whilst I have used thinking groups successfully in the past, this year I have completely overlooked this as a teaching tool as I thought (wrongly), that my learners would not be able to actively participate. I definitely had not thought about the fact that regardless of level (in this case ranging from JAM stage 1- 4) that there is so much that can be gained by providing opportunities to 'argue' reasoning and thinking. At no point had I thought about the importance of allowing my learners to engage with their errors in a peer protected environment. 

By embracing the idea that if my learners could explain and justify their thinking they could understand and use I introduced todays problem...

The question(s) I posed were linked to my learner's own worlds through our cluster wide inquiry and our recent camp at Hunua Falls. This empowered everyone from the outset as they could relate to what I was asking them to do. The affirmation came in the form of one student who said, "I understand why you need us to work this out Mrs Anderson. We have to help Auckland save water."

To set the scene I read out and showed a recent mailer I received with my water bill. We tapped into our inquiry knowledge to make connections to the topic then met our new thinking groups. To make sure everyone knew what 1 litre looked like we created a list of what we knew that came in 1 litre amounts. Coke was the most popular so that is the image I grabbed.

With initial connections made my learners took their first tiny steps into the world of problem solving. I told them they could use any strategy, number knowledge or maths equipment they wanted to find the answer. After a slow start this lesson took off. We celebrated every answer regardless of how the answer was found. Then in groups had our first dialogic maths conversations to decide as a group which strategy was the best one. The only scaffolding I put in place was the word 'because' and used the think aloud strategy to model how to state an opinion then use the word 'because' to support my thinking. Surprisingly each group had a different opinion.

Finding out how many litres of water we could save individually per week if we saved 20 litres per day was answered first. After the discussions I outlined above I posed the second part of the problem. 'How many litres of water would LS2 save per week if all 50 students saved 20 litres per day?' Once again I noticed a wide variety of strategies being used. Interestingly a few students were experimenting with the thinking shared in the first problem. I am excited to see where this journey takes us tomorrow...