Critical Friend Observations...

When carrying out an inquiry into your own teaching practice it is really helpful to have a critical friend who can see your practice from a different perspective. Their feedback and feed forward helps you to adapt your practice to continue to meet the learning needs of the students in your classroom. As I mentioned in a previous post, for me this person is Donna Ryan. I know what I think I do/say when I am teaching, but having Donna observe me taking a phonics session, and record exactly what she saw me do, was a valuable learning opportunity.

This is what I did/said to help my learners make the connections they needed to make sense of the learning:

• Recap learning from last session
• Check in to see if understanding is in place
• Co-construct the learning intention (LI) and goals for the lesson
• Asked the students "What do you need to do today to achieve this?"
• Gave students control of the learning by giving them the opportunity to choose the follow up activity
• Asked "Why are we doing this?" to recap on the purpose of the learning
• Reinforced the focus/goal as a reminder
• Modelled the learning
• Guided/scaffolded students towards next step
• Checked in to make sure understanding was in place
• Identified where they had met the LI
• Reaffirmed "I like the way you have used the commas correctly, we learnt that yesterday and this shows me you were listening carefully"
• Asked "Can you remind me what we were focussing on today?"

From this I can see that I share control of the learning with my students, continually check that connections are being made, scaffold through questioning and teacher modelling, and reaffirm to ensure self efficacy and confidence continues to grow.

Critical friends are awesome!...

Last term I videoed myself taking the maths lesson I blogged about in my previous post. The purpose behind this lesson was help my students to grow their maths language, and the purpose for my video was so I could see the explicit teaching strategies I use in a maths lesson. It's always a challenge to critique your own practice as there is no opportunity for the conversations that can affect change through both affirmation and guidance. I invited Donna Ryan, one of our Across School CoL teachers, to be my critical friend. Together we reviewed this lesson and identified the strategies I use to help my learners strengthen their connections to and make sense of our learning.

When introducing new learning valuing the power of front loading helps our learners avoid disconnects between what they already know and what they are about to learn. I captured 14 minutes 36 seconds of footage, with 6 minutes 55 seconds at the start given to helping my learners make the very important personal connections to the content they need if they are to be able to draw on and use their prior knowledge to help them make sense of new learning.

During this time we noticed I:

• use teacher think alouds to capture interest and evoke curiosity
• provide opportunities for paired discussion to make connections to the known, reflect on responses given, use the language in context and problem solve
• value and accept all responses
• share my own knowledge gaps and how I might fill these
• value students as experts
• ask questions
• use teacher tell opportunities when scaffolding with materials and images
• share the purpose of task
• remind/prompt known scaffold opportunities
• question
• give feedback
• initiate opportunities for negotiation
• remind students to value their own thinking
• revisit the same content in a variety of ways
• invite my learners to take risks in a supportive and collaborative environment
• give clear explanations
• use content vocabulary in context

On reflection I am quite surprised how many ways I find opportunities to help a wide variety of students make connections within a lesson. This was really affirming as it proves I know my learners, something that is vital to effective teaching, as one size really does not fit all.

Going forward I will definitely be making use of Donna's suggestion to include more opportunities for my focus group to practise using and hearing maths language in other learning areas to help them see that maths is not just something we do at maths time. I have asked Donna to come back later in the term to repeat this process so we can see if I have been successful in providing opportunities for practical challenges that bring maths language and learning into our Reading and STEAM lessons. 

... and we're off! MIT15 Update #2

What a week! It's the end of Week 6 and those of you who are teachers will know that means we are now half way through term one. For me that also signifies the conclusion of our visit from the Education Review Office (ERO)! 

When reflecting on the last week I have identified a personal high point of ERO's visit. I know that for many teachers having a visitor in your room is daunting, but when you are part of the Manaiakalani cluster visitors to your learning environment are the norm. I have learned to embrace visits as opportunities to share my classroom practice and celebrate my student's learning successes. Someone was definitely looking after me that day because my observation took place as we were building the foundations of my MIT inquiry! In addition to being asked about the current learning taking place, I was asked to talk about the ways I extend and engage my students. Apart from this being something I am truly passionate about, having an active class site and blog meant I had a wealth of supporting evidence at my fingertips. Many of my learners were spoken to and it was evident from our discussion after the lesson, that all the students spoken to understood what they were doing, why they were doing it and could talk about what they needed to do to get to the next level in Writing. This excited me as I could see that my MIT focus was very much alive in Room 5.

One foot in front of the other:

My next step from Update #1 was to look closely at the content of the comments and see if genuine connections had been made by comparing the comments with the actual work analysed. Unfortunately when I did this my initial euphoria did a very large u-turn. I noticed that there was a significant amount of mismatch between what had been written in the task and what was 'noticed', evident in the comments.

The collaborative success criteria based on content only:

You will have done this correctly if you have:

• Written in past tense
• Listed at three goals you hope to achieve
• Explained what you will need to do to achieve these goals
• Included at least one question

The example above shows that the success criteria was used to help prompt the feedback but it is incorrect. There is no evidence of a question being asked, nor any evidence of how this student hopes to achieve these goals. 

This week saw us peel back and start by developing student content knowledge. I took advantage of the fact we have just done e-asTTle writing samples as that made the task of how to give feedback both purposeful and relevant. I explained that the rubric was what helped teachers find out what level their students were working at and helped them find out what they needed to teach next to help everyone move their work to the next level. This will make an interesting comparison when I compare my marking with theirs!

Again the students were paired with their critical friends. Each pair was given a version of the e-asTTle marking rubric written in 'kidspeak'. The more able student was given the task of noticing what their partner did well as I want my learners to see receiving feedback as a positive part of our learning. The purpose: To identify what level they are at now. 

What we did:

This was a step by step process as we explored the 'Ideas' component. Exemplars were used to show what this might look like at different levels. We then discussed what it was we were looking for and then carried out the task. I found the students to be extremely honest in their evaluations. Interestingly I noticed that the owners of the writing were fully engaged in trying to 'prove' they were at a certain level, and the critical friends were searching for real evidence to support this. Without me saying anything I observed that each pair was looking at the next box on the rubric to identify next steps. Yah! Connections are being made! We then wrote statements following a prompt:

I think I am at level ____ because _____. To move to the next level I need to _____.

I found that proving where they were at was the easy part. We had to reign back the next steps to only one point (per criteria) as there was a little bit too much ambition. I need this to be achievable in reality and not simply look good on paper.

The best part was this is what ERO observed taking place! Way to go Room 5 your learning conversations showed that you know where you are at and what you need to do to move your learning to the next level.

Throughout the week we continued the process exploring each component of the writing rubric.

What's Next?

I need to have the same learning conversations with my more able learners so that they too can identify where they are at and what their next steps are. Once we have done that we will devise a way of making our learning needs visible that everyone is happy with. Not sure what this will look like but I am sure of exactly what is needed in my planning!

First Steps: MIT15 Update #1

I have been fortunate enough to move through to the 2015 teaching year with some students who were in my class in 2014. This has given me 'feedback experts' who have a level of skills and knowledge in one curriculum area and can talk those new to our class this year through the process of giving peer led feedback. We have a new independent reading challenge which is allowing us to build on the familiar. By that I mean strengthening the feedback comments that were developed last year. This has been a very positive process so far. I love hearing the learning conversations that take place as the 'experts' guide my new learners. The exciting part for me is that the buy in and engagement in these tasks is gaining strength as the unfamiliar becomes the familiar. I have set up the program so that everyone has a buddy. This has allowed me to spend time guiding and conferencing each pair at the level they need. For some we have walked slowly through the process, and for others the scaffolding has almost been removed. 

The album below reflects examples of peer lead feedback in Reading, the curriculum area we focused on last year. The next step is to find out if my learner's feedback skills and knowledge in one curriculum area transferrable to another.

By providing this 'peg to hang the new learning on' I leapt into the oblivion and buddied up my class so that each person had a 'critical friend' to give them feedback on their personal writing. I needed to see where my learners were at as far as being able to give feedback in Writing so I simply asked them to work together to see if, when wearing their critical friend glasses, they could use our success criteria to notice where their partner had made a connection. 

The album below reflects examples of peer lead feedback in Writing. This is a snapshot of the initial independent feedback comments. The students were reminded only to use the success criteria to see where their partner had 'got it right'. 

What's Next?

The comments I have included in the album show that I have a great starting point. My next step is to look closely at the content of the comments and see if genuine connections have been made. I will do this by comparing the comments with the actual work analysed.

Room 9's Journey to become Dialogic Learners

Yvette and Kapri created this movie to show Room 9's journey to become dialogic learners. It highlights our 'learn-create-share' process in Reading.

Personal 'Wow' Moment

As a teacher in the Manaiakalani cluster I am part of the ongoing observations of classroom practice and student engagement that contribute data to the Manaiakalani research and evaluation being carried out by the Woolf Fisher Research Centre. As a result of these observations I was identified as a teacher who achieved a high level of cognitive engagement in my classroom, and in June was filmed by Rebecca Sweeney from CORE Education. The link to my contribution is below.

Cognitive & Behavioural Engagement: Robyn Anderson - Panmure Bridge School

 This toolkit is one idea of how critical friends can help each other move their writing to the next level.