Silent Challenges...

Some of my favourite lessons this year have been our silent challenges. The idea behind this is that instead of me 'telling' my learners what it it I want them to do, they need to read and understand from a series of written instructions what their task is. By doing this I have encouraged my learners to read for meaning and shown them the importance of making sure they understand what it is they have read. These tasks allowed the collaboration between my learners to shine at it's best.

The challenge below was set only for my reading group. One of the gaps in their learning was reading for meaning when a text is not scaffolded and unpacked. I decided this would be a fun way to show them why this was important and how they could make sense of a text that they had little connection to. To make sure everyone found success I created mixed ability groups so they could support each other. The learning arguments or dialogic discussions that took place were rich and afforded me great opportunities to make some important anecdotal observations.

The rest of the class saw asked for a similar challenge so I created one that embraced our learning in maths and inquiry. Never would I have imagined that 52 Year 7 and 8 learners would be outside testing flight distances and be so on task! The discussions I heard were based on adaptations that could be made to get more distance and were accompanied by laughter, team spirit and outstanding group collaboration.

Movie Making Update

Since writing my previous post the completed the movie 'Shake Out' has been entered it in the 'Outlook for Someday' competition. Congratulations Latham, Daniel, Jasmine, Sylis and Reon for getting your movie on the shortlist for this movie making challenge. We are all very proud of you.

Here is the link to watch it: https://vimeo.com/189095082

The Shake Out from The Outlook for Someday on Vimeo.

Celebrating Success

This week we noticed that some of our students had hit the 500 post mark. An admirable achievement by anyones standards. We felt they needed some recognition for this so I created our very own 'PBS 500 Club' badge for their blogs. Huge congratulations to those students and yah me for working out how to create this GIF!

Smart Searching PD

Today our Year 8's were taken through a session on smart searching with Mairi Ogilvie from the National Library. We were reminded of how to ask search engines the right question to help us find the information we are looking for. This was a great refresher for me too! The Year 8's as experts were asked to share their learning with the Year 7's. This was the best part for me as I observed so many of our quieter learners in a new light as they shone as 'teachers'. I am a firm believer of the thinking that we learn best when we learn with and from each other.

To make this new knowledge accessible I created a page on our site to allow my learners to work through the smart searching challenge to consolidate the learning a week later.

Click here to access the follow up tasks and a 'how to' exemplar created by Cecillia that takes you through the stages of narrowing your search.

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NZLA 2016 Conference Takeaways

Having attended the NZLA 2016 Conference in Waitangi I am inspired to begin term 4 and to share my new learning with both my learners and my colleagues. Here are a few of my takeaways:

Photos

Karen Melhuish Spencer

• As teachers we need to stay connected and have conversations with our students and wider school community.
• We need to deliberately teach digital citizenship and keep informed
• As teachers we need to enable and support our learners journey as digital citizens
• No ‘sheriff’ on the internet = no rules therefore our learners have to manage their own identity so we need to teach skills of social connections and make students aware of the consequences of passing on viral messages

Alison Davis

• We are challenged to continue increasing the number of students who are intellectually engaged by changing the treadmill - learners need to be in the driver's seat
• Finding out the needs of our students - big picture data
• Gather student voice to id the hard spots/gaps
• LI and SC are needed to make the learning explicit
• Academic vocabulary in the classroom - need to make it accessible to the students
• Think > Pair > Share > Compare (Explain your thinking... 'How would you explain...?')
• Teach the struggling students the strategy > then they teach the others in the class - kids listen to kids!
• Reading comp. is about accessing the ideas
• Strategies are just the tools, but need to be able to transfer to different text and at more complex levels, how to use it and when to use it. Tools need sharpening - upskilling - (Decoding tools, vocab tools…) 

• Reading > Writing > Grammar connections are needed
• Unpack exemplars and co-construct SC to grow u/st

ARBs

(Verena Watson/Sue McDowall)

• ARBS have 2700+ resources available 
• Homepage - https://arbs.nzcer.org.nz/home
• Concept maps link to strategy support

• Eg comprehension strategies have links to teacher support materials, definitions/explanations and all the ARB resources that support this learning
• Research articles are available

Questions

(Rita Palmer)

• Exploring different ways of encouraging learners to ask deeper questions (wonderbag, qu matrix, what if, synectics...)
• Give a student a qu to answer and they will learn the passage they have just read

Research says

• students ask less than 5% of the qu
• 70-80% of qu are at factual or recall level
• Teachers call upon those they see as higher achievers far more than those they perceive to be lower achievers
• Teachers must teach chn how to ask qu ‘without strong questioning skills students are merely learners on someone else’s tour bus’ - they maybe on the highway but someone else is doing the driving

Diversity

(Verena Watson/Sue McDowall)

• Connections to the familiar are affecting text buy-in from students
• Read aloud to help make connections
• Tchr PD must be current and practical based
• Use diversity don’t cope with it, cater for it or embrace it!

• Diversity = a rich class
• Need to prepare students to deal with diversity - ideas that differ from our own

NZLA Conference Presentation

Kiri Kirkpatrick and I were invited to share how we incorporate digital literacies in our ILE at the NZLA 2016 conference at Waitangi. Great to have such an interactive audience and to receive such positive feedback. 

Paying it Forward

As teachers we are always looking for ways to make personal connections with our learners. Today I had the absolute privilege to be taught by Ma'ata. By tapping into the cultural capital and expertise our learners have we can see them shine in a whole new light. This was Ma'ata's 'Pay it Forward' task for our PBS CARE awards. She created a DLO on Show Me then took me through it making sure I had my pronunciation correct. At the end of our learning time the smile on her face made this one of the best teaching days of 2016! Thank you Ma'ata.

Ma'ata's post:

This is a picture of me teaching Mrs Anderson how to count to 10 in Tongan. I used the DLO I made to help her learn. I think she was good at saying the numbers in Tongan.