I do not have specific, measurable data at this point to share about my students. The work that we do at NCEA Level 3 takes sooooo long to complete that I will not know till the end of this year and the beginning of next year when the results come in. My feedback for this check point is qualitative rather than quantitative.
At the start of the year, the whole class and I had a great training day, with my scholarship group staying for the whole day. Blog post here.
My approach for the whole class after that was to always prepare work that was to the highest standard I could to try and up the quality / standard of the work for the whole class. Blog posts about this preparation here.
What I have observed in the students -
They did not shy away from the challenge. They all responded well to aiming high.
One of my students is now confident in drawing in 3D for his design ideas. He has been with me since Year 10 and has always lacked confidence and got me to draw with him so he could copy. It has always taken him a few tries. This year, he has had a real breakthrough with this and we celebrated with fist bumps when he showed me 3D drawn work that he had done with no input from me at all. I know this one has been a really slow grower but it was so worth the look on his face when he cracked it. This has further underlined for me the importance of not worrying that the effects of an inquiry be seen after that short space of time of less than a year. It takes time for effects to come through and be embedded in how the students work.
When lockdown happened, the focus of my work with the students was on supporting them feel confident about their work and how they were doing. My blog posts about distance learning and how we did it in my subject are here. I felt that this was a more important direction to go in as everything else would come from that.
While we were on lockdown, I started making support videos for my inquiry class (the Year 13 students) to help them work through the design brief activities. I did this so they could work through the design brief activity in small chunks, that had videos and talked through examples at each stage. Blog post about it here.
When we got back to the class in person, I asked the class how they were finding the help videos. Were they helpful at all? Were they using them?. I got a mixed response at the time.
"I didn't really watch the videos, but the examples are useful"
"I watched the first video. It was ok"
"They were useful. No they weren't too long. Yes I could understand what you were saying"
When we got to the end of this part of the work and there were no more videos, I started getting different comments from the students.
"Is there any more videos miss?
"I've just watched the last video miss, did you make any more?"
So I think that the videos were more useful than we originally thought and they gave them more support than we thought, which is good as that is what I was aiming for.
When I had my lesson observed for patterns of behaviour in myself, blog post here, it became clear that I needed to lead from the front in terms of self talk and thinking positively. I asked my students to monitor me on that and they were good to their word and 2 or 3 of them are really good at picking me up when I do negative self talk - "miss, remember" ... "miss, don't be negative remember" ... "that was a bit harsh miss". It has got to a point where I have received unasked for feedback from my HOD about this where she has noticed that I am a lot less negative about myself when I am talking, which is great. I still need A LOT of work on this but it is a good start. I will get next year's students on board with this straight away and we will monitor each other as the year goes on. I can't expect my student to be positive about themselves if I am not modelling it myself.
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