Inquiry 2022 - Teaching Actions likely to Accelerate Student Learning

"Form hypotheses about teaching actions likely to accelerate student learning."

Thoughts after student feedback :-

• Link what they do future plans and how they can use DVC as 60% of the student replies said that it was an important aspect as to why they chose the subject.
• Do mindset activities as a lot of the students do not have a good mindset in regards to their abilities in DVC
• Build skills slowly to give the students confidence
• Let the students choose to work together on a research activity or by themselves, depending on how they best concentrate and focus on their work.
• Give regular feedback as to how they are doing as some of their replies are about not knowing where they stand.
• Build in practice time with activities so it is not straight into the assessed work. This could prove difficult as the students do tend to. get a little too focussed on whether an activity is for credits.
• Make work available in multiple places.
• Make clear step by step support material.
• Teacher made exemplars were more popular than the NZQA ones. I will also pull out past student projects for them to see Tamaki College exemplars.
• Work one to one with students. This is important as all their projects are slightly different so they all. have unique problems to overcome.
• Have rewindable resources as the students particularly did not like being told how to do something once then being expected to get on with it.
• Make sure their is the planning there and the time given for them to aim for the higher achievement levels.

Inquiry 2022 - Tools, Measures and Approaches

 "Describe the tools/measures/approaches you plan to use to get a more detailed and accurate profile of students’ learning in relation to that challenge. Justify why you chose these approaches and tools."

The focus for my inquiry this year is motivation of the students and how I, as the teacher, can affect that motivation in a positive way to enable achievement.

Asking Questions

One of the first things that I have done in my inquiry this year is to ask people questions.

• Teach first teacher who is teaching DVC alongside me
• Relief teacher who had my class while I was away
• Student working from home
• Students in the class

I tried to ask questions that drew out what they found helpful in how teachers present the work to them and what is not helpful.

Content Planning Monitoring
I am using workspaces and a class website to present the work to the students. These are used alongside emails and calendar invites (which end up in emails).

I am monitoring how the students are interacting with the content, talking to them and listening to them talk with each other. Changes can be made quite quickly if any part of the planning is confusing or not supportive enough. For example, I host the help videos on YouTube and this enables me to see how many times they have been viewed. This gives me an idea about how helpful they are being. 

NCEA Credits and Tracking

As my inquiry group are my senior DVC students (Year 11 and Year 13), I will be able to see how they are tracking along with their credits.

I also keep a spreadsheet of all the tasks and colour code them green, orange and red. This is up on the screen for the students to see what needs finishing off at a glance.

Ongoing Student Voice

Motivation is quite a tricky thing to measure so I think my best bet will be to keep talking to the students and getting their feedback as we go through the year.

I am not sure that a Google Form. will be the best way to keep doing this as they do need a bit of a shove sometimes to get them filled in. I need to come up with a quick way for them to indicate how they think things are going.

PD - Making Spanakopita with Year 13

 I had a great opportunity today to learn how to make Spanakopita alongside Mrs Heka's Year 13 Catering and Hospitality class. They are getting ready to cater for a function so have started trying out different finger foods with Mrs Heka so they can come up with a menu. 

This was sooooo tasty and so easy. 

Link to Google Drawing

PD - Tapasā - Carrying the Tapa

 

PD - Week 1 and 2 - OMG Tech PLD: 3D printing, Lasercutting and CNC machining

 We have had 2 weeks of PD from OMG Tech so far.

On week 1,  we looked at using Fusion 360. We looked at the basics and Krishna showed us how to produce a simple shape. A great tutorial to use is this one from Product Design Online. I worked my way through this tutorial after this first session and it takes you step by step through for a complete beginner.

We then went through slicing the design on Prusa Slicer so that it was ready to send G code to the 3D printer.

This came out really well when I printed it. We printed it fast so we could see it quickly but the quality was not bad.

Points to note when Krishna helped me to set up the 3D printer properly. 

• A really clean base plate - he cleaned it with hot soapy water and dried it
• Use cotton tissue to clean the hot print nozzle as the extra plastic stuck on there will come off on the tissue.
• Print the first few layers slower to ensure good adhesion to the base plate.

I really want a way for the students to be able to create an orthographic drawing digitally so that we can use that method when the new DVC standards come into affect. I had a go at making this design into an orthographic today. I was happy with how easy it was to do, the detail you can add and how it links directly to the 3D product that has been designed and drawn. Will Fusion 360 be efficient for this? I am not sure. I need to use it a lot more myself first before I make a decision.

Here are my written notes from the sessions.

Useful links

thingiverse.com

printables.com

Thomas Sanladerer - YouTube channel

CNC Kitchen - YouTube Channel

PD - Local Curriculum

 

Inquiry 2022 - Barriers to Learning

 

Reading - Barriers to Learning and How to Overcome them

Im my senior classes, I always have a range of students. 

• Year 11 - depending on the curriculum lines in Year 9 and 10, they may have had some graphics for both years, one year or non.
• Year 12 - they may have done NCEA Level 1 DVC at Year 11 or not.
• Year 13 - they may have done Level 1 and Level 2, they may have just done one of them or they may have done no DVC at NCEA level at all.
• Some have chosen DVC because they want to do it.
• Some are in the DVC class as there was nothing else on that option line that they felt like doing.

These situations create a wide range of experience and motivation in my students. I have a blog post about student voice about where they sit on this continuum here. I have students who want to do their absolute best through to students who are there to hang out and every where on the continuum inbetween.

1. I find that mindset is a huge barrier to learning in my subject. As soon as the words "I can't do this, I can't draw" come out of them, the student builds their own barrier and this is one that is the most difficult to get over.
2. Concentration is always a barrier to learning and being off task. Students are progressively over time having a shorter attention span and get sidetracked very quickly. I find this to be a problem as they have to spend extensive periods of time on the same project for DVC.
3. Students unable to come into school due to COVID restrictions and because they have had to get jobs to help their families has been a big problem. If they are not in the class but are still on the school role, then they are still on my list so my  responsibility to teach somehow.
4. Students having a very disjointed school, learning experience over the past 2 and a half years has meant it is very difficult for them to settle into the routine again.

My inquiry this year has its main focus on motivation. I will need to keep all the barriers to learning in mind when planning any interventions.