Causal Chain 2024

 Part of what we have to do within our inquiry is to think about the chain of events that will cause the desired outcome to happen.

"A causal chain is when a cause leads to an effect and that effect becomes the cause of another effect - A leads to B. B leads to C. C leads to D...start from D and work backwards Any intervention you design will (consciously or not) be based on a causal chain you have in mind - this is your theory of action.... To really understand deeply how teaching (as a cause) leads to a valued student outcome (effect), we need to know about more than just the first cause in the chain and the final - we need to know about each link." 

Dr Aaron Wilson

Link to Google Drawing

Year 11 Visual Art First Standard

 We are now working on the second standard in Year 11 Visual Art and there has been a recent final flurry of activity to get the first standard done so the grades can be included on the reports which are due at the end of this week. There is nothing like the looming knowledge of parents / care givers knowing how you have been doing to inspire a bit of work completion. 

This standard was AS91912 - Link to the class site and planning here.

Careers Expo - Art Gallery

 We had our annual careers expo this week, and we decided that the Visual Art and DVC department would put on an art gallery style exhibition of student work as a practice run for our big art exhibition next term.

We had been thinking about how to display the sculpture work for a while. This is the first time Tamaki College has done sculpture at NCEA so we had no prior way of displaying it and we really wanted each piece of student work to have its own plinth. We then had the idea of using concrete building blocks to build our own plinths that can be assembled and disassembled as we need them. Also, they can be built to the height we need.

So we found an Auckland company that could supply and deliver a pallet load of the blocks we needed and my senior class then got the job of moving them off the pallet into the back of the garage. With a piece of plywood as the top, the practice plinth came out looking just how we wanted it.

Our head of careers who was organising the whole event got hold of a load of old political campaign board. These are really big and plain white on the back. She told us to come and take what we wanted. As we wanted to display a lot of the students drawings and artwork, just relying on the wall behind where we were going to be in the sports hall was not going to be enough. We had the idea of taping up three of the boards to make a large free standing triangular structure. This could then be stood anywhere and have loads of space for 2D artwork. White gaffer tape which did the job on the corners really well and they stood up securely.

It was a big job in the days running up to the day, as we had a lot of photographing of student work to do and we then printed it out A3 sized. We used the same burgundy border around everything to link it all together. We made a shared Google presentation to do this and made the page size A3 so there would be no pixelating.

Link to presentation

We printed a couple of posters and one of the Year 12 students sculpture photographs onto A1 so they made an impact on the boards.

It was my lovely senior class on the day of the expo who got the job of moving all the blocks and boards.

We then set everything up. We had been given the area in front of the doors so the gallery was the first thing people saw as they were entering the expo. We took advantage of this and went either side of the door so people had to actually walk through the gallery to enter.

We got lots of good feedback on the night, gave out lots of flyers and hopefully inspired some students to choose Visual Art or DVC next year.

Code Switching

 Earlier this year I did a staff questionnaire where I was asking them about their experiences as a teacher using English as their second (or more) language. Blog post here A very interesting point came up about "code switching" and I mentioned this in my presentation to staff in June. Blog post here

After the staff presentation, Dr Jannie van Hees, a language specialist who works at Tamaki College with some of our students who are English as a second language students, told me that she has researched into code switching and very kindly shared a podcast that she made for the Ministry of Education about it. Link here

Day-to-day code switching from Ministry of Education on Vimeo.

Planning for Visual Art AS91914

 My Year 11 Visual Art students have worked through their first internal standard and are now onto working on the external they are entered into, AS91914 - Explore Visual Arts processes and conventions to inform own art making.

We have been enjoying the experimental aspects of this standard. The first thing that we did was to try out the new gel plates  - link to blog post here.

We then started looking at the first of the two artist models we are using this year, Henri Rousseau. I am using this as a way to experiments with different media with the students. They have not had much experience of different art media so I made a worksheet where they looked at Rousseau's work and used a selection of different media to copy sections of it.

Link to document

The students have been doing some reading about Henri Rousseau - Link to blog post here , and they had to use this information to answer a series of questions and add this information into their sketchbook presentation. Here is the link to class site page with the Rousseau information, instructions and questions.

As usual, I always do an example alongside the students. Here is my sketchbook page so I can show them what I want them to do. We are only using 1 page for this work as we can only use 8 pages for this standard as a whole. I wanted them to. cut up the worksheet and present the Rousseau information and media experiments in a visually attractive way.

Next week, we have out Careers expo, so I have been photographing the student work to make an exhibition for visitors to the expo to look at. For part of that, I have made two posters of the student's Rousseau work. One of all the tigers that they drew and one of the different media that they have used. I have made these posters A1 sized so they look really good and you can see the student work clearly.

Link to media document

Link to Tigers document

Our next step is to go through tis same process with out end art ist model, Margaret Aull - link to site page

The students will then use the information collected from the first standard - link to site page - with the style of one the the artist models and produce a piece of work of their own design.

Reading - Effective Literacy Strategies

 Link to document

Manaiakalani Staff Share PLD

 These were our discussion points about structured literacy collated by Naomi.

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The group shared their reasons for wanting to get more of an understanding of Structured Literacy and shared prior knowledge. Matt shared how SL is associated with improvement efforts for students with dyslexia. Russell shared the principled literacy work they have been implementing at Tamaki College through their literacy specialist Mark Milford. Alka shared the literacy strategies she has been using to get students to identify keywords in text and vocabulary work for recalling subject-specific words. Karen shared successful approaches in Visual Arts for Scanning and Predicting. Jay shared a copy of the Effective Literacy Strategies handbook he has used in structuring literacy instruction in his subject area.

The government has made clear its plans for training teachers in SL from Years 0-3 but we still await direction on how SL will be implemented from Year 4, 7-8 and for the Secondary sector.

Naomi shared names of some of the main providers of SL in New Zealand: IDeal (See Ideal Matters); Liz Kane (Little Learners Love Literacy) and BSLA (Better Start Literacy). The Code is a useful scope and sequence for spelling patterns, rules, and morphology being adopted widely in schools. Here is a useful article in everyday terms on what Structured Literacy is and also from Cognition Education. It is likely that the government will provide a steer on both pathways for using SL approaches i.e. for reading intervention (e.g. Tier 2 students; those well below curriculum level) and for effective literacy instruction using a scope and sequence approach to teaching morphology for reading, spelling and decoding of challenging, and subject-specific vocabulary. The UK has a decent scope and sequence for spelling in their curriculum.

Sunshine are one of the only providers in New Zealand at the moment of decodable texts for older learners with age-appropriate content. It’s called The Reading Road series.

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Reading Links

Balanced vs Structured Literacy — Lifting Literacy Aotearoa

Understanding Structured Literacy | Inclusive Education

Using a structured literacy approach to teach reading: What you need to know | RNZ News

The Code | Liz Kane Literacy

*** The iDeaL Approach to Structured Literacy ***, iDeaL | Learning MATTERS

Reading in Visual Art - Scanning and Predicting

 It has got to the point in my Year 11 Visual Art class where we have to start reading about our artist models so information about them can be included in our sketchbooks.

The first artist we have been looking at is Henri Rousseau. We have been looking at his work in terms of experimenting with different media to do copies of sections of the work. 

We started our reading today. In my inquiry last year, I spent a lot of time looking at how to do information transfer with my classes. Marc Milford, our literacy specialist, is keen for students to learn how to scan and predict. He took a text I had found online and made me an example of how to do this. Link to document here I felt a little overwhelmed by the size and content in this document so I had a go at making a lighter one to use today. Link to document

After showing this document to Marc before the lesson today, he felt that it still needed some work so he came to the lesson with an addition to it as I had not included any work on scanning. Link to document

When we started the reading, we had our guest reader from last year, Ms George. The students had to read along and use the table on the document to record any words that they did not understand.

After the reading we talked about those words and we looked up the meanings together and discussed them.

The students then re read the the document and underlined the key words from Marc's document as they read.