How has my inquiry been impacted by COVID19?

Our CoL meeting yesterday was our first one face to face since term 1. We have had Google Meet ones, but they are just not the same. No hugging or eating is involved in a Google Meet version!!

Part of what we discussed yesterday was how our inquiries have been affected by COVID19 and the lockdown situation New Zealand went through.
We were asked the question ...

"How has the Covid-19 period impacted the learners in your focus group? Will you need to make any changes to your Inquiry? "

Since lockdown and after, I have realised what I thought was helpful stuff on my class website is not so helpful after all. It was not set up well enough to enable students to work as independently as I would have liked. This was important during lockdown, both for those students who could come online and work with me but especially for those who couldn't. Since we have got back it is also important as the students are at such a huge variance as to where they are in their design projects.
I started to try and address this with the help videos that I was putting together for my inquiry group for the design brief. Blog posts here and here. This needs to be expanded into all year groups for everything that I am asking them to do.

As my students missed so much and they are at such different stages in their work they have quite large confidence issues. I have noticed this when everything is normal as they come into NCEA Level 3 with no background knowledge, but it is a lot worse at the moment. My focus has definitely shifted into mindset, growth mindset and confidence building. I have been building in activities for them to do, visits from other teachers talking about mindset and I have been doing a lot of reading about it myself. This is turning into a focus which is just as important as the Scholarship work, as nothing will happen if they don't feel like they can achieve it in the first place.

In the Technology Department, we have been asked to identify the learning barriers for our senior students, what strategies we have been trying and what we intend to further try in order to get some achievement happening.
Here is mine for my inquiry group. I have taken the names out.

As you can see, a lot of the problems are related to confidence.

Main Learning Barriers	Other Learning Barriers	Teacher Practice - Strategies and Interventions	Strategy and Intervention to shift achievement by the 18th August 2020
Literacy	Prior / Content Knowledge	I get another student to translate for me when xxx doesn't understand my instructions.	Being nice to Gene Smallwood to see if she will translate some support sheets for me into Filipino. I am offering Wednesday and Thursday after school sessions for terms 3 and 4.
Attendance	Motivation	Board games and support when he comes in. I try and get him to feel part of the group again when i see him. It is hard as he feels xxx not being there and so he avoids coming.	I made help videos and examples for the design brief section of the project for those who could not come online over lockdown. These are available on the class site. I need to make more of these for more of the project as feedback from the students is that they are using them. I am offering Wednesday and Thursday after school sessions for terms 3 and 4.
Attendance	Motivation	Since we lost xxx, xxx has hardly been in at all. I think 'i have seen him 3 times. I try to make him as welcome as I can and get him to join in with the rest of the group with games and warm ups.	I made help videos and examples for the design brief section of the project for those who could not come online over lockdown. These are available on the class site. I need to make more of these for more of the project as feedback from the students is that they are using them. I am offering Wednesday and Thursday after school sessions for terms 3 and 4.
Confidence		xxx likes to know the big picture, so I try and relate everything we do and let him know why and how it connects with the end product. I show him skills one to one and give him time to practice as he lacks confidence in his own drawing skills.	I made help videos and examples for the design brief section of the project for those who could not come online over lockdown. These are available on the class site. I need to make more of these for more of the project as feedback from the students is that they are using them. I am offering Wednesday and Thursday after school sessions for terms 3 and 4.
Attendance	Confidence	I try and use examples and one to one when xxx is in the class to try and remind her where she is up to in the whole project. There are big gaps in between visits to the class.	I made help videos and examples for the design brief section of the project for those who could not come online over lockdown. These are available on the class site. I need to make more of these for more of the project as feedback from the students is that they are using them. I am offering Wednesday and Thursday after school sessions for terms 3 and 4.
Attendance	Time Awareness	I try and use examples and one to one when xxx is in the class to try and remind her where she is up to in the whole project. There are big gaps in between visits to the class.	I made help videos and examples for the design brief section of the project for those who could not come online over lockdown. These are available on the class site. I need to make more of these for more of the project as feedback from the students is that they are using them. I am offering Wednesday and Thursday after school sessions for terms 3 and 4.
In school other commitments	Time Awareness	xxx has not really kept up to date this year at all. She has a lot of extra stuff on and this has affected both her attendance and focus at times. I have examples on hand all the time to show her what she needs to be doing.	I made help videos and examples for the design brief section of the project for those who could not come online over lockdown. These are available on the class site. I need to make more of these for more of the project as feedback from the students is that they are using them. I am offering Wednesday and Thursday after school sessions for terms 3 and 4.
In school other commitments	Time Awareness	xxx has not really kept up to date this year at all. She has a lot of extra stuff on and this has affected both her attendance and focus at times. I have examples on hand all the time to show her what she needs to be doing.	I made help videos and examples for the design brief section of the project for those who could not come online over lockdown. These are available on the class site. I need to make more of these for more of the project as feedback from the students is that they are using them. I am offering Wednesday and Thursday after school sessions for terms 3 and 4.
Too much of a perfectionist		xxx and I have been working on "loosening up" the style this year. He tends to like everything "just so" and he really needs to be looser and produce more design ideas to choose from, whether he likes them or not. He came into the holiday sessions most days.	I made help videos and examples for the design brief section of the project for those who could not come online over lockdown. These are available on the class site. I need to make more of these for more of the project as feedback from the students is that they are using them. I am offering Wednesday and Thursday after school sessions for terms 3 and 4.
Confidence		I have been trying to encourage xxx this year as his 3D drawing has really improved. I remind him what it was like in Y11 and 12 and make him think about how much improvement he has made. He did not take any time off when we lost xxx but he has felt it really badly. I try and give him room to play games with the group to build confidence and togetherness again which he is lacking due to others not coming to school. He came into the holiday sessions once.	I made help videos and examples for the design brief section of the project for those who could not come online over lockdown. These are available on the class site. I need to make more of these for more of the project as feedback from the students is that they are using them. I am offering Wednesday and Thursday after school sessions for terms 3 and 4.
Attendance	Too much of a perfectionist	xxx is another who i have been encouraging to be looser this year. He has responded well and is trying hard to not be such a perfectionist with everything.	I made help videos and examples for the design brief section of the project for those who could not come online over lockdown. These are available on the class site. I need to make more of these for more of the project as feedback from the students is that they are using them. I am offering Wednesday and Thursday after school sessions for terms 3 and 4.
Never here		I have hardly seen xxx all year. I don't think that the 37% that KAMAR is saying is correct. It seems too high.	I made help videos and examples for the design brief section of the project for those who could not come online over lockdown. These are available on the class site. I need to make more of these for more of the project as feedback from the students is that they are using them. I am offering Wednesday and Thursday after school sessions for terms 3 and 4.
Confidence	Prior / Content Knowledge	I try and do examples for / with xxx as he really lacks confidence in his work.	I made help videos and examples for the design brief section of the project for those who could not come online over lockdown. These are available on the class site. I need to make more of these for more of the project as feedback from the students is that they are using them. I am offering Wednesday and Thursday after school sessions for terms 3 and 4.
Attendance	Attitude and time awareness	xxx has terrible attendance this year and she has developed a strange attitude when she is in class. I try to show her the examples we have worked on together each time I see her to remind her what we are doing as there are big gaps between visits.	I made help videos and examples for the design brief section of the project for those who could not come online over lockdown. These are available on the class site. I need to make more of these for more of the project as feedback from the students is that they are using them. I am offering Wednesday and Thursday after school sessions for terms 3 and 4.
Attendance	Confidence	I sit with xxx one to one a lot to show him things specifically related to his own project as he has difficulty translating general skills to what he is doing. A lot of that is related to his lack of confidence in his own work. He came into the holiday sessions a few times.	I made help videos and examples for the design brief section of the project for those who could not come online over lockdown. These are available on the class site. I need to make more of these for more of the project as feedback from the students is that they are using them. I am offering Wednesday and Thursday after school sessions for terms 3 and 4.

Bursts and Bubbles 2018

Today all of the Manaiakalani CoL teachers got together to present the findings of their year long inquiries in a "Bursts and Bubbles" session.

Check out the blog links on all of these slides to see how the CoL teachers have conducted their inquiries and results that they have had.

First CoL Meeting of the year.

We met as a CoL for the first time this year and we were lucky enough to have two presentations that will start off our inquiry year in the right direction.

Meta Analysis of Inquiries

Woolf Fisher

“WFRC will analyse data and evidence from teachers’ inquiries to identified Learn Create Share
practices likely to contribute to accelerated progress for students.”

Not everyone can access what is in your head so inquiries are key. It is vital that the inquiries are picked apart and shared so everyone can benefit from them. This year, the CoL inquiries will be analysed to see what works at a deeper level by our research partners, Woolf Fisher.

Language Acquisition & Development as the Inquiry Lens into your subject/level

Dr Jannie van Hees

Language in abundance has no set way of working, it is not a one size fits all, it is a process of finding out. Language needs to be around the students at all times.
Conditions for learning -
How do you get knowledge? - the main way is through words (in various ways) -this grows cognition and knowledge.
We watched a series of videos that were all trying to teach us how to do the same task. They varied in what type f information was given.
No words, just video how to - we were calling on prior knowledge and knowledge of the names of the things used. It would be really hard if there was no prior knowledge of these things,
No transferability as there is no language used.
Spoken instructions over the visuals and written on the screen.
Words give a sense of context - it is obvious what is being made.
Can slow down and replay, so it is rewindable.
What does language offer a person?
Do we look specifically at language that is offered in the resources that are given to the students.

• 
  
• What does language in abundance mean for a particular teacher / class? 
• Quantity of talk needs to happen. 
• Responding and elaborating. 
• Setting up a culture of valuing contributions. 
• Actions with talk that goes along with it. 
• Vocab needs to go alongside meaning and putting into context. 
• Participate and interact with the words. 
• Explain is an important skill to be able to do

http://www.nzcer.org.nz/nzcerpress/primary-vocabulary

Anywhere, any time, any text.
Do we read enough to students? Do they read to each other?
Don’t hope that they come across words - make it on purpose. How can they notice the words and know what they mean and how to use them.
Language in abundance by itself is not enough - it needs support.

 

What’s the Big Idea for 2018

“Language in Abundance”, Language Acquisition, development, Transfer
and sustaining across school levels and curriculum domains.

Language in abundance environments ‘drip’ with language availability and attention, where noticing and relevant use of words allow for deeper, wider, more specific and precise, context appropriate language expression…leading to knowing at deeper and broader

levels. Dr. Jannie Van Hees

What’s OUR responsibility as CoL teachers?

• Conduct a mean as inquiry at your level/s in your subject/ 
• Language in Abundance is the lens 
• Share it really well 
• Help each other 
• Visit online/offline, debate, discuss, challenge, suggest

Bursts and Bubbles - Whole CoL Presentation

It was a great evening listening to all of out Manaiakalani CoL Teachers talk about impact stories from their inquiries this year. We all had 3 minutes to tell our stories and even though we teach different things, in different schools to different age groups, it was fascinating listening to similar problems and "aha" moments.

Here is my presentation ...

Burst and Bubbles

The entire CoL is getting together this afternoon to talk about where we are up to in our inquiries.

Here are the main points from my presentation, which also includes information from the previous 2 blog posts,

Visible Learning Accelerates Shift PD Session

NCEA Internal Results Analysis for DVC 2017

Presenting at the Manaiakalani Boards Forum

Last night, I was asked to be one of 6 teachers to present at the Manaiakalani Boards Forum. These 6 teachers represented the 6 achievement challenges for the Community of Learning.
What was really interesting while listening to the other presentations by my colleagues, was the fact that similar challenges to student learning were becoming apparent in inquiries across the cluster. One of these that stood out the most was literacy and vocabulary in all areas. This is definitely something that the future of my inquiry will be focussing on.

We had to put together presentation display boards for the board members to look at. These boards outlined our inquiry to date.

We then took turns to stand and explain our inquiries to the board forum.

This is the slide deck that I presented about for my inquiry.

Manaiakalani Hui 2017 - CoL Presentation

Today was the annual Manaiakalani Hui.
Part of this was the was inquiry presentations from the CoL teachers. We has set up together under our Achievement Challenge banners and the visitors to the hui had to come round with their Bingo cards to ask about one of the Manaiakalani labels from the inquiry structure. After getting information about one of the labels, they got a stamp on their card.
I was with my colleagues under the banner for Achievement Challenge 1 - Raise Māori student achievement through the development of cultural visibility and responsive practices across the pathway as measured against National Standards and agreed targets for reading Years 1-10 and NCEA years 11-13.


Here is the presentation that I had running that gives a general overview of what I have been doing, but most of my time was spent with people looking at my blog, in particular at posts related to the label they were wanting information about.
Most of the chat today was about my recent blog posts about how my inquiry has changed to include literacy and vocabulary. There was also a lot of interest shown in how I am using SOLO, the resources I have made and especially the visual self assessment structures that I have put together with the SOLO activities.
Thanks to +Fiona Grant for the above photo

July CoL Meeting - The Good the Bad and The Ugly....

Today, in our CoL meeting, we had to analyse at what we were doing and share in our inquiry groups. Our groups for this meeting were based around the Achievement Challenges so we could compare what was gong well and what wasn't with colleagues working on the same goal.

Out main feedback session to each other was to highlight parts of our inquiries that was a success and which parts failed and where they can be improved.

This was my main feedback about this :-

The working together as small groups worked really well and they had a lot more confidence with their research. 

What is not going well is that now they think they can help each other with their drawings. This would be ok but it has branched into them doing it for each other rather than helping!!
I am trying to model how to help each other like this by doing drawing work with individuals and letting them do it the same way but not letting them have mine.

I was surprised when we worked together on a design analysis exercise that the hard bit was the describing. After talking to other teachers, I realised that this was due to lack of vocabulary. This has led me to put together the beginnings of a vocabulary collection especially for describing design work - link here

We all worked on a Google Drawing to plan our feedback first, so we could structure it correctly.

The outcome of this for me is that I have organised to go and visit +Kyla Hansell  ( her blog is here ) to talk about the students working in groups and how she does it.

CoL Meeting Term 2 - Focusing Inquiry and Teaching Inquiry

We had our CoL meeting after school today. This is the second one this term and our focus in small groups, was on the following things :-

Learn (Focusing Inquiry)

Share a brief reflection in response to your Focusing Inquiry

• What information, strategies, tools did you use to determine what your students have already learned and what they need to learn next? (3min)

As you share reference your blog and highlight how you have organised your evidence so that it is visible and accessible to your colleagues.

Create (Teaching Inquiry)

• Based on this evidence what are you planning to do differently as a teacher? What might you need help with? (3min)

For the first part, my answer included my work with the seniors on their isometric skills for Manaiakalani Class OnAir.

After we had done this work, I sent the students a Google Form to get their feedback about how it went. In depth feedback about this here.

So my strategies were to get the students to analyse what they had done and what they thought they had got out of it as an activity. The tools I used was a Google Form and talking face to face with the students.

I talked about how not all the feedback I got from the students was good or positive but we got a positive outcome from it. "Bad feedback is good feedback".

For the second part of the feedback, I talked about my creation of the self assessment parts of the SOLO Taxonomy structured activities that I have been making recently. I have made these but not used them with the students yet. Blog post here and SOLO resources here. I feel that this is a good way to go as the focus is not on a particular activity or project or NCEA standard with these self assessment grids, but on the depth of thinking that the students have done.

The part that I am going to aim for help with is to ask to go and visit the classrooms of a couple of intermediate school teachers. These guys have been using self assessment as part of their teaching so I want to go and see how they do it and discuss with them about the difference it makes.

It was a really good session listening to everyone else in the group talk about their inquiries and what they have been doing. You get wrapped up in your own classroom and it is extremely interesting listening to other teachers talk about what they do and how they do it.

My Inquiry for 2017

This is one of the identified Achievement Challenges for the Manaiakalani Community of Learning.

Raise Māori student achievement through the development of cultural visibility and responsive practices across the pathway as measured against National Standards and agreed targets for reading Years 1-10 and NCEA years 11-13.

I have decided to target my senior classes this year as they are both mixed NCEA levels. One class is NCEA Level 1, 2 and 3 and the other class is NCEA Level 2 and 3.

My Inquiry this year as a CoL teacher is.....

What and who...

Supporting mixed Level 1, 2 and 3 NCEA classes to enable self motivated, rewindable and visible learning.

The how...

This will be through the use of online tools for teaching and learning and through a pedagogy based around SOLO taxonomy.

It will also be through the implementation of elements of Kia Eke Panuku, especially Kotahitanga and Ako, where the students can work on certain tasks together to build confidence.

The measurable outcome ...

This is targeted towards achieving the school focus of  16+ credits at Level 1 and 14+ credits at Level 2 and 3 for each subject that the students take.
This work is also to enable more access to merit and excellence levels on the NCEA DVC standards.

Manaiakalani Orientation 2017

It was my first day as part of the Manaiakalani CoL team and we were meeting the new staff to the cluster. The orientation was held in the Tamaki College library and it was great to meet all our new colleagues.
Here is the link to the resources from the day.

Photo care of +Fiona Grant (@FionaGrant)

Here are my notes from the day. They are hand written today to get my brain working at the start of term.