Evolution of my Causal Chains

 For quite a few years now, part of being in the Manaiakalani CoL has meant coming up with a Causal Chain to describe the cause and effect of your chosen inquiry. 

I have been looking over all my Causal Chains, looking at how they  have evolved. Over time, I started to think about the teacher actions that had to happen before the student outcomes could happen. I also started  looking at it as a series of cause and effect. IF ..... THEN statements. 

This has been a great way to clarify in my own head what my plan is and how I am going to do it. It lists for me what changes I need to make for myself before I can make any changes for the students.

Putting it all out like this has made me realise that I kept the bright colours for 7 years!! 

2018 - link to document

2019 - link to document

2020 - link to document

2021 - link to document

2022 - link to document

2023 - link to document

2024 - link to document

Teacher Only Day - Literacy with Marc 2

 While working with Marc on Teacher Only Day today, he got us to find a text from our own subject area that we could work with. We pulled out key words and made image matching exercises. Then we put the key words into a separate list to write a summary of the text using those words.

Here is my trial today using a text I found about the Guggenheim Museum by Frank Gehry.

Link to document

Teacher Only Day - Literacy with Marc

 Link to Marc's document

Bursts and Bubbles Presentation 2024

 The focus of student learning for my inquiry work this year was continuing with the literacy work that I was doing last year. This seemed to be an important thing to continue as the actual intervention was only done in a small amount of time last year.

I identified this as my focus as there is a continuous need for literacy skills in both DVC and Visual Art as both subjects have to do a lot of research reading and writing based on this.

To build a picture of my students’ learning I used the usual PAT and asTTle test results and for the seniors, their previous years NCEA results. I also did student voice about how they thought about literacy.

Last year when this was my inquiry focus, I worked closely with Marc and focused mainly on information transfer. It was important that I continued to do this again this year and it has been built into the planning of the project work on both of my class sites now. 

What has been new this year, to build  on my literacy skills that I can use with my students, is scanning and predicting. With the help of Marc again this year, we have done a lot of work looking at the reading that students have to do to learn about different artists in Visual Art.

It became clear as I was looking for texts online that we could use, that the language used in art texts is really hard in terms of structure and the language and words used. When Marc and I were planning on a reading session with the students, a lot of time had to be included with vocabulary work and visual links to aid understanding of what they were reading.

I have a lot of students in my two Year 11 classes who are English as a Second Language students so I have been doing a lot of reading about supporting English language learners. As part of that, I sent a Google form around our staff at Tamaki asking about their experiences as people whose first language is not English. This came about through me watching a colleague talking to her family members at school. They were sliding smoothly between their native language and English while talking and it was fascinating to watch. This introduced me to the concept of code switching and I have done some reading about that subject thanks to Janee. 

The easiest things for me to change were how I approach literacy as we are blessed with a lot of in house help with this at Tamaki who are always willing to help with the subject specific problems that come up. This means you never feel left in the dark about where to go and how to move forward.  

Moving forward, as a result of realising how hard the online texts are to understand, I have started a website of my own which I am starting to use. I want to write on this website specifically for the students’  needs at the time. For example, the only thing on it at the moment is information about different materials as this is what my Year 11 DVC students needed at the end of term 3 when I started this. It will be a big job so it will only be added to in a just in time manner till I build up more of a library there.

Some learnings that would be relevant to other teachers are inquiry is not always a short task that is over then you move on. I always seem to choose something that never ends! For example, I have never stopped using the SOLO work that I did a few years ago. 

The last post on my blog is 5 examples of writing from my Year 11 Visual Art students. This was the last standard they computed this year if you want to go and check out their writing.

Year 11 Art Writing Examples

 These examples are from my Year 11 Visual Art class's final piece of work that they did this year. The work was for AS91913 and they completed their analysis on Workspace and a final piece of art work. These 5 examples show how much writing was involved with this standard and how well they did it. I have taken the work away from the original documents so they can be all together and anonymous.

Link to document

Art Exhibition

 Last week, we had the pleasure of holding the first Tamaki College Art Exhibition. We held it at The Good The Bad gallery in Glen Innes and out opening night was Tuesday 5th November. 

Here is a walk though before we opened.

Here is the link to more photos and videos of the exhibition and opening night.

Academic Reading - Literacy

NCEA Literacy Planning Resources

Case Studies

How to Read a Text

Disciplinary Literacy 2: Reading

Effective Practices that Support Literacy

Online Research

 There many things that my students have to research about and the main place we do this is the internet. I know from my own research how time consuming it is to find information that is both relevant and useful. Some websites have a bit of what information you are looking for and not all of it so you have to dot about through a selection of sites. I also find the language that is used on websites when you do find them is not always the easiest to understand what they talking about. To help my students while they are doing their research, I have been putting links onto our class website as helpful starting points to save them some time.

Examples here - Year 11 Designers - Year 12 Design Era Hexagons - Materials Research

A website that I use with my students a lot and that I rate very highly is Technology Student.Com. The content on this website is great and written in a way that is easy for students to understand. It is better to get information about types of hardwood, for example, from this website than a website that specialises in wood, as the language used is much more technical on the specialist website that is not relevant or understandable for the use it is needed for in a student project. Also, doing this kind of research is not the main focus of a project and I find that the student s are turned off really quickly if they are finding the research hard or they are not able to understand what they are finding. Copy and paste happens and no understanding is going on.

As much as I love the Technology Student website for its content, I absolutely hate the layout and the navigation. I don't bother going on the main site and searching for something. I normally do a Google search along the lines of "types of softwood technology student" as I know that this will point me to where I need to be.

This year, I have started doing research for my Year 11 Visual Art students too and I find this even harder as the language that is used to talk about artworks and artists is at a much harder / higher level than is easily understood or is needed.

My blogpost about reading about Henri Rousseau.

Marc Milford's blogpost about this same exercise, as he helped me put it together.

With all of this in mind, I have decided his year to start to put together my own website of "stuff" based on the research that I do to find information for the students. What I have got on this website at the time of writing this blogpost is not a lot. I have mainly focussed on starting on materials as that is what my students are needing at this time, but it is a job that will be ongoing and I will plod along with it into the future. I am not expecting this to be a quick thing to put together at all and will work on things that my students are needing at any given time so that it slowly builds up to be something that is useful over time.

Link to website - its hasn't even got a front page yet!!

Link to materials page

Link to wood page

Student Voice on Literacy

 I have asked my Year 11 Design and Visual Communication and Year 11 Visual Art classes the following questions about the literacy work that we have been doing this year so far.

Design and Visual Communication

Could you please explain why you put the answer to the last question.

( How easy do you think it is to find the research information on the internet?)

6 responses

I find it a bit difficult to understand information.

Because it gives a clear understanding of what the context of the task is.

I decided to rate the question a 3 out of 6 because most of the time the information your researching is a topic you've never heard about or don't know anything about it. But other then that I think its pretty easy to research information on the internet.

It's easy, but often the information isn't exactly what I need, can be overwhelming, or isn't reliable.

I think it's a bit hard to frind important online because it doesn't show me the right type of answer that I want.

Its easy to find the research information but sometimes its quite hard

What reading methods do your teachers use in other classes that you think would be useful to use in DVC?6 responses

Don't know

Video clips

I honestly don't know if there's any difference I really don't mind.

None

Help often around us students

Nothing

Visual Art

Could you please explain why you put the answer to the last question.

( How easy do you think it is to find the research information on the internet?)

6 responses

Because information is widely accessible, search engines quickly provide relevant results and digital tools offer resources like academic papers, articles and databases instantly

Sometimes I understand some information, sometimes I don't understand some things that i find and also because theres no information.

Because of the task we are given, it becomes easy for me to incorporate some references into a project

There are some things that we look up and it’s not the right meaning or images.

It is not quite hard to find important online because if you put into google specifically what you want to search and it will pop up.

It’s kind a hard, but if you really know what to look for you can get it easily.

What reading methods do your teachers use in other classes that you think would be useful to use in Art?6 responses

Active reading: what I mean is like engaging with the text by taking notes, asking questions and summarising as you go

Helping student a bit more often.

Video clips

None

Be more active around the students

The resheach, becouse It can help me to use it in my art activities easier.