Manaiakalani Hui

Yesterday we were fortunate to attend the fifth annual Manaiakalani Hui which was a great opportunity to connect with colleagues and other members of our cluster.  It was a jam packed agenda so I attempted to both sketchnote and tweet over the day to see if that helped me synthesise the information.

Multitasking is not my forte so here are my outtakes via sketchnotes from the day:

The first item on the agenda was a presentation from our Manaiakalani Ambassadors which are student representatives from our schools who presented an element of their learning from the year so far.  Their deft knowledge of the "learn/create/share" pedagogy and the pride and confidence in which they presented was admirable and something that I would like to strive towards creating with the learners I teach.

The part that I found the most interesting was the presentations from the Spark MIT Innovative Teachers - these are colleagues within the cluster who shared their current enquiries with us.  A lot of these revolved around both motivation and literacy - both topics that I am currently investigating for potential focuses for next year's dissertation.  Again I found these presenters incredibly proud of the learning they are creating - this opportunity is available for me in my third year of teaching so something to investigate over the next year as an option for 2018!

Russell Burt presented the group wth an interesting notion that there are 47,000 plus jobs in the technology sectors which we need to be preparing our learners with the skills to work in such positions.  By keeping the open lens on how we can expose learners to opportunities in which they learn these skills is paramount - a very scary but also exciting challenge for the years ahead!

We were fortunate to have Rebecca, Aaron and Stuart from the Woolf Fisher Research Centre come present to us - some analogies and acronyms have stuck with me like "Students who can do harder things with harder tests at an earlier age" and L.I.F.T (Learning Ideas From Text).  Again I am excited and inspired about how to bring more critical literacy skills into my practice and am grateful for the support and the information that is provided to our cluster on a regular basis.

After lunch, it was great to learn more about the outreach programmes especially after having made connections from today.  How can we use these networks to share resources and ideas freely to better support our learners in the drive to learn today's skills for tomorrow's jobs?  We were also challenged by both Russell and Pat Sneddon to keep reassessing the status quo and using the skills we have from moving from below to at and transfer these over to the movement of learners from at to above.

A very thought provoking day - check out Twitter for more insights from other attendees - #Manaiakalani