Show Me Your Working (Understanding) - My Hunch

Having changed year levels this year, developing my pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) has become a priority for myself.

This year I am team teaching in numeracy with a group of learners operating between Level 2 and Level 3 of the New Zealand Curriculum for numeracy.  This is a natural follow on for the numeracy that I was teaching in previous years and I am grateful for this foundation as I look forward to challenge myself in this space.

As the learners are operating at a higher level, my first noticing goes to how we are struggling as a group to articulate our numerical thinking when asked to explain how we came to a conclusion or got a specific answer.  My first instinct was to explore if there were particular vocabulary gaps within our group, however, what I am noticing more is a) a general lack of confidence with articulation of numerical thinking and b) a reluctance to do this in group settings aka 'the fear of getting it wrong in front of others'.

Fortunately for me, a lot of schools in our clusters are looking into this area and documenting through the use of their blogs, especially Pt England School, so it has been awesome to read and see how some of the teachers are developing these skills within their own numeracy programs.

I have also found the app Flipgrid helpful in developing the learners confidence in taking risks in articulating their strategies.  Learners are able to record themselves on their own device and listen back to themselves before posting the video to an online forum where other members of the group can listen and respond to the videos.  This has also served as a great link with our cybersmart curriculum.

Next Steps: Continue to look for opportunities to build these communication skills within our numeracy program.  I also need to see if the team will let me pay for a Flipgrid membership as the free version only allows you to activate one grid at a time.

I am also going to connect with some of my colleagues at Pt England to see how they are finding their PD and what are their learnings so far.

Graduations - MDTA and PRT

November and December have been busy months with loads of deadlines looming for both study and school assessment however it was great to stop and celebrate some of the milestones at the end of this year.

We were fortunate to have our MDTA graduation at the Google HQ in the CBD where we all came together to celebrate.  The support for the group was oozing out of the room and it was great to hear everyones mentors and principals speak highly of our journeys.  While I already considered myself fortunate to be a part of the MDTA, it wasn't until I reflected on the great opportunities I had since joining the programme.  I now feel more confident within my teaching practice and the skills that I have gathered since starting will allow me to continue to grow as a teacher.

What made me more humble about the experience was the support we have had from the start, both Dorothy and Anne have added so much to my kete and I look forward to connecting with me in 2018.  I was also fortunate to have Latai at school with me and this shared experience has allowed me to see all opportunities for collaboration.  What I am most grateful for is the support of my mentor teacher who exemplifies what it means to mentor and has inspired me to become an AUT mentor in 2018.

Today I was also fortunate to have a graduation ceremony at school for the end of my provisional registeration.  Through an administrative error, this meant that Stonefields graciously held a ceremony for myself, Latai and Sammy and looking back, I would have not had it any other way.  To celebrate with the kids meant the world to me!

So while this brings me to the end of my journey as both a MDTA and a PRT, this is not the end of my blog.  I am moving into a new year level in 2018 and intend to continue blogging not only to help me with reflecting but also help me develop further as a writer and connect with others as I move onto the next stage of my teaching practice.  For all those who have supported me so far, thank you very much.

Manaiakalani Film Festival 2017

This year's Manaiakalani Film Festival was an absolute blast - it was such a great occasion to take the hub along to see both their entry as well as other schools from around the cluster.

This year I gave the control of the film over to a group of learners who crafted an idea to highlight one of the 'issues' that happens in the playground.  Having a goal and a vision really helped the kids storyboard out the different elements of their narrative and allowed them to direct me as to what types of effects or shots they required.  I was merely the cameraman for the day!

I enjoyed the fact that our vision principles came through in the story without me prompting these and the fact that the stars wanted to ensure that the entire hub were in the film.

Here is 'Thunder' which was proudly presented three times at the film festival by two learners.  Please check out the film on our hub blog and if you get an opportunity, please leave a comment on there for the kids.  They really love to read and respond to these.

Manaiakalani Film Festival

Such an air of excitement at school today with the students looking forward to seeing not only our school's entries into the Manaiakalani Film Festival, but other schools from around our cluster.

The MDTA cohort switched days to be at the Film Festival for the entire day and I was fortunate to watch both my entry and others from the cohort and Stonefields.  What a fantastic array of films that were on display!

This was the first time that the film that I had been creating with a group from my hub was going to be shared with others.  I was extremely proud of two of my learners who had created the story from an idea that they had for our break through exhibition as they presented their film today.  They spoke with such confidence and passion and their film was a hit with the audience from both the sessions it screened at.

You can watch Rubbish Busters in its entirety here and if you could, please leave a comment for the group as they would love some feedback from their audience!

PLG - Visible Teaching and Learning

Today's PLG was an insightful one as it challenged my thinking as a teacher.  When designing learning, am I creating experiences that will inspire and empower my learners or am I tailoring these lessons for a style of learning which mirrors my own?  Interesting to stop and ponder on this as I feel that I am defaulting to the latter subconsciously.

The focus of today's session was to help us understand further on how visible teaching and learning could help accelerate shift.

We were fortunate to watch a short video from Chrissie Butler from Core Education where she spoke about the Universal Design for Learning and this stuck home with me.  Was I limiting my learners ability to learn by only offering them a choice of two to three resources and if I were to create more multimodal learning opportunities, how would this impact on my learners?

I particular enjoyed this next slide as it helped give me more awareness and confidence to use more resources when designing learning.

By recognising the use of texts in these different formats, I could then support learners better by offering them a choice of how they would prefer to engage with the topics.  Please note, where you see the word "text", this does not mean an actual book - it may mean a video, an audio file or an article online.

The remainder of the day was left to us to use some of this knowledge to help develop some tools that we could use for the remainder of the year or next year in some cases (check out Georgia's post about her plans for next year!).

I chose to look at some elements to my literacy programme that could open up links to other curriculum areas which again is something to aspire to.  We are focusing on reading picture books to our learners at the moment to develop their discussion skills and I was very keen to read them some stories that I read when I was their age.  I did stop here for a moment and thought about whether I was defaulting to a learning style that I enjoyed however thought that this could be the springboard to some different elements.  Here is the initial brainstorm:

Next steps is to discuss this brainstorm with my mentor and look at creating some different resources based on the feedback from that conversation.  Stay tuned for an update on how this may look - I'm pretty excited!

Film Festival Reflection

I am almost finished with my film festival entry - it has been a great chance to do some different learning with the kids as well reflect on some of my teaching practice!  Unfortunately I will not be able to show you the finished result until it airs at the Manaiakalani Film Festival in November as it is meant to be a surprise for the learners to see a film they helped create and starred in debut on the big screen!

Today we came together to spend the day editing and bounce ideas off each other in relation to our films progress so far.  It was great to see such a diverse range of films and I was really impressed with everyone's ideas and skills with filming and the editing.  We were able to share what we had completed so far and get feedback from the cohort.

I spent most of the day shearing time off my footage which was originally around 20 minutes with the goal to get it under three minutes.  This took a lot of watching and then rewinding, however, I made links with an earlier discussion we had in the morning about rewindable learning.

The concept of rewindable learning is something that we have learned about a lot this year but having to use it myself today to better apply understanding to my growing iMovie skills - I can see the benefit in using in more so in my practice.  I have already started this week to make the use of video more as a resource in my design of learning and have had some success with some workshops we are currently running in our learning space.

By having resources available in a format that learners can rewatch, pause or skip ahead, this allows great agency of how the learner is managing their learning and allows them to become less reliant on instruction.  I also found that learners used these resources to come and have more critical conversations with me when conferencing.  I was hearing a lot of "Why would they say this?" and "What does this mean?" and we were able to use the videos to plan out our next steps.

So what does that mean?  If the design of learning requires it, then I shall be using more videos.  And more authentic ones at that where either I am creating the content for my learners or they are helping me co-construct them.

That brings in a nice segue with my film festival entry - it is a follow on from a video I helped a group create for our recent Break Through Exhibition where we created an educational video for learners.  We wanted to have a bit of fun with the topic and this is how the idea was created.

Reflections:

• It was quite clear to manage the balance between how much of my voice was going into the film compared to that of the kids.  I had to step back a few times as I did feel that I was telling more than instructing.
• I had to take the kids on the journey of film-making - it was an interesting conversation to have with many of them about why we would take multiple shots when they were happy when we did one.
• I really noticed that I need to work on my instruction giving.  At first, I was giving multiple instructions and the kids were getting lost after the second one and because they started off well, I stopped checking for understanding quickly into shooting.  Once things went off track a bit, I realised that I needed to make sure everyone was comfortable with the next scene.
• I actually forgot to have fun at one stage as I was caught up in the filming and directing of the video.
• Finally I lowered my expectations - I know that I am not Steven Speilburg or Peter Jackson and the kids are not actors getting paid for their skills.  The main thing was that the kids were enjoying themselves and communicating the story that they had created.

At the end of the day, I am really impressed with how the kids were able to learn skills such as storyboarding and use their dramatic skills to create a piece of learning that we all feel proud to share with the wider community come Term Four!

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

PLG - Visit to Point England School

Today Juliana and I went to Pt England School as part of our PLG focus.  As we both teach Years 2/3, we went with the focuses on seeing the following:

• Year 1s - seeing the level of ability our learners are coming from and how the design of learning is set at that level.
• Year 4s - we wanted to see how the design of learning was set at this level and how we can prepare our Year 3 learners for the transition.

We were greeted by one of the most impressive assemblies that I have attended - the air of celebration was present as we watched learners get their sport awards.  We also saw a new house captain being elected which was announced with such mana!

Shortly after, we went into two Year 1 classes - these learners are adept in using Explain Everything (the app that we use in our hub) and were very keen to show us their learning.  The learners that I spent time with showed me how they use the sound bytes which their teachers record with their explanations or instructions to assist them.

After morning tea, we moved into the pavilion where we visited a Year 4 learning space - this was two classes that were merged into one with two teachers.  The learners were working through a list of activities from the week in the block called "Finishing Friday" - I helped some learners with an activity that they were working through with geometry and I got a fair few "presents" with them all keen to show me their proficiency with symmetry.  I got this awesome example from a learner who understood the concept and explained it to me very efficiently.

Both experiences have made me consider the following with my own practice:

• How can I use digital affordances (such as the sound bytes in Explain Everything) to allow my learners more opportunities for rewindable learning?
• Am I generating enough choice for my learners in regard to their learning?
• How can we incorporate more opportunities to celebrate our successes in our learning?  I was blown away by the attitude of the learners at their assembly!

Such a humbling experience being welcomed into other schools in our area - I am grateful to part of a community of learning!  Thank you to all the teachers that let us come into their spaces and observe!

PLG - Google Hangouts and Manaiakalani Google Class On Air

Today we were fortunate to have Matt Goodwin come along to share what he and four other teachers have been achieving through the Manaiakalani Google Class on Air.  This initiative is where these teachers are recording their lessons while they teach and making not only snippets of the video available online but the lesson plans and reflections.  You also get access to select learners blogs and work to see how the learning is transferred and absorbed.  The great thing to see is that four of these teachers are graduates of the first MDTA cohort and have really taken the share part of our pedagogy to the next level.

I applaud these guys for being so confident to put themselves out there as I still find it daunting being observed, however, this will be an assignment task that myself and the MDTA cohort will be undertaking later this year.

In preparation for this, Matt showed the tools of the trade and the process he undertakes when preparing and filming these lessons.  Each teacher has been tasked with recording 20 lessons in a school year and Matt showed us how he used the recording function of Google Hangouts to achieve this.  A cool and efficient aspect of the record function is that it can upload directly to Youtube and then you can use the Youtube Editor to make adjustments.

I can see this tool being used for rewindable learning however I would need to ensure that I am comfortable with the tools firsthand before bringing them into the learning space.  We got a chance to experiment with Google Hangouts later that day and it is quite an adjustment to recording yourself and then editing it in iMovies however I can see the benefit of being upload to Youtube instantly and being able to use that footage while learning.

Once again, I count myself fortunate working in a learning community who are willing to put themselves out there and I look forward to having some of the tenacity transferred to me as I grow more confident in this space - bring on Heath's Class on Air!

PLG - Insights and Immersion...

Today sparked the first of our Digital Immersion days - every Friday the MDTA cohort join Dorothy Burt and Anne Sinclair at Tamaki campus for the day to connect and share with each other our learnings from the week and gain skills in the digital space within our spaces.

We began with a reconnect with our community and faced the reality of our community which was a great insight into why our programme was created and how we can use the skills we are building our capability in to help support our learners with their own learning.

The digital aspect of today was a look at Google Drive and Documents with some great tips on how to effectively use these in our teaching practice.

We were then able to reflect from the day using Google Draw - I am not the worlds best artist so I will be challenging myself to take risks with the visual arts and learn alongside my learners.

I was interested to see how many touch points learners in our community have in relation to a "regular" learner in another community.  To meet learners in our community, and especially as a newcomer, I would not be aware of some of these aspects of our learners lives and how myself as a teacher can play a small part of their lives (in their perception).  I can see how building visible connections with my learners and their families can not only empower the learners while at school, but also empower my own teaching practice to be reactive to the community.  I think having this awareness is key to aid me with these relationships and help me develop a responsive pedagogy to the needs of my learners.

Introduction and Orientation 2016

A year to the day on which I began my step into teaching allowed me to get an appreciation for the community which I am now fortunate to call myself a part of.

Picture this, a group of 9 enthusiastic beginning teachers (BT's) raring to jump into their careers, armed with their backpacks full of knowledge and experience.  The first day had the focus of connecting with both our community and each other as we explored the geography and demographics of our cluster as a team.  This enthusiasm was infectious as we set off and it was awesome to see that this energy kept going throughout the day.

Day two had us explore the expectations and guidelines of the Manaiakalani Digital Teaching Academy (MDTA) and while it may have seemed like information overload at times, it was very evident that the supportive nature of our cohort has already begun to develop and we have the support of our leaders and mentors.  We were fortunate to meet with our academic partners from the University of Auckland this day.

The final day, the MDTA cohort joined with the other new teachers for the cluster at Tamaki College for the official Orientation Day.  I found this day very beneficial as it was a great refresher of where the cluster had come from, but also allowed me to appreciate more the direction in which they were moving towards and how I could be a part of this development.

Looking back, there were times where I said "what have I signed up for?" but the focus on both communication and collaboration is so natural that by talking with others or asking questions, all the current questions have been answered.  Don't worry, I know that there will more questions to come!