Term 1, Week 9 - Feeling Fine?

Focus #1 - continue to work on the work-life balance
Focus #2 - grow my own passion for literacy
Focus #3 - grow my practice in numeracy
Focus #4 - building my practice in a traditional space

How’s this week been?

Only 1 gym session this week as I found myself getting a bit tired and run down.  This ended up with me taking Friday off to rest up.

The upside of being sick on Friday was that I was able to finish The Song of Achilles and have moved into the second book in the “Brotherband” series by John Flanagan.  I got into the Ranger Apprentice series a few years ago and ploughed through that so have started this series which I really enjoyed.  The backstory as to how John got into writing was something I found interesting where he started writing these stories as his son, at the time, was not interested in reading.  I have managed to hook 1 boy in my class onto the series so far as he was not enjoying Percy Jackson.

This week in numeracy I have been focusing on our Statistics strand as we near the end of the term.  I was also fortunate enough to have our Maths Lead come and model some number knowledge activities in class to a group of my focus learners as they move from Early Stage 5 (numbers up to 100) to become more confident with numbers past 100 leading into 1000 and 10,000.  As I have Learning Support in my class on alternate days, I will need to plan for this group of kids to have a boost of knowledge activities on those days.

I have also noticed that I am doing a lot more whole class teaching which is something that I need to look at for Term 2.  The majority of this term has been the build-up of our expectations and routines in Room 13 however it is slowly becoming the default for most of my literacy and numeracy teaching so now that I am getting a better understanding of the kids and what they are capable of, I should be starting to differentiate based on their needs.

Teaching Highlights:
Writing has been a highlight this week as we finish up our recounts of Garden To Table to send onto Anita at Stonefields for her learners to read and engage with.  Having this authentic audience has been really interesting as it has helped the kids focus on the following elements of their writing:

• The actual physical aspect of writing - as a class we chose to handwrite these pieces of writing as I noticed that when I said publish, the kids defaulted to thinking about typing their ‘good copy’ out and printing it.  
• The focus - while typically a rowdy class, when it comes to writing, Room 13 love quiet so we have made it a tradition to try and have as much quiet for around 15 minutes.  I have tried to implement the noise monitor on Class Dojo to help with this however the majority of the class seem to be able to manage themselves and are quick to let others know if they are not following suit.
• Feedback - we had a great session on Tuesday after I noticed I was starting to get the queues for conferencing (10 kids deep at one point!).  After some diagrams and discussion about them potentially only having a teacher edit and check their writing up until now, the kids were receptive to reading their writing to one another and I even had a few of the more confident writers start to critique and give feedback to each other.  This is very promising as I have also started to teach the class how to use both a dictionary and thesaurus in their literacy sessions so I will continue to grow this capacity as we move into Term 2.
• The level of detail - from my initial assessments, I noticed that the majority of the class were confident with simple recounts, however, these lacked detail.  Due to our prompt of writing recounts for another school who did not have similar experiences to ourselves, the kids really thought about how they could portray their messages.  This led them to use more adjectives, a range of different sentence types and a lot of them injecting their own voice into their writing. 

Claremont Exchange 2018

This year I was fortunate to take part in the annual exchange between Stonefields and Claremont College alongside Anita.  This exchange has been one that has existed for a few years now and a lot of my colleagues have visited Sydney.  The intention of the exchange for the two schools to share both information and aspects of our practice with each other so Anita and I created a video as an application for the reasons why we wanted to go.

Fast forward to Week Eight of Term Two and I was in Sydney at the school - the staff were amazing and set the bar high for hosting which we returned the favour next term.  Both Anita and I remarked on how fortunate we were to be immersed in a school for three days and being able to capture our noticings as we moved around.  So what were some of my take outs from this experience?

Use of Space:
Claremont has a smaller footprint than Stonefields therefore have been really smart about the use of space in their teaching environments.  The first thing I noticed was the effective use of storage - all the classrooms have been purpose built so it was great to see storage being implemented under seating, whiteboards as teaching spaces on the outside of cupboards etc.  This has really made me reflect on whether I am using space to the best of my ability while teaching and how I can really get the most of the environment (ie, the initial hunch for my inquiry this year).

Team Teaching:
All the classrooms at Claremont have two or more teachers in them so the potential arises for collaboration.  It was great to see communication happen between teachers on the fly as the learners transitioned from one subject to another and again I reflected on whether I was doing this in my practice currently.  To be honest, I feel that I am teaching solo at the moment and wonder what impact it would have on the kids if we opened up the potential for more team teaching within the hub.  It was great teaching alongside a student teacher these last two terms so I need to look for future opportunities for us a as hub team to work collaboratively.

Digital versus Practical Applications in my Practice:
One of the most stand out moments for me was to see how the learners gravitated more towards practical applications of tasks rather than opting for a digital method.  To my untrained eye, I first thought I was seeing a lot of worksheets however as I got to speak to both the teachers and the learners, it was made aware that these were custom made resources that scaffolded learners into tasks.

Currently I am finding that the learners are opting for digital due to it being new or accessible however am I scaffolding them into these applications appropriately?  I feel that I am making assumptions that we are 1:1 devices that all learning should be accessible through that forum but are there better ways to make these links more explicit as well as catering for all learners.

Next Steps:
The main follow up from this blog post is to prepare for Claremont's visit in Term 3 where we continue to look for opportunities for the kids to interact with each others.  They are really interested in how we bring Te Reo into our practice and it was be a great opportunity for the kids to share their knowledge with others.

Lots of things to ponder as I move into the next term however the best thing was that I was able to share this experience with another teacher.  Being able to discuss these areas of wonder in the moment helped me think about how I could bring some these to life when I get back into the hub.  Stay tuned for more updates as I will definitely link back to this blog post with future reflections.

Term Two Reflection and Next Steps for Term Three

As I have already reflected on my practice in relation to the learning areas of reading, writing and numeracy - this reflection will look more at how I have been building relationships with the learners this term and outlining some small personal goals I have for the next term.

Our Term Two concept was "Being My Best Self" that linked with our schools vision for wellbeing but we also chose to expose learners to the concept of hauora where we explored and investigated the different realms of wellbeing.  This term I felt that we had more learners open up and discuss who they were as a whole person because we gave them the opportunity to both explore and express these facts.  Another great initiative we created in the hub is the daily affirmations at the end of the day where learners were able to share when they noticed someone else in the hub being their best self.  This experience showed me that this concept learning had heightened everyone's knowledge about one another so it was great to hear when a learner who historically may have been distracted in numeracy learning be nominated for being extra determined with their learning for the day.  We found that learners were not nominating their friends and the sheer look of joy or surprise when someone heard their name being called out meant that we were all leaving the day on a positive note.

I asked my Guardian Group for some feedback at the end of the term about how they had been enjoying our time as a group and here are the responses.  The fact that the majority of the group put down that they enjoy "Fun Day Friday" means that the time that we are spending as a group is well worth it - this is where the group have the challenge on Friday to make me laugh when we are doing the roll.  These are moments where I see learners that are usually reserved really open up and I have a few masters of the worm who like to bust it out.  While it was nice to get some affirmations in the "What would I like Mr Lewzey to know about me?" section, my eyes went more to the responses like "nothing" and I have massive respect for the learner who called me out on not pronoucing their name correct all the time.  So I still have a long way to go with some of my group, however while this survey was anonymous, I have a good idea about which ones I need to continue to build relationships with.

Here is when my Star Wars fanatics wanted to do the roll on May 4th:

However that is only 22 of the 70 learners in our hub that I interact with and there are still learners in the hub that while I feel I have a good understanding of, I need to keep on trying.  We have done some regrouping for Term Three so this means that I will be working with some learners that I have not had the opportunity to work with this year so far so I am looking forward to building those relationships.

In regards to relationships with all hub learners, we check in with the learners each term to see if they have a significant adult at school and more so in the hub.  Here are the results from when we asked the learners this term:

My eyes go direct to the nine learners who do not feel confident to talk to any of the teachers in the space, whether they have a problem or would like to share something.  Learners have the chance to acknowledge other teachers within the school, however looking at the data, these learners have indicated that they do not have anyone and coming into half way through the school year, this is something that we as a hub team need to address quickly so we have tagged ourselves to particular learners and will discuss with their families next term to see if we can get some more insight into this.

I still watch this video when I am feeling a bit down about my practice as it helps me remember a key component of my beliefs as a teacher: everyone needs somebody who believes in them.

Superhero ABC and Feedback

Based on feedback from my reading groups, we have been looking at ways to develop our word attack strategies this term.  There is a book in our school library which is very popular with one of our learners in the hub called "Superhero ABC", so much so that it is known by a number of our learners as "his book" so they were very surprised when I used it as the prompt to explore alliteration.

With the hook there, a lot of the learners were quite excited to develop a character of their own and use alliteration to help describe their abilities and background.  I chose to use a combination of both Explain Everything so the learners could draw their character and Google Slides where they would be able to craft their descriptions.  I shared this to the whole group so each learner had their own slide but could also read others as I wanted to introduce the element of peer feedback to the exercise.

After the first session, I began to read through the descriptions and thought that I would use the comment function of Google Slides to give the learners feedback.  This was a bit of a risk as most of the learners hadn't had exposure to this form of feedback before however I gave each learner feedback.

The next day I explained to the group that I had read through their initial drafts and had given them feedback using comments.  I modelled how they could find this on their slide.  In hindsight, I hadn't told them about the 'reply' function of the comments but as you can see from the images below, they soon worked it out.

The majority of the responses were similar to this (NB have blocked out learners full names):

However as the week moved on and I started conferencing with learners, I noticed a shift in some of the learners responses.

I even started have dialogues with some learners who posed me questions of their own:

Learners who normally were too shy to ask for help during lessons now found that they had a voice and were empowered to ask questions.

This did get me reflecting on how I was using feedback in my practice and how I could use the affordance of comments to extend my reach - to date, I had not used the comments as I 'felt' that this may had been too advanced for some learners but seeing how naturally these 7 and 8 year olds took to this, I can now look develop both my own and the learners skills in both receiving and giving feedback.

Here is the blog post with the learners new identities on there - good to note that Blogger only allows a maximum of 20 labels on a blog post so I had to split the post in half to ensure all learners names were on this.  Stay tuned for another update as they have requested we look at some poetry before the end of the term with our new identities!

Meet My Guardian Group - Agents Of Their Own Learning!

I wrote an earlier post about getting to know myself before knowing my learners so I thought I would introduce you to my Guardian Group.

While not your standard photo, this does sum up some of the personalities of these kids.  In the hub with 70 learners, I am responsible for the roll and pastoral care of this group of learners.  When I came into this year, I reflected on my interaction with my last year's Guardian Group (that I shared with my mentor teacher) and felt that our time together was quite transactional and dedicated solely to the taking of the roll and the dissemination of information.

So coming into 2017, I really wanted to dial up the relationships with my Guardian Group.  A noticing that the hub team had with all our learners early in the year was that they needed some time after lunch to come down from the excitement of break time so we came up with "Relax and Refresh" - a 15 minute period after the roll where they could prepare for the afternoon block of learning.

Wanting their voice into how to best utilise this time, we discussed different ways that we could continue our learning and after a couple of days, this is what they came up with!

Looking at the activities they came up with, there is a great balance of the initial intention of providing them a chance to relax and recharge, but what I enjoyed seeing more was that some of the activities gives us opportunities to develop our skills of collaboration and finding out more about one another.

I got a great insight into the nature of these kids last week when I shared with them this article.  We discussed the article and how this idea linked in with our Break Through learning (learning spawned from an insight or our passions) and then we spoke about the money.  I innocently asked the question about what they would do if they were offered the $44 million.  The majority of the group spoke about how money does not equal happiness and how aspects such as family and health were important.  I was blown away by the humble nature of their responses and know that by doing future activities like the ones we have planned out, that I will get further insights into how to engage with these learners.

I tell the kids that these 15 minutes are one of my favourite times of the school day and I am looking forward to building further agency with these learners for the remainder of the year.

Changing Spaces 2017

This year I decided to take a risk and present at Changing Spaces - I attended the day last year and supported but watched all my colleagues speak about their practice and how we operate in an ILE and thought that this would be a great goal for my second year.

I was fortunate to attend the keynote by Chrissie Butler where she challenged us to take a mental walk around our schools and their environments as she spoke.  She spoke of us as educators as developing an acute sensitivity to individual differences in order to drive design decisions.  This means that we should be looking for a framework to support the deliberate design for variability.  As a teacher, I should be providing options for recruiting interest, optimising individual choice and selecting options to help minimise distractions.

She really challenged me in my thinking of how am I using our environment to do so and as I was frantically tidying up tables and chairs after our presentation, I stopped and thought about some of the following points in her presentation:

• What defines the bicultural space?  How are the learners' individual stories being represented?  Are there spaces for everyone to make connections?  Does it feel like a safe environment to meet the needs of the whole person?
• This safety extends to both gender and sexualities - Chrissie challenged us to stop speaking in the binary and more as a 'we'.  This also links with being a community.
• Equitable access for all - she shared a great quote from Timoti Harris: 'Steps will naturally exclude some, a ramp allows all to enter'.  Again I have started to look at our space with a new lens and will continue to observe throughout the first few weeks of this term.
• Sensitivity to sensory needs - it was great to be reminded of this as I feel that I have become accustomed to the background noise in the hubs.  For some learners, this is a major distraction so how can we use the space more effectively to support them with their learning?  It also made me more mindful of the learners that use the noise to slip into the background.  Are there ways that I can connect with these learners in a way that enables them to feel comfortable but also makes me more aware of their needs when teaching?

This final quote from the presentation really stuck out for me - 'Nothing for me without me.'  I do centre my practice around using student voice however as I was putting the tables and chairs back into the spaces that they sat for Term One, I had to walk away.  This notion is key as I am not the only individual in the space and our learners needs to feel that they have a voice in the design of their space.  So instead of finishing the task, I just made sure things were back in an orderly fashion where we could use some time next week to look at the design and see if we can improve on anything for Term Two.  I am looking forward to the learners' input and feedback as I know they will have some great insight into how they want this to look like!

After the keynote, Latai and I were able to share with a group about our journeys so far as beginning teachers in an ILE.  This was the 2.0 version of a presentation we gave last year at the University of Auckland We asked the group to share with us the reasons why they chose to attend our session and it was a mix of those who were also new to teaching or those who had or were transitioning into an ILE setting.  Feedback from the previous year was that people appreciated the stories that teachers told about real life situations so one of the main activities we ran was giving groups scenarios that they discussed and brought back to the wider group to share.  These scenarios were examples from our first year and after everyone shared, we gave our insights based on our experiences.

I was grateful for the opportunity to present as I do need the practice of public speaking however co presenting takes a bit of the nerves away and this was a good example of how hub teams work together to complement each others' abilities as well as the generating and sharing of collective insights.  

Visit to Ormiston Primary School

Today Steph and I went and visited Ormiston Primary School - this visit had been a result of an invitation from Caroline Bush (DP) when she and the schools PRT's came and visited Stonefields.

As we drove up to the school, we noticed the similarities between OPS and our school - both are in relatively new communities with OPS being open for two years now.  The difference between the two schools was that Stonefields was built first and the community sprung up around it whereas the community around OPS was already there and were waiting for the school to open resulting in 100 learners starting the first day the school opened and the roll now sitting around 340 learners.

Caroline took us on a tour of the school where we walked all the learning environments.  Some of the stand out points for me were:

• There is a clear succession plan for learners with Ormiston Senior High already built and Ormiston Junior High being built.  As we walked into the library, we stood in the beginning of the cultural walkway which will link all three schools.
• All the learning spaces have the similar layout allowing learners to make clear decisions about both the type and style of learning they wish to do.  It was great to see learners engaged in a variety of different learning experiences.  
• Within the learning spaces, there is a mix of fixed and flexible furnishing.  I found this mix to be responsive to the needs of both the learners and the teachers.
• Another interesting element is that the entire school operate on the same timetable.  There is the flexibility within these blocks to integrate all parts of the curriculum into the design of learning.
• The school also has a KDEC (Kelston Deaf Education Centre) unit attached to it and a lot of the learnings from here are evident in the other learning spaces like teachers switching the lights off to gain all learners attention and the environments being conscious of visual disturbances in them.

It was a very insightful day for me, especially with how I use the learning environment.  We have been invited to go back and connect with the school's PRTs to share learnings about operating in an ILE and I can see this would be very beneficial for my practice.

Teaching Inquiry - First Thoughts

As I begin to form my first teaching inquiry, I am thinking about how I can create shift with my Year 3 learners with their writing.

Literacy is my passion and I am constantly looking for ways that I can model both engagement and exciting with the writing process with my learners.  I feel it is important for me to be a role model for my learners with writing as this is the subject that I experience the most resistance from my groups and their voices represent that of mine when I was at school.

"I don't know what to write about!"

"I don't enjoy writing - it is boring!"

"I am not good at writing!"

This are snippets of conversations I have on a daily basis and while it does sadden me, I intend to use this as motivation to look for ways to win the small battles and chip away at the underlying issues.  I know this is a marathon, not a sprint so intend to use this to build the inquiry.

I know I am not alone in this - last night, Hub 1 and 2 ran a workshop for parents who were looking for ways to help build their children's confidence in writing and how to support what they are learning at school.  This is a great insight into how I can connect with families more and use these relationships to help tailor my planning to the individual needs of my learners.

Connecting with the Community

Tonight was "Meet The Teacher" night so I was feeling a bit nervous as I would be presenting to parents at two sessions.  Luckily I was presenting as part of a group and the team were awesome at setting me up for success with the information that I was presenting.

We had a pretty impressive turn out, especially in the second session and it was great to have dialogues with individual families as they moved around the hub.  I think part of my nervousness was down to my perception that I am a beginning teacher and I may have not the appropriate experience to answer queries at this stage.  However the majority of the questions that came my way was more about who I am as an individual, my background and how am I connecting with the learners and the school.

Our families have a huge amount of pride in the school and it was evident to see when they spoke of their child's achievements so far.  It was also beneficial for me to listen to some of the questions that came from families in relation to the use of devices in the learning spaces.  There is some natural concern that the devices will be the focus while the students are in the classroom so I need to be conscious to remind myself that it is another tool in the space and how it complements my pedagogy.

It was really awesome to see that families stayed afterwards to enjoy a picnic as well as the waterslide (very popular and the kids were so patient while waiting in line!) and other games and activities we had put out for everyone.

While it was a long day, I was glad that I was able to make these connections with the community and look forward to growing them during my time at the school.

First Week Down.

I have heard stories about people "surviving" their first weeks however with the speed of which this week has moved, I can see how some may begin to explain their experience as surviving by way of meeting their basic needs in order to move onto the next task.

As mentioned before, I am teaching at Stonefields School near Mount Wellington in a Year 2/3 Hub.  This is an open space in which we have 71 learners between the teaching team.  I am fortunate to be in a team with four other teachers so as a beginning teacher, I am in a great space to develop my own practice by observation and working with the others to reflect and build on my skills.

The first weeks focus has been connecting with our learners and getting to know them as we develop a programme for the year.  This is the second year in which some of these learners will be using an iPad for their learning however with all the Year 2s moving into the space, we need to ensure that we are giving them the skills to use the devices as an effective tool for their learning.  These are some of the skills that I will be learning through the Digital Immersion Fridays with the MDTA cohort.

So how was my first week?

Apart from the speed where the hours quickly sped away from me, I thoroughly enjoyed my first week teaching!

Honestly, I find making connections with all my learners a bit daunting however it is a good challenge to set myself for my first year.  I am going to start by concentrating on my Guardian, numeracy and literacy groups as these will be the learners that I will be interacting with on a regular basis.

A lot of the activities this week were spent on getting the learners to interact and collaborate with each other - I need to begin to look at these activities and use them in my planning to help build those skills when the groups are learning.  I also need to remember to look for ways to collaborate with my team - look for opportunities to team teach where our strengths and passions can complement each others.