Google Certified Educator - Level 2

Having done the Google Certified Educator - Level 1 last year, I had always thought about doing the second level.  I decided that I would try for it these holidays and I was able to pass.

I went into the experience, thinking that it was going to be about developing further skills in a number of the Google Apps for Education that I was already using, however I found that while doing this, the experience made me reflect on things that I was already doing in my practice as well as challenge my thinking in how to engage with the learners in different ways.

The training takes you through the following three sections:

1. Engage in Professional Growth and Leadership;
2. Increase Efficiency and Save Time; and
3. Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity

One of the great things I found out to maximise time is to create 'canned responses' in Gmail where you can build emails and have them be available as templates for you to populate rather than typing or copying and pasting previous emails.  

Another aspect that I wish to explore more is the 'HyperDoc' - this is something that we spent time exploring last year as part of the MDTA programme however this process made me reflect on how I could leverage this more in my practice to help learners both learn at their own pace but also encourage them to keep challenging themselves in their learning.

Mid Year Reflection: My Practice in Writing

As with reflecting on reading and numeracy, I also reflected on my writing practice this term and gathered voice from the learners.  I was a bit nervous to see what these learners would feel about my instruction as they had both been a focus for our Term 1 inquiry as well as the focus for my dissertation this year.

Looking at the above chart, I am not surprised by these results.  Some of the learners (18.2%) have been vocal about not enjoying writing hence the reason why I have tried to keep my practice fluid and find ways to engage with them based on their interests.  

The tension I have had this term has been balancing the need for aspects like handwriting and spelling and finding ways to get technology to aid us in the writing process.  From the feedback, it looks like I have had some success with using Explain Everything to help us with our planning and crafting sessions.  Learners have been able to use the voice recording aspect to capture their ideas and plan on their device to help them then go onto craft, refine and publish.  While I had intended to have the group create a full narrative on an animation we had watched, I found that we needed to spend more time on the first part of a narrative where critical elements such as characters and setting are introduced.  The group have achieved some amazing results this term where we were able to share and celebrate via our hub blog (please leave a comment if you can):

I also chose to ask them about an element of my dissertation inquiry where the group reflected on their writing progress each week.

I do wish to carry on with a scaled down version of this reflection process for next term so will gather some more information from the group on how I can make this less of an event and more a natural part of the process.  Over the term break, I will start to analyse the data collected from this term so hopefully some other insights will spring from that.

I feel that I have grown the most in my practice in relation to teaching writing.  While I enjoy writing, I need to realise that it can be a difficult process to others and feedback from both the learners and their families is that they are unable to see progress in their writing (in contrast to both reading and writing).  This has made me think about how I can use the tools available to help learners see their own progress but also celebrate shift more.

Another takeout I have taken from gathering this feedback is that I am working with a group who may not enjoy writing and how can I make this more enjoyable or the learning not as teacher directed as it may have been in the past.  I was fortunate to go and observe a colleague as she used stations to keep the energy high when teaching phonics so I will look into how I can incorporate movement and rotations into teaching aspects such as handwriting and spelling more. 

Mid Year Reflection: My Practice in Numeracy

Similar to the learners I work with in reading, I collected voice from my numeracy groups to analyse both engagement and shift.

In relation to results, all the groups have maintained their 'At' call in National Standards as they are all now working towards operating at early Level 2 of the NZ Curriculum.

Term One was about consolidating all the learners knowledge and strategies at Stage 4 as I had learners working at all different parts of this so this term has been developing and building their confidence in Stage 5 Number Knowledge and introducing them to a number of the strategies for both Addition/Subtraction and Multiplication/Division.  As you can see in some of their responses, some of these strategies have really stuck with them.

One of the main differences that I did this term was to create four sub groups within the group so I could differentiate learning to the level appropriate for the learners.  This helped me challenge particular learners as well as support and develop confidence in others.  Here is the snapshot at where the current engagement levels are at:

This goes with my gut on how I felt learners were feeling about their numeracy learners.  The four learners (21.1%) are learners who have developed the confidence to tell me when they are stuck in their learning and this has taken a couple of terms to build this ability.  

The biggest learning curve this year in numeracy has been my own PCK - last year I was working more with our Year 2 learners in Stages 3 and 4 so moving into Early Stage 5 has been both exciting and challenging as I think of ways to engage with learners.

Using the kids love of Pokemon to teach place value was something that I thought was a bit random at first however the kids loved it and I managed to help some learners overcome the obstacle of regrouping with this activity.

That is the key to keeping thing fresh - teaching numeracy can be black or white.  Either you know the strategy and get the answer correct or you don't.  So my personal challenge is to look to develop my creative skills in teaching numeracy to continue the engagement for both the learners and myself!

Mid Year Reflection: My Practice in Reading

Following on from last term's reflection, I reached out to my learners in order to gauge their voice in my teaching and to analyse the shift.

I chose to add one question to the ones I asked last term, this being:

• What are some things that you have learned this term?  This was more out of interest to see what learners could remember from this term.

The first question I ask of the learners is how much they have enjoyed the learning this term, with them being able to rate it on a likert scale from 1 ("I haven't enjoyed it!") to 3 ("I have enjoyed it a lot!").  

Great to see that 4 learners (16.7%) are sitting between the two choices, this means that I still have a bit of work to build engagement with reading.  This group of learners are very engaged with their reading to the point where they are planning their own time when it comes to reading.  Here is a slide that I add to each groups modelling books to help them do so.

It was great to read what learners had both enjoyed reading and learned this term.  I had worked to have learners make connections through different texts, using both readers and journals alongside using apps like GetEpic!.  The learners have really enjoyed using this as an additional resource for books and I have used it to build collections on similar topics so they can analyse and decided whether texts are appropriate for their use.

It is also great to see that some of the additional writing activities made the lists like our alliteration activity and you might notice that a lot of the group mentioned learning about Haikus which was a follow activity where we looked at syllables and how we can use this knowledge to help us when we need to chunk new words we encounter in our reading.  Check out the groups great poems below (note two links due to labels):

Reading through the challenging comments from the learners, great to see that learners had reflected on some of the learning that I chose to focus on this term.  We spent a lot of time working on the differences between retelling and summarising as a lot of the group found it difficult being able to identify and utilise these skills.  We also spent time developing our word attack skills so activities like the ones above helped learners build their confidence in these strategies.

Looking at shift, the majority of the group have maintained their skills and I have mapped out their shift based on a resource our SLT helped created for us and reflecting on this, some of the comments about how I can help learners progress stand out for me.

A few of the learners mentioned about how they would like me to help them further understand their follow up activities so I will reassess how I am creating modelling books and ask my mentor to come observe me in relation to instruction with these groups.  Great to see the honesty with some learners requiring further assistance with summarising - this was a note that I communicated to whānau these holidays along with the links to the resources to help learners practice over the holidays if they wanted to.

In summary, I am very fortunate to working alongside this group of learners as they are so engaged with their readers.  Stay tuned for an update on what Term 3 is going to look like for my reading practice!

Co-constructing Success Criteria for Blog Posts

As part of the Cybersmart learning this term, our hub have tried a two prong approach to building learners' capacity in using the digital aspects of their learning.  These were:

• Working with our Year 2 learners and some learners that identified that they needed to consolidate their knowledge of Explain Everything.  This is something that we will need to return to for all learners as Explain Everything has had an update recently - check out Karen Belt's blog post that explains some of the upgrades.
• The remainder of our Year 3 learners have been learning more about creating a smart footprint in preparation for next term's focus on building smart relationships in Term 3.

We introduced the learners to how they could email a blog post to the blog and had some great discussions about what we would need to consider before we upload a draft post to our hub blog.  As a result, the learners asked if we could build some success criteria to help them remember what is important before uploading blog posts.  Here is what we came up with:

I am looking forward to seeing learners take advantage of the email to blog function next term!  Stay tuned to see how this takes off.

Noticing Shifts in Writing

Today I ran a second writing sample as part of my data collection for my dissertation focus.  I was quite nervous about this as it meant asking these learners to sit and write for 45 minutes.  I chose to give these learners a visual prompt along with some of our guidelines that we have used for our narrative writing throughout this term.

When I spoke to the group about doing a writing sample, I was met with excitement and questions. The prompt seemed to excite everyone in the group and the questions ranged from surface features to wonderings about how they could link the various parts of the picture to their narratives.

During their planning, I noticed that a lot of the learners were discussing their ideas.  While not an official e-assTTle writing sample, I intended to run the session as similar to the first writing sample as possible, however seeing the excitement and enjoyment that the kids were getting out of sharing their ideas, I chose to following some of the advice from the passage below from TKI:

When the planning time was over, I again thought it would be difficult for the learners to move into their independent writing but I was greeted with sights below.  These photos are not staged, in fact, no one noticed me taking these.  They were so engaged with getting their pens to paper.

The only protests I got through this session is when I told the group that the time was up due to us moving into reading.  What the learners do not know is that as a 'reward', I am planning to publish these and gift them to them in our end of term writing ceremony so they can go home to celebrate with their whanaus for the upcoming holidays.

My Spirit Animal is a Duck!

It is a strange title for this blog post, however, it is timely as I reflecting on nearing the end of registration.  With two terms to go, I am three quarters of the way there and am looking forward to the remainder of my time as a PCT.  I had written in a previous post about sharing my story about how I chose to come into teaching so thought I better make good on that promise!

The initial passion for teaching came from doing a special topic paper at the end of university where I helped create a pilot programme for the pastoral care of International Students.  Part of the criteria for the paper was to design and run weekly workshops for groups of 10-15 students on aspects of university life for example, how to use the systems at the library or how to set up your printing account.  While to an outside eye, this was probably mundane - I really enjoyed seeing people growing in confidence.

Working in admin type roles after graduating, I decided that I wanted to explore both this aspect further as well as the world so combined the two and that is how I ended up teaching English in Japan.  I bounced around different schools in Tokyo before settling into one in the suburbs bordering the city centre.  Due to its location, I ended up teaching children from the age of 2 (yes, you read that right) to 13 when they moved into the adult classes.  I moved into the lead role for the school during my time there for the children's learning programme and opened two junior schools before leaving to come back to New Zealand.

It was my intention to go back to university when I came home, however due to the time of year and financial reality, I took a job for a corporate and fell into a career pretty quickly.  The passion for education was still there but it had morphed into an appreciation for capability and training and I found myself excelling in roles where I was supporting others be their very best.  Towards the end of my time in the organisation, I even stepped into a leadership role to gain experience and realised that this was a different set of skills required for this and was fortunate enough to build my knowledge about coaching and mentoring.

An organisation wide restructure helped me stop for a minute to reassess where I was heading and opened up a few home truths about how I was feeling (this is where the title comes into play!).  I have picked up my work ethic from both my parents who had run and operated their own businesses for most of my life.  I was fortunate enough to work alongside them (not that they would probably say that at some times!) and saw that in order to make things work, you had to put the effort in.  At work, I tend to agree to things and would find myself spinning lots of plates.  On the outside I appeared that I was under control, however like a duck gliding along the water, no one sees the legs kicking like anything to maintain that graceful glide.

That was me and it had caught up with me.  I nearly burned out and ended up going to counselling for a while to help put strategies into place to help me restore the balance.  Finding the moment to breathe is key if only for five minutes in the day.  Stopping also made me realise that I was not following my passions anymore and hence came the call to resign from work and go back to university to become a teacher.  You know the rest as my teaching journey started in this blog.

Now this is when you could say: "Heath, you realise that teaching is no different from your previous job.  If anything, it is probably going to be just as busy, if not more."  Others did and looking at it, they are right to a certain degree.

The reason behind this post was that a few weeks ago, the wheels did fall off and I found that I had been reverting to old habits to get through.  If I am model how to be a learner to my students, then I do need to live true to what I tell them about asking for help when they need it.  I also need to more transparent with people so they understand what is going on, rather than me just bottling everything up.  This transparency is a key factor to collaboration and being my best self as both a teacher and a person.