Term 2 - After a day with the Woolf Fischer Research team

I am extremely excited to be heading up to Auckland this weekend for the second Spark MIT professional learning group (PLG).

I have been doing a lot of reading and looking at other schools and what they have been doing for Numeracy. I have also been thinking about the affordances of Learn, Create, Share and reflecting on my practise. Really I have been asking myself "Is my practice the best that it can be from what I know? And is there anything I am missing that could make a difference?" 

I felt extremely privileged to be a part of the Uru Manuka Review of the Data and what this means for practise. The day concluded in me feeling much stronger in my knowledge of powerful learning conversations, the difference between a DLO (digital learning object) and a DLA (digital learning artefact), as well as, thinking about how a students knowledge transfers. 

From this day some things I am going to change/edit in my practise are: 
- Giving students set class time to respond to the feedback that has been given to them online and also verbally. 
-  Aiming to provide positive, helpful and thoughtful feedback to students on all pieces of work (not applying a celling to any task). 
- Ensuring that the tasks I am asking the students to complete have an aspect of higher level thinking to them (know how students can take their learning further or gain deeper understanding through a task) 
- Thinking about blogging as not only a polished piece of work, but also drafts and work that needs some refining
- I am also really interested to know what kind of feedback the students I have prefer - aural or written or videoed? Does it make a difference to them? 

I have been looking in to the tasks I am asking my students to complete for Numeracy in particular and a quote that really resonated with me was from the Woolf Fischer team "Creating provides students with an opportunity to reflect on, synthesise, and come to a deeper understanding of what they read and know – or think they know." I had to ask myself are the create tasks I am prompting allowing students to come to a deeper understanding or are they just completing the task that I have given them?

Here are two examples of the work I have set this term..

Here is a link to a students finished product of this task Dani @ Gilberthorpe

Here is a link to a students finished product of this task Nevaeh @ Gilberthorpe 

I feel like the tasks involved practise of the new skill and the students recordings provide the deeper thinking. I could do more to provide some transferable scaffolds for students and a chance for students to create their own problems or examples... Food for thought anyway!