Mindlab Lecture #1: 'What is Knowledge?' And 'Followship'.

What is knowledge? 

Essential skills for 21st century learners: 

The skills our students need to know are broken into three areas, all are important to the development of our students. 

Watch changing education: Sir Ken Robinson 

~ What is the purpose of education? Has this changed based on the development of society? Does education match what we need for society? 

Is google to know? 
Google tracks you and has a history of the information you have previously been looking at so it modifies the search results. Duck Duck Go is a website that does not track what you have been doing in the past, so keep that in mind when you are searching for new information. 

Talking about your understanding of knowledge
We decided that our understanding of 'what knowledge is' is: 
- What you understand to be true (Represented by the T)
- Skills you have learnt (The brain and the weaving of ideas)
- What you experience to be true (The weaving)
- What is actually true?! (The question that leads to new ideas and understanding)

#knowledge #Christchurch click here to see our video 

‘The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed - it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardise education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions” (Robinson, 2009)

How is the understanding of the purpose of education visible in your classroom? 
Teaching students effective ways to use the affordances of technology to increase efficiency and encourage creativity.  
"Teach students to critically analyse the knowledge that they master and construct their own understanding from this." This is the Learn, Create, Share Framework. Allowing students to share their own understandings through activating prior knowledge, creating an understanding, critically thinking, sharing the information that they know to be true and then reforming their ideas and opinions. 

Followship 

What makes a good leader? What makes a good follower?

Following and leading in relation to dance (video to watch). 
Allowing creativity for the leader/follower. 

 
What do you consider a good leader to be like? 
Someone who includes, listens to and challenges opinion - encouraging those who follow to be critical and think for themselves for the benefit of their group as a whole. Someone who uses the strengths of their followers to build teamwork and give the followers a sense of empowerment. 

Extra resources or thoughts: Did you know that mindlabkids.com is an online place for students to learn more about being digital citizens? With cool activities and 

Next steps from Data 2018

Well... this year has taken off and we are already in week 7! It has been a while since my last post and I apologise. We were super fortunate to have the Woolf Fischer Research Team down to present our data from 2018 and give us an indication of areas we are doing well in and others that we need to improve in. WFRT also gave us some areas of inquiry for this year - which I will talk about below. 

Pockets of Promise: 

Writing
Students from year 0-1 are making accelerated progress and are getting close to meeting the National Norms after their first year! Well done Junior Teachers!

On average all students in writing made more than norm progress.

In three schools students ended the year with achievement higher than national norm.

Over two years (2016-2017) all students are still making more than expected progress in Writing.

On average our boys are making more progress than our girls in Writing.

All ethnicities made accelerated progress.

Future Focus/ Next steps:

Reading

50/50 split between students making accelerated progress and low achievement in Reading.

We are still making progress in Reading, just not enough progress - not the same amount as the National Norm. This is an area to look into as it is unusual to have higher Writing achievement than Reading. How can we accelerate progress in this area? Is critical thinking an area that needs to be developed for students to be successful in this area?

Math

In general Students across all ages are (1 year) below the National Norm in Maths. We need to accelerate this in order to make progress. When looking into ethnicity Pasifika and Maori are on average 2 years below the National Norm - Why is this?

This is a great place to start for our inquires this year. The researchers always have me leaving with more questions. It is positive to have such clear information and data to think about.

I guess you will just have to wait and see which area I plan on focusing in on this year!