Feedback from Woolf Fisher - Summer Learning Journey

As always it is so great to have the opportunity to break down and understand our data with the team from Woolf Fisher. This time we were discussing our Summer Learning Journey Data along side the cumulative data from the beginning of our Manaiakalani journey. 

It is important to note that this was Uru Mānuka's first time participating in the Summer Learning Journey and so as expected our data does look different from Manaiakalani's. Some of the finer details of Manaiakalani's data will help us greatly in the future. Things like what activities our students are more interested in completing and how many blog posts need to be made to make progress or learning shift. 

The Summer Learning Journey focus is on Reading and Writing. The assessment used to analyse the data is the PAT Reading and e-asTTle Writing scores. Students are given choice in the number of tasks they complete and also get credit for commenting on others work. They also receive personal feedback on every blog post from a team of adults working out of Auckland University. The below table is from Manaiakalani's SLJ showing the success of the programme. 

It is interesting to note that students who don't blog over summer can lose up to 5 months of learning in Writing. The fact that students who participated did not experience the Summer Learning Dip it a huge success and the evidence that they actually made progress over the school break is an even bigger one! 

Below is data collected on student engagement based on activity type: 

It is interesting to see that our students completed the task that was to express their opinion the most. 

The other relevant data was evidence on how frequent blog posts needed to be to show progress. 

The difference between students blogging once a week and twice a week is huge. The activities are only 10-15minutes in length. If we can somehow get our parents on board and get students blogging twice a week  (at minimum) over the breaks we will see a significant level of progress in both Reading and Writing for our learners. 
This also lead us to asking questions around how habitual this is currently for our learners - are they blogging twice a week at the moment? If they are is it more likely that this behaviour will continue throughout the break? These are some areas that need some looking into. 

I am excited to see what each school will do in reflection to this data. I feel that our cluster is experiencing huge success in our connection, communication and coherence. More heads are better than one, and now we have strong evidence to tell us what exactly improves student progress over the break! 

x

First Assignment for Mindlab

For our first Mindlab Assessment we were asked to "identify, justify and plan a digital and collaborative learning innovation applied to a specific area of your practice." This then had to be submitted in a video format in 6-8 minutes. 

This task was more challenging than I had first anticipated... I did a lot of professional readings and so when it came time to get all of my ideas down I had so much to say! 

The challenge that I identified in my practise was lack of students originality and creativity while completing learning tasks. I was aware that students were sometimes scaffolded too much and really wanted to look into ways I could challenge them to be more creative. 
Research shows that Problem Based Learning and Collaboration are two ways to increase creativity. I also came up with an idea around using learning questions instead of using learning outcomes to also increase critical thinking and engagement. 

Here is my slide deck and below is my video presentation. (Don't you hate listening to your own voice! I sure do!)

In reflection I am aware that I did not explain my plan in enough detail for someone else to understand it... but I did well anyway and thought that I would share it with you so you could all see my thinking behind my first assignment... 

I am using Cybersmart Buddies to increase collaboration, have used the learning question to turn my lesson into a problem that needs to be solved and am challenging the students to share their own unique voice for something that is an identified problem in their community. Let's see how successful this will be over the term! Look out for students projects being uploaded to their blogs on the twitter feed here.