Last week I was lucky enough to be away on my honeymoon! I was really annoyed to be missing the Sense Making session around the Online Learning Observations (OLO's). Aren't we so lucky in this day and age to be able to miss a meeting and have it recorded so that you can reflect upon exactly what was shared!
Here are my main points of interest and some reflections for 2021 after two watches of the footage.
When looking at planning, we need to think about a Text diet across a week. A novel looks very different compared to how a short story looks in a class program. Are we providing students with a well rounded diet for texts? Is there a way we could link this into Tuhi Mai? Something similar to a Chapter Chat across the cluster or wider?
Our data showed that we didn't look at a wide range of genre in the text sets. Again how can we expand genre? For example can we ultilise current events and the news? Do texts act as windows or mirrors into different cultures? Think about the dominant culture represented in the texts, how are we connecting our learners to the cultures in the world?
WF pointed out that there was no specific and obvious focus on devices (language features of the text and purpose of these). This could be due to the large proportion of non fiction texts. Again linking back to the need for a more diverse text diet. We need to be explicit in our planning if we are focusing on audience and purpose of the text, if an educator can't see the connection how is a learner going to get there.
An area we could focus more on themes or messages in texts, looking at the inferential rather than the literal information provided. This would create a focus on explicit teaching of metacognition and should be visible in planning & written or recorded instructions.
Here is a diagram for the Thinking skills shown in the OLO's. They range from understanding to critical thinking.
OLO Activities
An activity can have many tasks that sit underneath it.
Slide 46 - yellow line underneath = HLP
Are we teaching students how to have good discussions? We need to be.
High School discussion online - students could tag each other in comments and ask them a question about the text (similar to activity in DFI).
Rewind-ability of teachers - Do we see this as something to work on? This doesn’t have to be the teachers face, it can be audio supporting the document.
There is still the need for rewindable modelling by the teacher rather than relying on peer teaching. The “giants” in a field explain the topic/subject using language that students may not be able to share or explain in - think about why we go to see the experts or why we invite the experts in, in our classes the Teacher is the giant. We need to ultise this by promoting rewind-ablity of the teacher.
When we are asking our students to create we need to push students to use new media forms or give students constraints to support them to think outside the box. This will help to increase the level of reorganisation and push students to provide more than slides.
Podcasts would be an interesting thing to explore as a cluster. Moving to promote more speech in DLO’s has huge oral language benefits for our students.
Looking at the Share
Teachers need to provide students with more information around why they are sharing their learning. At the moment the main focus is to make it visible. Teachers could raise the metacognition of this process by asking students to reflect on what others have shared, reflect on the learning process and to think about their purpose and audience.
Are we posting finished products? If we are it is hard for an audience to comment - teachers and students are less inclined to comment if they feel it serves not purpose and there will be no change to the finial post.
Are we providing students with the opportunity to go back in and change their work based on the feedback that they have been given? Are we teaching them how to do this?
Is it an authentic opportunity for knowledge building by asking students to comment on others work?
Something we could look into is co-creating rubics & linking to HLP's for:
DLO
Rewindable Learning
Discussions
Multiple text sets
Peer Teaching
Critical Literacy? Critical Thinking?
Future Focus
Visibility
Rewind-ability
Audience and Purpose
Diversity of texts in the text sets
Shared understanding across cluster
Things to think about:
What to be deliberate and intentional about in 2021?
Show me how to do this? What does it look like?
Teacher lead toolkits on literacy? 30minutes sessions?
Week 6 online toolkits from MET - where does this fit?
WF has created some teacher reflective questions when planning and creating - these are for Uru Mānuka specifically. I think this is a great place to start.
