Keynote address: Wiring a child’s brain for lifelong success - Laura Justice

I was fortunate enough to attend the Child Well-being Research Symposium last week.

(Handout with abstracts)

There were many interesting sessions shared and I will work on posting up the most engaging over the next week.

The first session was a keynote from Laura Justice a professor at Ohio State University - I found it really refreshing and it reminded me of a lot of the work I had looked into way back when I was at University 8 years ago! Here is a link to her presentation.

The first part of the session looked at Neuroscience. In particular how the brain forms and develops. Each part of the brain is relative to a function - Rational thinking comes from the frontal lobe, Temporal lobe = speech and language features etc. Pathways between and within these lobes are built over time & experience. This means that society has to do the work to build these pathways and how these pathways are formed is important to think about. The word that is used for this process is Synaptogenesis - 2 base words 'synapsis' the connection between two neurons and 'genesis' to bring life/beginning.

An experience causes the pathway between neurons. Meaning that experience-expectant plasticity = synaptogenesis. Research shows that the peak period of plasticity is 7/13years ish. Here is a picture of the process:

Justice mentioned that the most important message she hoped we left the lesson was to always remember that a young child’s brain is much more robust and open to change than ours and therefore you should never underestimate them or what they are capable of.

Another strong message from this keynote was that:

"The environment matters more for certain skills than genes - especially ‘kindergarten readiness skills’."

High quality experiences (nurture) are crucial for buffering the effects of early adversity on the child’s brain.

Meaning that quality early care and education promotes resilience in children, offers a positive offset to challenges.

The second aspect of the keynote was looking at the acquisition of vocabulary, known as Linguistics.

Vocabulary is the basis of a number of things - reading, pro-social behaviours, math, world knowledge and computational thinking just to name a few. It is a key readiness skill and is the foundation for the majority of the curriculum.

Vocabulary is an ‘emergent structure’ it depends on the experiences that you have and the language that you know. The visual representation she shared for this was the creation of an ant hill - something that evolves over time, no two people's vocabulary is the same.

The sensitive period for vocabulary development is age 0-5. Having a good vocabulary is crucial for meeting your needs and wants.

‘Achievement gaps’ (or better-worded opportunity gaps) in vocab are largely a product of experience: the hardware is there, the input needs experiences.

We should be looking further into what it means to know a word.
A word in the lexicon means that the student knows - what it means, how it sounds, how it is spelled, how to use it grammatically, and whether affixes be added to it.

What does it take to know a word deeply? Repeated exposures that are highly informative

The message given was that classrooms should be noisy because the hardware is in place (experience-expectant plasticity) what is needed is input.

Finally, Justice spoke on her ideas around Education.

Language acquisition in the early years is dependent on interactions with others.

Expressions, gestures, intonation, pauses, and loudness provide important cues for learning.

Joint attention - adult and child sharing the same experience is crucial to language development.

In her keynote Justice defined this like a game of ping-pong which involves a serve and return - back and forth = one turn. The completion of a turn develops the brain circuitry/pathways.

The serve is known as a communicative bid (an effort to start the game). Here are some examples:

The adults serve starts and the adults serve is always contingent on the child’s return.

Meaning that the adult is following the child’s focus.

The message from researchers is that IT MUST LAST 5 TURNS.

Interestingly classrooms conversations (cabell, justice et al., 2015). Looking at conversations in small group settings and found that the average length of a conversation is 4 turns. With 50% under 4 turns, 50% over 4 turns and 1:10 conversations was 10+ turns.

Justice put a warning in play - be careful about play based conversations - these need to be supporting long conversations and the evidence from this study show it is not happening currently.

Another reason being that from a very early age children prefer to play with children who have the same language skills as them. And what we need to do is disrupt this.

One solution could be "Bug in the ear" coaching - providing cues to the teacher - to guide conversations.

For ESOL students we should be providing the same opportunities as other students. The serve and return might look a little different, it could be gestural or physical. These students can benefit from exposure to sophisticated language. Instead of us simplifying what we are saying the students will strip down the language to where they are at the moment.

In our settings, we should be designing strategies for implementing to monitor each child’s experiences on these 5 serves.

Exposure to extended conversations are really important.

Overall, I found this session was one of my favourites from the two days. I enjoyed the messages around not underestimating children and also around the importance of developing vocabulary early. I found that this session linked nicely to the learning I have done and the work we do with Manaiakalani.

I would like to read more around the "5 turns" and what evidence supports this - so if you have any links please feel free to leave them in a comment!

First PLD Session of 2019! - PLG Groups: Why These Are Effective for Professional Learning.

Welcome back! 2019 has started with a hiss and a roar and I am super excited about all of the cool initiatives we have started this term! On Tuesday I was invited to attend a session with the PLG Leaders at Hornby High run by Deirde McCracken. This was a great experience and I look forward to working with Deirde in a larger sense over the year.

The first part of the session was looking at professional learning groups and the research behind why we chose to learn in this way. The information we looked at was from: The Ten Tenets of Collaborative Professionalism, AITSL: Professional Learning communities and The Adaptive School: Developing & Facilitating Collaborative Groups (2018).

My biggest take aways from this session were:
- Collaboration is the key and we need to learn how to do it well as professionals
- We need more open, honest and reflective dialogue with our colleagues
-"difference, debate and disagreement are necessary for improvement"
- our main goal is collaborative professionalism

Our 'homework' was to look through the agenda and come up with an outline for future PLG meetings. This involves looking at aims, principals and dialogue protocol. I am really excited about working in a more guided and driven PLG group. I will keep you up to date with all of the other learnings... along the way.

uLearn Day Two: Keynote Abdul Chohan

Abdul Chohan - Bolton UK

Chemistry trained teacher - leadership

Abdul began his talk with the challenge of the laptop trolley - some devices not working, some won’t connect, “I’ve forgot my password” and how this transformed into his school the Olive Tree. The challenge made him think outside the box - What can money buy me? - ipod touch a new tool 2008, I could buy 180 of these…. A sign from above!

He developed his teaching and overcame barriers and blocks to using them successfully. He learnt about the difference between mobility and portability - laptops vs. ipads. The most amazing thing for his learners - “It works when you switch it on!”

Abdul then went on to talk about 'The Plumbing' - how to get technology to be transformational in terms of learning and teaching. And what does the plumbing look like in my school?

The Olive Tree Primary School

• Induction programme
• Teachers trained on twitter
• Teachers posting amazing things they are doing in the classroom
• Believe you can

He believes that Belief is the thing that changes behaviour. Things need to be made simple and reliable - it is hard to make something complex simple but it is worthwhile doing. He also believes that the highest cost in education is these words - "we’ve always done it that way"

We are in The Age of Change - Bill Rankin

Apps like uber, alibaba, wikipedia - they don’t sell product, they sell a service and this has changed our beliefs - we have new knowledge and new experiences. This related to how we have the responsibility to look beyond the curriculum.

IQ or DQ - teaching self regulation online and cybersmarts is important. We need to understand what this means.

Link to education - if we are going to put technology into classrooms - what is our return? What are we going to get out of this? What is the impact of technology in education?

19th Century Surgery vs. 21st century surgery - allows surgeons to do things that they couldn’t do before? Death by powerpoint is not something we should be teaching! Looking at environment - we are translating not transforming!

Fundamentals of education - what makes good teaching and learning?

Activity

Authenticity

Investment

Motivation

Technology

SAMR

Design activities that encourage students to think deeply. Cognitive demand is higher.

Sharing takes it further.

Building transparency and consistency.

Non - negotiables

Develop the people

Relationships

Rewindable learning  

Arrange for feedback - app called show me or something similar

The wrong question - which is the best app for… the best app is the teacher in the classroom.

Session every week - what is one best thing you have done?

One best failure - what did you try and it did not work?

Using ibooks to be creating multimodes for students - free books from the olive tree

Measure the impact - how do you know that it has made a difference?

We need to be looking and transforming the ways we do things. "Opportunity is high - we are at a point where we need to understanding the global picture!"

Unpacking Understanding of Learn Create Share

Today we had an awesome PLG session where we were challenged by our shared understanding of Learn, Create, Share and Manaiakalani’s definition of each step. We used The Learning Conversation Framework (Joan Dalton) (page 42 in particular) to help clarify and challenge our thinking.

It's funny because I had previously thought I had a good understanding of each stage... This is the slide show that I worked through earlier in the year.

The day included a run down of what we thought each step was and included, pairing this with each others ideas and then discussing why we were on a different wavelength to Manaiakalani. I think this was one of, if not the most powerful learning discussions that I have had. Working together to understand and challenge our own thinking lead us to having that ‘eureka’ moment, where there was clarity and complete understanding.

We talked about how we could help others to be on the same wavelength and to find their own clarity of the process.

The learning pit (James Nottingham) is the model that I felt I connected with in relation to our newfound understanding of Learn, Create, Share.

Our version of this looks a bit like this…

Learn - “An activity where the objective is to access and engage with existing knowledge.” Broken down into looking at what knowledge a student has, what knowledge they can build on and what knowledge exists in the wider world. Looking at the purpose of the next step creating - what is the outcome of the whole process for the learner.

Create - “Remixing prior knowledge with new knowledge and understanding.” The things we do as teachers to help create understanding, as well as, the things the students do to further their understanding.

Sharing - “Any activity that involves sharing of knowledge. The result is often building new knowledge connecting and collaborating with others.”  We also talked about how students should be seeking feedback/feedforward in the sharing phase which will take them back into the learning pit.

Here is a drawing I create to help share my thinking and understanding…

That is where I am at today… talking this through on a whole cluster level and getting everyone to have the same shared understanding is our next step…

Chapter One - Creative Schools - Ken Robinson

At the end of last year I was very fortunate to be gifted the book "Creative Schools" by Ken Robinson. It has been sitting on my desk waiting to be read for a while now, and finally I have the opportunity to open it. I thought it would be a good idea to reflect upon each chapter as I uncover new thoughts and ideas. 

So here is Chapter One - Back to Basics. 

The beginning of the chapter went back over the importance of students relationships and how really knowing your learners makes such a huge difference to their (and your) attitude to learning. In my new role, I am working with a large range of learners and am finding it really difficult to connect with all of them. I know that this is something that I should work on more, and am hoping that I can connect with them through their blogs - as this gives me a larger timeframe to work in. I also need to work on connecting with the staff I am working with, making time to talk to them informally about what really matters to them... I feel an afternoon tea coming on! haha! 

The chapter then goes on to talk about the political nature of Education and the theory behind standardisation lifting society. By understanding where these people come from and seeing their idealistic point of view, we can assume that this is a theory that may work. But hold on, we are not all the same, so how can any test show what we are truely capable of? 


"Healthy economies depend on people having good ideas for new business and the ability to grow them and create employment." 
if schools were a business we would not say the customer was failing. It is the system that is failing not the students.