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.
Showing posts with label Thinking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thinking. Show all posts
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!
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!
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Inspired Research from Sir Ken Robinson
Today I took the time to reflect upon my teaching and lesson planning. I thought a good place to start would be with a video that has been talked about many times in leadership meetings, "Do Schools Kill Creativity?" ~ Sir Ken Robinson.
I think there are so many great ideas that came out of watching this talk. But the one that really interested me was divergent thinking. In particular, I want to know how I can increase divergent thinking in my students to enable them to tap into their own creativity.
The great example from the video that stemmed this thought process was around the use of a paper clip. Most people when asked what you could use a paper clip for would come up with 20ish ideas, people who are divergent thinkers could come up with hundreds. (They would think about the paper clip without limitations - it could be rubber or 10ft high etc.) I want my students to be thinking outside the box. In fact, I want my students to be thinking without the limitations of a box in the first place!
I think there are so many great ideas that came out of watching this talk. But the one that really interested me was divergent thinking. In particular, I want to know how I can increase divergent thinking in my students to enable them to tap into their own creativity.
The great example from the video that stemmed this thought process was around the use of a paper clip. Most people when asked what you could use a paper clip for would come up with 20ish ideas, people who are divergent thinkers could come up with hundreds. (They would think about the paper clip without limitations - it could be rubber or 10ft high etc.) I want my students to be thinking outside the box. In fact, I want my students to be thinking without the limitations of a box in the first place!
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I really enjoyed reading this article Fuel Creativity with Divergent Thinking by Stacey Goodman. It has some great practical ideas to encourage positive classroom cultures.
A Challenge from this article was the difference between "Good Judgement vs. Divergent Thinking." I also like the idea of sharing ideas quickly so that you can move on to more creative ideas. I feel like it is important to share as many ideas as you can and then weed them out afterwards.
As always, this is just the beginning of my understanding. I just felt like I should document the thoughts I had and wanted to track my learning journey around this. I think it links very well into critical thinking and extended learning conversations - two areas that our cluster is inquiring into this year.
I want to work on allowing more than one correct answer... Although I do encourage this overall, I feel like my students still end up with very similar ideas or at least share their ideas in very similar ways. How do you encourage diversity and originality? Maybe I am not allowing enough time to understand and identify the problem...
That's all for now... I will continue to work on eliminating the square/box that we need to think outside of!
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