#educampPALMY

Kia ora,

I am very happy to have been part of the organising committee for #educampPALMY in 2015.

It was a wonderful opportunity to be sharing my experience and thoughts on it.

Here is a link to the smack down and google site.

SMACK DOWN

I ran a BREAKOUT on gafe, this was to fill a need. There was high interest from 38 people, they extended an interest in GAFE. So I felt compelled and privileged to share my perspective and context in using google classroom.
Here's my slide:
GAFE

My notes from the EMERGING LEADERS breakout, run by the edlead team.

11.00-11.45

Emerging Leaders:

Standing back to back on a position puts you at an opposed position to someone. In order to know what the other perspective if you must stand side by side. My job is to truly see and understand someone else’s perspective. What we’re expecting of our learners is key. We need positive leadership skills. Positioning myself as the leader by the side of a teacher empowers our relationship. I need to situate myself so that I can COACH alongside. Be the teacher / learner. When going into a conversation about how I want it to finish is not a good start. I need to see their side, see their perspective. Awareness / assumptions- I need to be more aware of myself to be effective. Deal with a CURRENT situation, talk through a problem. Jennifer Abrams- read about this scaffold in conversations. When in these difficult conversations, give them an invitation to speak and share. Am I solution giver or a problem giver?

I need to DE-PERSONALISE my learning to make it meaningful for me.

I need to be willing to appreciate positive feedback.

MLP- modern learning pedagogy: part five

MY NOTES ARE PRETTY SCATTY:

KEY NOTE 2: ADAM LEFSTEIN-

RULE #1- Don’t talk about pedagogical problems. The norms of privacy are obstructive in the development of MLE. Staff room talk is often about VENTING, consolation, or sharing of materials.

RULE #2- Don’t mind the gap between teaching aspirations and classroom realities.

The huge gap between what happens in the classroom and the way we talk about the classroom. We don’t talk honestly about our practice. We end up talking ASPIRATIONALLY about it. This makes it difficult to have real discourse.

RULE #3- DICHOTOMIZE. Content vs process, achievement outcomes vs values education & old edn vs new edn. There’s no individual without culture. 

RULE #4 TRUST YOUR OWN UNIQUE EXPERIENCE

RULE #5- NO PRECISE PROFESSIONAL LANGUAGE.

The teaching profession has a discourse that can easily be understood by people from a range of backgrounds. 

RULE #6- HYPERCRITICISM

RULE #7- Don't over tweet on tweet deck and pay attention to the key note speaker, otherwise you'll miss out on rule #7.

RULE #8- FOCUS ON WHAT’S MISSING: Hold a conversation about ‘what could have happened’.

RULE #9- TRUST OUR FEELING AND INTUITION

RULE #10- EVERYTHING IS DUE TO THE TEACHER: Pupils shape teaching no less than teachers do.

***

PROFESSIONAL CONVERSATIONS-

Classroom practice is key.

Hold deep conversations about the representations of practice.

Adopt an inquiry stance: describe and understand before attempting to judge or solve.

Balance the critique.

Focus on issues and dilemmas, and move between specific instances and general principles.

A POSITIVE DISCOURSE GROUNDED IN CLASSROOM PRACTICE. The honest convo allows both sides to have a say. DELIBERATIVE LEADERSHIP- say what?

***

I WISH I HAD RE-READ MY U-LEARN NOTES BEFORE STARTING 2015.

It's obviously clear that we've focussed on issues and dilemmas. We constantly have been fixing our mistakes as we go. I like to think that being organic about how we problem solve is vital. There have been many times that we have sat and tried to preempt situations with forward planning. But as collaborative teachers we're pretty good on our feet. The awesome thing is that we also trust each other too.

I have an open approach to leadership. Sharing the lead is crucial, we three have strengths in various educational areas, not just in curriculum but also our combined knowledge is varied. I know this might sound like a lazy leadership approach, however, if there are strong leadership skills in both of my co-teachers, why wouldn't I allow them to naturally lead a conversation or development of a planning document, or assessment method. Yes, being deliberate about leading is just as important too. I need to focus on focussing our MLE. I want to know that by year's end that I have steered us toward aligning our programme with our school's vision and learning process, but with a unique twist, our MLP will flavouring.

As co-teachers, we have always talked about what we want to see if our learners, whilst our pedagogy is similar, we still are driven by core principles, which are apparent through many conversations. One of my colleagues is quite driven about providing U.D.L (more on this in my next post). So many of our planning meetings contain this element, it is so important to allow students to present learning in a way that they choose. This practice should be interwoven into our MLE. My only reservation, is how well have we set up the students to present their learning in various forms. If we say, sure make a video. Do they know how to? Will that mean we need to instantly run a workshop on making videos on chrome books or imacs. Will this cloud their presentation of the actual learning content. I want to provide this opportunity to freely present learning in their own way, but SCAFFOLDING must occur in advance. It needs to be set up in a way that we can definitely say we've set them up in a few forms of representation. So if we said, this concept we've been learning, such as Te Ako Ritenga, you're all thinking about it, you know lots about it, it's now time to go and work on how to present it to us. We would hope that the quality of their presentation would highlight their learning rather than their lack of knowledge of their chosen form of expression. Just this week gone, my co-teacher highlighted 'I students to be successful, I want to set them up for success'. My sentiments exactly. Getting to this point will take time. Do I believe that UDL is important? DEFINITELY. Do I want students to be successful? OF COURSE I DO. Getting there requires scaffolding.

Grounding our conversations in professional discourse, strengthens our co-teaching relationship.

***

MLP- modern learning pedagogy: part three

MY TEACHER INQUIRY 2015.

Where does one begin?

What path should one take?

How effective will it be to focus an inquiry on practice so that it doesn't impact the learning in one's classroom?

***

In 2015, I am lucky enough to be part of a 3 teacher collaborative teaching situation. Poutama: journey to learning is the 'space' that I work within. I am lucky enough to work alongside another experienced teacher, and the PRT that I mentor (which is a very loose term for what is the actual outcome of our interaction).

This year has thus far been exciting, challenging, draining, but worthwhile. 

There comes a point in any teacher's career, when you find yourself at a crossroad. Do I continue teaching the way I have always taught, or do I challenge myself to be better.  

After Ulearn 14 last year, I was offered the opportunity to continue being a senior teacher of a team, but also, to support Riverdale in the re-purposing of a major learning hub, flexible learning space. Namely, 'POUTAMA'. LC5 or learning community 5. It's a karaihe full of students, we're literally bursting with 73 students. But on any given day, there are 3 teachers, plus 2 teacher aides and another part time teacher, Monday-Wednesday. Having reduced our ratio to 1:24 we are better equipped to teach. More on this later, it's time to GO BACK.

So, early on in 2014, the 3 of us teachers spent time discussing the logistics of collaborative teaching and flexi-learning spaces. After all, an MLE needs strong MLP (modern learning pedagogy). Our Principal has led us to re-purpose the MLE to flexi-learning environment. This is a more appropriate title for what we are trying to develop. Many discussions over the summer break led us to the idea that our space needed to have 'breakout' zones. This was a theme of many of the ulearn workshops. I led the team to believe in my vision about having such a learning space. We added on the 'connect', 'think' and 'create'.

Breakout- an area of learning where a teacher might take a non-traditional workshop on metacognition, or digital technology. A space where students might work independently on their BYOD to complete a 'must do' or 'can do'. After 5 weeks, it looks very different to our original vision. However, students enjoy learning in this space, there are tables and chairs. A built in wall seat has allowed the students to use this space to their advantage.

Think- this space is where a lot of collaboration takes places, ss play active learning games, which are found in our SDA (self directed activity) boxes, the hope being that students that learn best with a peer or in a group are thus given this vital opportunity. Gamification is a huge concept right now in MLE circles. We've followed suit, but of course, learning games have always been a part of my own single cell classroom environments. We provide many online games too, we hope to fool these kids into learning, even though they're playing a game. Kinaesthetic learning behaviours are carefully integrated into our learning programme. We want to provide times for students that learn from doing, to do just that: 'learn by doing', rather than just sitting.

Connect- quiet is a very important aspect for many individuals. This space is where we teach instructional groups. Groups of learners we know need similar teaching. We see all of our workshop groups in this space. Therefore it must be silent. The students are still coming to terms with this idea. But it's early days, so that can obviously be forgiven. There are 2 whiteboard tables in this room, where 2 teacher can work with their groups, our 10 Imacs or 'learning hub' is in here too. This space is about 'connecting' with a teacher. We try to support our learners to meet the demands of a learning intention or W.A.L.T (acronym for we are learning to). In this space, one teacher will be sitting on the mat with their learners, so at any one time, there could be 3 teachers taking instructional groups of up to 8 learners each, 10 students on the imacs, 5 groups by the couch and pink chill zone. This of course sounds absurd, you'd be right to think it. However, LEARNING HAPPENS. Yes it gets noisy, however, when it's quiet, which is often, the ss are amazingly focussed, regardless of noise.

Create- we have spent much of our time focussing on the other spaces, that this space has been slightly neglected. It has a lot of potential, but with everything that we're learning as collaborative teachers, and with all the systems we're setting up, it's not been practical to build in this space.

***

Our pedagogy cannot simply be recorded in a few blog posts. Pictures don't do it justice. However, learning is at the top of our list. We want our learners engaged, we want them to love learning. We want to do the best we can. WE ARE LOVING WHAT WE DO.