Looking back on Mindlab, looking forward to ...

Looking back

And now, the end is near; 
And so I face the final curtain.
My friend, I'll say it clear, 
I'll state my case, of which I'm certain  (Frank Sinatra)

As I call time on the Mindlab course I'll admit to a sense of relief.  The second half of the course has been tough going, and I am NOT a natural academic.  by being research informed, I can now be more certain of my case rather than acting only on hunches.  When reflecting on the journey taken I am proud that I made it to the end (with only a couple of road bumps); energised by the things I have learned; and engaged by the people I have connected with.

In terms of a professional learning journey, this has been epic.  Although I was already on the blended e-learning / inquiry waka I have had my thinking broadened, deepened and challenged.  I have satisfied most of the Education Council's Practicing Teacher Criteria, especially:

Criteria 1: Establish and maintain effective professional relationships focused on the learning and well-being of all ākonga.  My professional learning network expanded through getting to know my Mindlab classmates and facilitators.  Not only did I add many of them to my networks, but each of them offered introductions, recommendations and links to other educators and thinkers.  Twitter has been an effective medium for sharing links and resources with my Mindlab community (#mindlabed) and beyond.  I have also discovered other hashtags (#wellyed) that have directly contributed to improved and interesting classroom practices such as discovering new apps such as GoNoodle, Lapse-It and Moviemaker.

Criteria 4: Demonstrate commitment to ongoing professional learning and development of professional personal practice.  Just by getting to the end of the course I feel I can tick this criteria off.  However, my commitment has gone further than finishing the assignments and turning up to course days.  From the Mindlab course I have springboarded into formal and informal professional development on Google Apps for Education, EduCamp Welly, growth mindsets as well as countless hours exploring and playing with different apps, websites and tools.

Criteria 12: Use critical inquiry and problem-solving effectively in their professional practice.  One of my biggest challenges in the 32 weeks was completing the literature review and compiling a detailed plan for a teaching inquiry.  The process (with the luxury of time away from the classroom over the summer) was robust and challenging and because of that I have a clear plan to follow with easy to recognise check in points and community involvement.  I see this as both a success and a goal to look forward to as I work through the inquiry timeline.

Looking forward

I planned each charted course; 

Each careful step along the byway, 

And more, much more than this, 

I did it my way.  (Frank Sinatra)

The first goal I am setting for myself and my professional practice is to follow through my teaching inquiry, making use of the opportunities to make informed changes at each iterative point.  I will search for research on the gaps I found, namely impacts on primary students' writing achievement of using Google Docs and impacts on Pasifika primary students of collaborative writing.

Secondly I would like to contribute to a future un-conference smackdown session about engaging Pasifika students by developing a community of learners in the classroom.  While I do not especially enjoy public speaking I have appreciated the lessons from Mindlab that everyone in the room has something to contribute, they just need someone to start the conversation.

On that note, even though this is the end, I look forward to the many conversations yet to come.

Cultural responsiveness in practice

Through a major shift in the way we deliver maths teaching across the school I have also had a major shift in my understanding and practice of cultural responsiveness.  My school is 70% Pasifika, 29% Maori and 1% Hispanic.  While our main focus is on Pasifika cultures, Maori plays a significant part and we consider Maori/Aotearoa as a Pasifika nation.

We are now into the second year of a Pasifika maths project involving development of communities of mathematical inquiry (led by Dr Roberta Hunter from Massey University).  In the midst of change I experienced the resistance, doubt, success, failure, black hole and light at the end of the tunnel moments.  I now have enough professional distance to look back at the journey and see the progress made as well as the road ahead.

We deliberately design maths problems with a Pasifika/cultural context, related to students' home lives.  As we launch the problem, students are able to connect their own experiences.  We are also able to share language.  Parents and fanau were introduced to the new pedagogy by their children in a Pasifika maths evening.  They also contributed to a bank of possible contexts and vocabulary.  I can give students larger numbers and more complex strategies to work with because they understand the story behind the maths, so the maths makes more sense.

Students work collaboratively and we talk about working as whanau - everyone contributing and taking responsibility for doing their job so the whole whanau will be successful.  High expectations are set for the group working norms as well as for the maths.  Students work in mixed ability groups, each working from where their understanding is.  The whanau is successful when everybody has made a connection and learned something new.

Our home whanau have shared that their children are more likely to share their maths learning since it is undertaken in a home/culture based context.

We celebrate successes and we celebrate failures, we always ask where to next, we value and praise the process as much as the product (sometimes more).  Because all of this is happening in a familiar cultural context, we are also celebrating, valuing and normalising our students' cultures and making them part of our school identity.

The positive changes I have experienced in my teaching and in my learners' engagement and motivation has led me to begin using a culturally responsive pedagogy throughout the curriculum.

A cultural approach to the delivery and structure of learning activities can be applied across different learning areas.  Finding Pasifika/Maori learning contexts for some curriculum areas has been a challenge.  Again, our parent community were able to offer some suggestions.

What my colleagues and I are struggling with is a way of marrying our culturally responsive teaching approach with (especially) formal assessments.

We have argued about the merits of different tools and the weightings given to various aspects of students' learning.  It seems that other schools (on our journey with Developing Mathematically Inquiring Communities) are also wrestling with this problem and are yet to find or provide a satisfactory solution.

This is an area for further inquiry.  Any feedback welcomed here.

Online ethics

Picture this: a class of cherubic children, clean and shiny, sitting quietly at their computers working industriously on their writing task.  OK, we can dream!  I am setting the scene for a recently experienced ethical online dilemma.

My class has started this year with Google accounts (first time, very excited).  They have been working on docs for writing and this day was to be the first day we shared our doc with a buddy for feedback comments.

Aside from forgetting our email addresses or not finding the 'share' button it was all going well.  Next, overhear some threads of conversation along the lines of, "I love that song" and "that's not about an island."  Investigating what all the fuss was about I soon discovered that one of my students had copied and pasted their favourite song lyrics in place of their story.

Some would argue that this showed great resourcefulness.  The student was utilising the tools and information at her disposal.  Unfortunately, not only was the text off-topic but she had tried to pass it off as her own writing.  She had plagiarized.

I am thankful that the buddy editor had been vocal in their feedback.  Although I would have seen the writing eventually, the well timed peer critique offered me the opportunity for some just-in-time teaching about acknowledging sources.

As a class we had previously talked about the importance of acknowledging the owner or source of an idea.  This is something we practice in analogue during our face-to-face maths discussions.  We acknowledge a person's thinking before we add on, question or challenge it.  A fellow student made the connection to the song lyrics by suggesting that the girl could have copied the lyrics, acknowledged the owner and then added her own text to them, or changed some of the existing text.

We also made connections to our school values of high expectations, respect, honesty, effort and perseverance and kindness.  The class identified how each value could be applied to the situation.

The class agreed that by using and changing the lyrics, we would show our thinking and learning.  By simply copying them we did not show any learning (or added value).

 The Education Council Code of Ethics for Certficated Teachers (https://educationcouncil.org.nz/content/code-of-ethics-certificated-teachers-0) lists teachers' commitments to learners, whanau, society and the profession.  

I chose to respond to the student's ethical breech around plagiarism in a restorative (what will we make better next time) way, and ignore the off-task, off-topic component.  By doing so I encouraged learners to think critically about significant social issues (commitment to learners).  I was also able to teach and model those positive values which are widely accepted in society and encourage learners to apply them and critically appreciate their significance (commitment to society).  In addition to the just-in-time teaching I phoned the student's parents to inform them what had happened and remind them about our commitment to online safety and security.  They were pleased to be informed and happy that the problem was resolved positively.  I fulfilled my commitment to parents by involving them in decision-making about the care and education of their child.

Like all lessons about values and ethics I am sure that this is one I will have to repeat in my classroom, however we now have another example to link to.