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.

Social media and teaching

Ironically I began my journey with social media in education when I was out of the classroom, working as a course administrator for a professional development provider.  My motivations were twofold: to keep up with innovations and trends in education; and to use my free time (yes, I had a lot more of it) to play and explore.

Becoming social online was a slow and gradual process.  I began with Facebook, then Twitter, then YouTube, then LinkedIN, then Blogger, then Flickr, then Feedly, then Pinterest, then Google+, then ... well, you get it.

Perhaps because I didn't have a classroom to practice in it took me a while to become more than a voyeur and actively participate in conversations or write posts of my own.  Time to play and explore has been the best professional development.  It has allowed me to see and experience the possibilities offered by each different application.

Now I am back in a classroom I feel confident about using social media tools as an integrated part of our teaching, learning and reflecting.  I use the tools that will fill a need in our learning and that fulfil a purpose.  In this way I am able to model and teach social media etiquette and safety which I would not be doing if the tool was a gimmick or just for fun.

Which brings me to my choices for social media in the classroom.  I have chosen to keep some applications for personal use only (Facebook, LinkedIN, Flickr, Feedly).  These media contain more personal information or are not appropriate to my class' learning needs.  There is also an age restriction for Facebook (although several of my students have an account).

Blogger, YouTube, Google and Twitter are the media I use in class and in school.  I have found YouTube has revolutionised the way I demonstrate a concept.  We also upload our own videos to share on our class blog.  Our class blog is used as a reflection, record and launch page for learning activities.  Twitter is mainly my professional learning feed.  We do not have a class account but occasionally I'll share a useful link or conversation.  We have created Google accounts for each student in my class this year and they are very keen to use the tools.  Several students are enjoying being able to comment on their own and others' work.

The idea of being connected in school as we are at home is vital if we are to deliver relevant, real and responsive learning experiences to our students.  They already know I am not the expert on everything and through social media (web 2.0 tools) I can give them some pathways to discovering experts themselves.

Maraeroa Seniors blog http://maraeroaseniors.blogspot.co.nz/
My Twitter handle - susie2point0

Issues in education

THE ISSUE
In a recent report examining global trends and implications for New Zealand schools, ERO (2012) has identified three areas of priority: student-centred learning; responsive and rich curriculum; and, assessment used for students’ learning.

I am increasingly aware that the jobs that my students' families have - and that many of my students aspire to - will either not exist or will be highly automated by the time my students are in the job market.

The students I currently teach face an increasingly crowded, global, competitive training and job market.  The valued currencies will be creativity, communication, innovation, flexibility, problem solving.

THE SHIFT
I am, therefore, making our classroom curriculum rich, real and responsive.  We use situations from students' lives outside of school as a basis for our learning from maths to science to social studies to the arts.

Since making the explicit shift to using student-based contexts for learning I have noticed that engagement levels across the class have increased.  Students are more likely to persevere through tasks at a higher level of challenge.

Students are interested and hooked into the learning earlier (and easier) than when we used school-based contexts for learning.  They make and express connections between their own experiences and knowledge and are more likely to ask delving questions.

THE RUB
Using teacher judgement, anecdotal notes, student voice and peer assessments I know that this approach to the curriculum is supporting students to access learning and achieve at a higher level.  However, I have found a disconnect between this mode of teaching/learning and standardised testing formats.

Specifically in maths, I have found students freeze, freak-out or flop when faced with PATs or e-Asttles.  The format, language and contexts of these tests are at odds with the way I deliver my maths curriculum.

Gloss is more culturally responsive, real life problem based - and easier to adapt the language without compromising the tool's validity.

All of which begs the questions: is teacher judgment enough to assess for learning?  If teachers are to be responsive, creative and draw from students' lives to inform their practice then are schools, Boards of Trustees and the Ministry of Education to allow for responsive, creative, student-based assessment tools?

Education Review Office (2012).The three most pressing issues for New Zealand’s education system.

Professional connections - appreciating the PLN

He aha te mea nui o te ao  What is the most important thing in the world?
He tangata, he tangata, he tangata  It is the people, it is the people, it is the people

Maori proverb

Throughout my teaching and non-teaching education career it has been the relationships and networks I've formed that have impacted on my practice more than reading or seeing.  

The advent of social media has been a huge boost to my personal learning network.  Since joining the Twitter-sphere I have been able to listen to, follow and contribute to education conversations across the globe.  Following hashtags like #educhat, #educhatnz, #wellyed, #ulearn, #mindlabed provides both conversation and links to research and readings.  This has allowed me to access a wealth of experience, opinion and expertise on topics of interest.  

While there is sometimes a tsunami of information to process and discern, the Twitter community offers a sense of validation for my personal experiences / wonderings / difficulties.  The fact that educators across the globe are wrestling with the same questions about their practice provides a 'safety in numbers' environment where I feel my contributions are worthwhile.  

I do not regularly have time to check in with my Twitter PLN but know that the stream will be flowing when I am again available to dip my toe in.

The second acceleration period in my personal learning network occured when I joined the July 2015 intake of the Mindlab/Unitech course.  The combination of face to face and social media contact has formed professional bonds that traverse sectors, deciles and roll numbers.  Having discussed and debated educational topics from a personal and research base I value the diverse solutions offered by my classmates to universal issues.

Being a lifelong learner means continually growing and changing in response to feedback.  My PLN provides both the feedback and the information for change.

Most great learning happens in groups. Collaboration is the stuff of growth.

Sir Ken Robinson Ph.D.

Communities of Practice - building a professional identity

"Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly."  Etienne Wenger-Trayner

As a social human being with diverse interests, I am a member of several communities of practice.  

In my learning life I am one of 150 participants in Le Grand Continental - a local-population sourced dance performance to open the NZ Festival programme.  The group is all ages, all levels of experience, all types of physical ability, all cultures, all religions, all [insert personal attribute here].  The one thing that has brought us together and drives us to learn the choreography (a 4-6 hour commitment each week since Nov '15) is our enjoyment of dance and music.  Unexpected bonds have been formed.  Offers of feedback and support abound.  Reflective discussion about connecting music with movement can be heard.  Through all these dynamic interactions there are continuous 'light bulb' learning moments so powerful that you can see, hear and feel them - which feeds the momentum of the group.

In my teaching life I am part of a community of mathematical inquiry.  The community was formed last year with three primary schools in Porirua East and mathematical mentors from Massey University, Auckland.  The aim of developing the community of mathematical inquiry is to deliver maths in a highly culturally responsive way to accelerate maths engagement and achievement for our students.

All three schools are in close proximity and have 80%+ Pasifika students.  The framework we use for maths delivery incorporates the Pasifika principles (respect, service, leadership, spirituality, belonging, family, love, inclusion and reciprocity).  As a community we come together for professional development days.  Within our schools we have sub-community and critical buddy sessions.  Students are part of the community.  They participate in maths lessons, reflect on their own and each other's learning, as well as providing feedback to teachers and the mentor team.  This year the community is welcoming three more local schools.

One of the issues the community is currently working on is how to collaborate amongst schools between professional development sessions.  This would enable sharing of day-to-day practices and learnings.  I have set up a Google site for teachers to post questions / lesson plans / breakthroughs.  However without regular contributions from community members there is no dialogue.  Some teachers have Twitter feeds.  Perhaps the shorter format will prove more appealing.

If I draw on my dance community experience, starting with the passionate (or able) core, we can begin with a gesture that will become a movement.

Reflecting on 'Reflecting on Reflective Practice'

Switching from holiday brain to school brain - planning, mentoring a masters teaching student and continuing Mindlab course papers - Linda Finlay's (2008) discussion paper raised a lot of flags.

The point in the article that particularly resonated with my own reflective practice journey was the importance of making reflection timely and meaningful.

I will put up my hand and admit to being the teacher who, long after the teaching had occurred (and with no real evidence), filled in the 'evaluation/reflection' box at the bottom of the planning document.  My reflections were never deliberately acted on - although a few ideas seeped through.  No one checked in with me nor did I invite input from students or colleagues.  It was an entirely solo, box-ticking exercise.

My teaching and learning practice has become far more responsive.  Using a teaching as inquiry approach means that reflection is happening formally and informally throughout practice (not after the unit is finished and the form needs to completed and filed away).  Planning and practice shifts as required to meet the needs of my learners.  In order to ensure that any shifts are in the right direction, both teacher and student need to reflect on what is or is not working, how we know and where to go next.

By incorporating reflection into my teaching and learning practice I not only prioritise the time and resource that deep reflection needs but can immediately implement changes to make my practice more effective.

At my school we use a range of reflective tools and do not have one prescribed model.  There is a lot of dialogue between colleagues, teacher-student or student-student (formally and informally).  A framework we have adopted through developing our community of mathematical inquiry is the 'talk moves'.  These are designed to encourage critical participation in maths discussion.  They have a strong element of critical, reflective thinking and justification which makes them apt for reflection.  For our teaching as inquiry foci we use a critical buddy to pose questions and provocations.

The challenge is to record these interactions and conversations in a way that is not intrusive or counterproductive to the reflection process (ideas?).  The record of reflection can then be used as an artifact (and a tool) in our learning journey.

The Journey So Far - a look back to move forward

The first step of this journey happened almost by accident. I had been a sporadic twitter user, an early adopter of new technology (in my school, certainly not the world), interested in teaching and learning theories and a professional development junkie. I had followed Glasser and Claxton. I had heard about inquiry and 21st century competencies from Kath Murdoch and Tony Ryan (among many others). I realised that as incredible and inspirational as all this was, it was the connections and conversations with 'people on the ground' that really helped turn information into practice.

When the opportunity to enrol on Mindlab's Certificate of Applied Practice: Digital and Collaborative (themindlab.com) course first came up I read through the information and decided it sounded a bit too much like hard work! However, the idea lingered. I revisited the website and by then I had met someone who had previously done the course. While home from school with tonsillitis I found myself signing up! Blame the antibiotics but it was a decision I am glad I made. While it has been very hard work at times (literature review anyone?), the collaborative nature of the course and the class has been impactful in my teaching.

In the early weeks of the course we had to comment on the key competencies as they related to us and our teaching practice. I deemed my strengths to be thinking, relating to others, participating and contributing. Two areas I committed to develop through the course were thinking and managing self. 

Thinking aka making connections has been a huge part of my challenge and enjoyment through the course. There were times when discussions, readings or videos would intersect with classroom experiences and professional learning happening through my school. In these moments I felt validated when a hunch was given substance or a challenge given acceptance. I often find myself thinking how my students must feel in similar circumstances and how important the opportunities to speak and be heard are.

Given I have just submitted an assignment due early December, managing self seems an apt competency for me to work on!

 
Reflecting on the reasons that I procrastinate (I usually have a plan and I usually follow through, eventually).  1.  I'm scared of failure and embarrassment.  2.  I'm not sure what to do (then refer to 1).  Knowing there is a model to borrow or template to use makes any task less daunting.  Having your thoughts and opinions valued by others (even when they disagree) is also encouraging.  The Mindlab class provided both of these crutches.

In my classroom these experiences have translated into a more scaffolded approach to tasks where a model (or shared experience) is discussed without judgement or agenda as a prequel to the learning activity. Learning has become more about the process (we talk about 'growth mindsets') than the end product. In his latest blog post George Couros (http://georgecouros.ca/blog) has a great diagram showing the messiness of learning, how it is not linear but derives from making connections from multiple inputs.  Understanding the process and minimising the 'risks' of learning has become a big part of my classroom practice.  Using 'talk moves' students to contribute and value multiple viewpoints which we synthesise into a shared understanding.

From our shared understanding we can all move forward.