A teacher's job is to teach, correct? What about planning? Of course we need to plan. We need to plan what we will teach, how we will teach it, and to whom we will teach it - in the current New Zealand system. To what level should we plan?
Too little detail in planning and teachers could end up stumbling through a lesson, not being as efficient as they need. They may not have resources ready for students.
Too much detail planning means teachers there might be detail that is forgotten or overlooked and the time gone to waste. Or worse, they will lose time from their personal lives.
Planning week to week. Is this meeting students' needs, or is it consuming time that teachers could use to be creative in their teaching, get upskilled/upskill other teachers, or take on leadership responsibilities?
Planning by term. Is this failing to meeting students' needs, or is it ensuring exposure to a full curriculum?
I have experienced all of the above, and I need to consider the balance in case I decide to become a school manager/leader. How much do I trust my teachers to do their job, especially in a modern context where it is difficult to fire someone for not doing their job? How much do I micro-manage my teachers, especially in a context where teachers aren't getting the pay and respect due to them? How do I create a culture where teachers want to help and have the time to help each other?
What is the Nature of Education? What is the purpose of Education? Is it to "foster a love of learning" or is it to provide children with the tools to do things in society, including learning new skills to be functional? To some this may seem an innocuous question or a pointless one since the end result is the same, isn't it? In an ideal world, I would certainly hope that the end result is the same. However as I see it, both the end results are different and the processes used are different.
The end result of fostering learning lovers is a population of young people who enjoy learning about anything. I am going to assume the hope is that young people will then have no inhibitions about learning anything new that they might need in the future. Really? I enjoyed primary school. I enjoyed parts of secondary school. I would say that I like, if not love learning about new things. However I actively procrastinate when I'm faced with needing to learn anything I find boring, pointless, or difficult/tedious. The end result of fostering learning lovers is just that: people who love learning. That doesn't necessarily mean that they can do, or even want to do.
How about teaching the core skills required to be functional in a multitude of jobs? This way at the very least, young adults (not the euphemism for children) have the option of taking any job that comes their way or to learn the skills needed to take on a job. It sounds archaic, but this was the purpose of the first education institutes developed during the Industrial Revolution. To get those children to at least the minimum level of functionality in society. At that time, it was to serve industry and companies. However did it also serve those children? As educators, shouldn't we be thinking about which serves children better: to love learning, or to be at least minimally functional?
I write as if they are two different things because the way I see it, the teaching approaches are fundamentally different. One requires a relaxed pace of teaching, and making sure to provide a wide range of enjoyable experiences to learn from. The keyword there being enjoyable. The other approach requires programmes/progressions of learning that build upon each other to meet a target level of ability.
Children are similar to adults, some will love learning, some with hate it, and some will be indifferent. In fact children are possibly more prone to enjoy learning than adults since all young need to learn the skills required of adulthood. If they already possess this attitude, then why bother trying to foster it? Why not change the methods of teaching, so that this natural curiosity isn't taken away from children while still learning the core skills?
There are people like Prince Ea espousing that the current approach to education is broken (see the video) and that school didn't teach the skills needed for everyday life. Really? Did he not learn to read? Did he not learn to think in different ways? Did he not learn information as a base to build, or in his case, to re-build from? How is he even a thinker of that level if school didn't teach him some fundamental thinking skills?
Sure, he is talking mainly about the American high school system. However to blatantly ignore the fact that he can do what he can because of school is also wrong.
School can never teach "the skills needed for the future". We cannot know the future. We can predict, but mostly we will be wrong. No one predicted YouTube and therefore "YouTuber" as a career pathway. No one predicted computer miniaturisation, 3D printing and their cost dropping to the point where MakerSpaces and "Maker" being a career pathway. No one predicted social media and "Influencer" as a career pathway. What skills do these all have in common? The abilities to read, analyse numbers, understand trends in people/populations, and plan. In other words, reading, writing, maths, history, science, critical thinking. Despite my desire to rag on influencers, the successful ones admittedly know how to manipulate people's perceptions and give them what they want...critical thinking of a kind.
Back to the point, Education or teachers at least, cannot teach the skills needed in the future. We can however, teach the fundamental skills needed to learn and adapt in the future regardless of whether a person loves what they're doing or not.
As previously mentioned, I enjoyed making films while I worked in the Manaiakalani cluster. In my time there I made and contributed to at least one film every year (except 2016). The record of them is below.
Contrasting my films to most of the other Manakalani films, you may notice that mine are more short film style rather than "learning videos", or what I call 'home video' style. In 2015, I had success in having students actually contribute to the development of the film, which was a learning experience for them. I thought this was a much more valuable experience for them compared to the teacher filming a PE session, or some other showcase of learning. You can see that style in my 2014 films, especially Along the Shore.
Later on, there was some feedback or a crackdown on certain types of film (films with violence?). Honestly, I can't remember what happened, but it made Ogilvie and me annoyed. That's when I started to put satire into my work.
Lastly, the 2021 book trailers were an idea from our principal. The idea was to have an easy idea that could be created anywhere in case of another lockdown. The LotR trailer was created by me alone due to the fact that we had run out of time and students due to Covid.
While most of the movies were fun to make, I obviously have my favourites. My favourites are:
PokeBlade. This wasn't submitted as the representative film for Panmure Bridge School at the Evening Showcase. However I had reports that during the day screenings, it was an audience (and adult supervisor) favourite.
COVID. I really needed to satirise the situation.
How to Hold a Netbook. Doing a "How to" series in the style of How to Dad was an inspiration by Ogilvie.
It's a Bit Dicey. Can you tell that this is where my effort to satirise everything started? This movie combined kung fu movies integrated into our class's Inquiry topic and used blue screening and animation. This was all before I started using HitFilm as a film editor, so it was not easy.
I worked in the Manaiakalani Cluster for eight years, starting as a beginning teacher (BT) in the Manaiakalani Digital Teacher Academy (MDTA). Seven years of that, I worked at Panmure Bridge School (PBS), as can be seen by my class site links. As of December 2022, that came to an end, and from January 2023, I started at a different school.
Panmure Bridge School and the various staff taught me a lot, helping me mature from a BT to a slightly experienced teacher. I learned various methods of teaching, how to work with a range of people, and a little of how to manage groups of people. I learned how to use assessment to inform my teaching, how to use data to continually improve my practice (admittedly, I haven't shown my data on my blog), and I developed a habit of keeping my lessons and teaching transparent.
In my time at PBS, I hope I have contributed to them as much as I think I have. I became their "digital guy", managing the accounts, taking care of equipment and minor hardware and software issues, and the film festival management. Making films was probably the most fun I had, especially trying to push the limits of what was considered for educational purposes. More on that in another post maybe. I also recreated their website in 2020, and created streamlined documentation formats which reduced digital clutter and helped keep information centralised.
The school (School) where I work now will remain unnamed until I understand their digital policies much better. School is quite different from PBS, having a different demographic of children and families, slightly different teaching philosophy, and different systems. So far it's been a huge learning curve and I haven't even started teaching yet. We'll see what happens. We've already had some professional development training. More on that later.
I have been working on developing numeracy for a couple of years now. I had a hunch that improving oral and read literacy would have a positive impact on numeracy, especially with comprehending word problems.
Where I am currently:
I have taught Extended Discussion through Reading. I have aligned my Reciprocal Maths roles with my Extended Discussion roles. I use both regularly in lessons.
Changes I have made to my practise:
I have built extended discussion in to my reading lessons. I have a specific lesson for working on word problems and allow students to discuss through a problem and teach each other.
Problems:
Some students are not buying into helping others through conversation. They prefer to just solve problems. I may need to make specific groupings.
Next steps:
I have an idea for a more simplified Extended Discussion cue card. Hopefully this will promote more natural discussion.
I still need to move from Reciprocal Maths to the more open discussion format of Extended discussion.
Basic Facts Boxes has been updated, four years after I first developed it. This version has several new features to improve the experience all coming under an altered basic facts focus and a different physical layout.
Basic Facts Boxes v2 focuses on the addition/subtraction facts to 20 and times tables, i.e. the first 100 multiplications. I work with students who have major gaps in knowledge and are often far behind expectations, so I need to figure out ways of helping them learn. The Numeracy Development Project takes children on a meandering path through number learning, which in my opinion makes children run sections of the path before they can walk. Focusing on the facts to 20 and times tables covers the main facts we English speaking people need as core maths skills.
To differentiate for those less skilled, there is now the option of choosing ordered or random. Ordered being the easier version... That's assumed, not tested. I would hope that students would be able to see a pattern forming so they can solve anything they don't know yet. Anyone who can't is likely to need a different level of education programme anyway.
The basic facts boxes that students fill in are now collated into two 10x10 grids (excluding frames). This change imparts several improvements:
Increased practise frequency within a single "box".
Smoother and faster number entry. Users now only need to use the tab and enter keys to move between cells.
Improved screenshot captures.
The ability to print to an A4 page.
Using a new format forced me to make improvements on the layout and programming. Everything except the title, grid, and buttons at the top are generated through the script. This brings everything one step closer to a "fool proof" spreadsheet where if anything (such as the grid) was deleted somehow, the whole grid would be reset/ regenerated by clicking a button.
This year is shaping up to be a strange one. While I am still working on maths, my inquiry this year is into reading comprehension and more specifically an initiative called Extended Discussion. Extended Discussion attempts to improve reading comprehension of texts through conversation between group members. This is very different from my initial post about this year's inquiry.
The end goal of Extended Discussion is to have students discussing a text and asking questions of each other. Discussion and questioning pools students' mental resources and gives opportunities to learn from others or teach others. Effective questioning also encourages students to discover where they may not realise they have misunderstood the text.
Obviously, training students to be capable of conversation requires different amounts of work for different students. In general the students of my class tend to be on the polite side, not wanting to disagree or speak out of turn. A handful are able to comprehend texts at their chronological age or higher. Even then, they still do not have the background knowledge (derived from reading mileage) to help them overcome some language hurdles such as idioms or metaphor. A large majority of my students' reading ages are sitting just below their chronological age. On top of that, they have the same background knowledge issues as the handful mentioned above but more pronounced. While I suspect much of my students' reluctance to answer questions, or their seeming inability to answer simple questions is the result of doing nothing at home over our multitude of lockdowns, the reading mileage issue has been present since long before lockdowns started.
A breakdown of my process follows:
The benefit of running this in my Reading programme is that it is going in the direction I wanted my Maths to go, hence the Reciprocal Maths cards I developed. I will be trying to develop this within my Maths programme as well.
Week One was the intended first week of teaching Reciprocal Maths and applying it to word problems...that didn't happen, for many reasons. One such reason was my underestimation of the effect of covid based learning gaps, and the lack of formal maths education using maths exercise books.
Week Two ended up being a very brief introduction to Reciprocal Maths, while Week One ended up being a lesson on how to rule up a maths exercise book. It seemed that students took to the steps and process of Reciprocal Maths easily enough. However few groups applied the strategy taught prior to exercising Reciprocal Maths. More instruction and closer observation are needed.
This week, perhaps a choreographed demonstration is required to give an idea of how to run through the procedure.
Side note: it seems many students need more instruction on which way to begin opening an exercise book and how to find the "first" unused page.
*Edit and disclaimer* The following post doesn't detail my confusion as to what the Inquiry for 2022 actually was. In subsequent posts you will see that my Inquiry was into Extended Discussion. This post was written before that decision was made. The principal talked about improving children's wellbeing and motivation to come to school in the new post lockdown era (seen in the post prior to this). That is what I got fixated on.
Post-ish Covid Teacher Inquiry...what to do? My Teacher Inquiry has already been chosen for me, but frankly, I don't see it as something I need to put too much thought into. More on that later.
Right here I will bullet point the maths programme that I had started last year with Grant Ogilvie (Go for Teaching) but wasn't able to continue. The details are as follows:
Number knowledge & algebra, other strands, and strategy are taught on separate days in the week.
The above divisions are taught every week.
Other strands are taught in detail throughout the term. This is where the blog posts come from.
Number sequence and order, place value, fractions, basic facts, and algebra are taught in two week blocks. Currently the two weeks are consecutive weeks. Preferably the weeks would be separated to encourage retention. This will happen from T3, when my new co-teacher has developed some familiarity with the programme.
strategy covers add/sub, mult/div, proportions/ratios, as Gloss (assessment) divides them.
proportions and ratios are taught more than the others due to it being the focus as decided by the Senior Management Team. Preferably I would make sure add/sub and mult/div are understood completely before teaching prop/rat, but that's not how the NZ maths curriculum works.
Reasoning from observation as follows:
skills and knowledge across the board were low
division of groups based on overall level was not targeting students precisely enough.
retention was poor
many students with capable skills were testing low, with our hunch being they didn't understand the problems.
our subsequent decisions were: to look more closely at the data to target specific weak areas for each student, specifically in strand, to continually and repeatedly cover all knowledge, and to develop comprehension of maths problems and thinking skills to solve them.
finding weak areas in strand and teaching it over protracted periods is an attempt to boost strand knowledge
repeatedly covering all areas of knowledge is to build retention
to improve maths problem comprehension, we developed our "Reciprocal Maths" programme, which we haven't had a good run at due to Covid.
Our Reciprocal Maths programme has been covered here.
So what is my Teacher Inquiry for 2022? What I can do to keep/increase student motivation post Covid... I understand the need for keeping an eye on student "wellbeing", and that children's motivation for school might be lowered... However isn't keeping students motivated part of a teacher's job anyway?
Teacher inquiry for 2022 is about how to gain student engagement in the wake of COVID lockdowns, isolations, and fear based absence. To keep students engaged Grant Ogilvie (GO for Teaching) and I have used more physically-based activities and included more social supports (tuakana-teina / sempai-kōhai teaching).
Although the general vibe of the classroom at the moment is keenness to get into work, there are some difficulties due to the situation. These difficulties range from not having the resources they normally would have by this time to a disparity between their keenness and actual ability.
The main strategy Grant and I are employing, though, is keeping class running as close to normal as possible. This includes everything from keeping all expectations as they were pre-covid (while understanding that many have not had a full Year 3 or 4) to running lessons as close to "normal" as possible and not leaning too heavily into online learning. For the moment, this strategy is difficult, however it should pan out well.
I created the Recount Writer in an attempt to further scaffold the writing of the recount text type. Initially the roll out went to my maths groups. Within this group of children, there is a wide range of writing ability. Subsequent roll outs were to my reading groups, most of whom find writing difficult, and the whole class in Inquiry.
In our school, we teach the structure of a recount as TREE; title, reveal, events, ending. The reveal is meant to introduce the overall activity done and who was involved. The events detail separate parts of the activity. We generally aim for three events for a standard recount or one event for a quick recount. The latter are primarily used in short blog posts. Personal reflections of the activity come in the ending section.
Test Results
Following are three results from different students showing a reasonable amount of success. An interesting point to note is that while all three of the events were set to compulsory in the Recount Writer scaffold, only the topic sentence for each paragraph was compulsory. The examples below show that students have attempted to add further detail, for the most part.
This recount is from a student in my maths groups. This student is both new to the class and has difficulty with sentence structure, particularly tense.
The sample shows that while the student still has issues with tense, they have been able to separate the learning task into three separate events. Separating events is often a big hurdle in writing recounts and learning how to use paragraphs.
Animal Rescue Centres is a text I taught for reading. The student who wrote this is new to the school, new to using netbooks on the scale we do, and comes from a Te Reo Māori immersion kura so less experienced with writing English than other students.
We can see that they have not only separated events, but also started to think about where sentences start and stop. This is part of the how the Recount Writer was designed. The easiest next step for this student would be to remind them to use full stops at the end of their answer to each prompted question.
The fact that this student has written about what they did over several lessons as opposed to the reading tasks is an indication of where many students are at in terms of their understanding of the content they need to be blogging about.
Party popper Prototype is written by a more experienced writer who has worked their way up from being an unproductive student. All of the aspects of recount writing are present. The next step for a student like this could be to use the Recount Writer to develop single events that are detailed over multiple paragraphs. Alternatively the next step would be to take them off the writer after a bit more practise and have them write blog posts of this detail.
Next Step
The premise of a writer has been shown to have promise. The next step is to adapt this to the Information Report and Explanation text types.
Last year GO for teaching and I came up with an idea to increase writing mileage while freeing up time for more targeted teaching in writing. See our initial post and the follow-up post regarding the update. This idea was successful in having students practise writing different text structures (recount and information report mostly) semi-independently for their blog posts. Moving practise time to non-lesson time allowed us (the teachers) to focus on teaching more grammatical and stylistic points. The extra practise time was particularly needed during the various lockdowns throughout 2020, which made us lose a lot of lesson time.
Issue
This year, our class has not been completing the same volume of work despite being at school more because there are less lockdowns. There seem to be a multitude of possible reasons. One of those reasons is our class make up having expanded to include year 4's The year 4's are a small group of students who aren't used to the amount of production required for years 5 and 6.
Fix
After throwing around a few ideas, Go for teaching and I decided on another scaffold to try speeding up the process of getting blog posts written while learning the different parts of various text structures, starting with recounts. The scaffold made (see below) is based on a survey mailing list that we came across. The Recount Writer uses prompts divided into the different sections of a recount to aid students in writing their recounts.
The Recount Writer then sends a copy of the student's responses written and formatted on a Google Doc to their inbox (see examples below). Students are then expected to copy and paste the text into Blogger to create a blog post.
The next step, aside from refining this prompt, will be to create scaffolds for the information report and explanation text types.
I ran a workshop at the August 2020 Create Staff Meeting Workshop on using Pencil Code for art and maths. The Create Workshop ran for Manaiakalani staff is a cluster wide staff meeting where teachers hold workshops to pass on skills for teaching children. The focus of the skills is on the 'create' part of Learn Create, Share, which involves children creating digital learning objects (DLOs) as learning tasks.
My Pencil Code workshop took people through some challenges to learn the basics of coding. The first challenge for example, had people drawing a straight line, then expanding on that skill to create a house.
After creating the house, people could continue with the basic shapes challenge to create a smiling sun, or move on to the Coding Angles challenge.
The Coding Angles challenge tasks people with coding the turtle to travel between locations by measuring the angle and estimating distance between locations. This task involved the use of both digital and physical resources through using a protractor.
The afternoon was a good introduction for everyone into Pencil Code and how it can be used in the classroom for maths and art with these challenges. Pencil Code is more versatile and I would like to try coding simple quizzes or pick a path stories with children.
Sheena Cameron and Louise Dempsey held a PD session on balanced reading programmes. The balance being talked about was between modelled reading, shared reading, guided reading, and independent reading. One of my key takeaways from this PD was to use template follow-up tasks rather than specifically created tasks. I tend towards the latter, which is in Sheena and Louise's words, unsustainable.
Yes, that Covid Lockdown. What are the learnings I have taken from teaching through lockdown? Working in a digital learning environment, I was quite confident that most of the 'digital component' would be easy enough for students to pick up. Generally that was the case, however what did go awry was the students not understanding the written instructions given. I tried a number of different things to allow students to understand their instructions.
The most wide ranging strategy was to create video tutorials showing how to do tasks (Light and Sound inquiry unit with video tutorials showing how to complete tasks). Another wide ranging strategy was to simplify the language used in written instructions. Finally small group or as close to one on one support as possible was provided through video meetings where I held tutorials.
Lockdown taught a lot about existing procedures, how much of instructions our students actually comprehend and retain, and helped establish better work flow procedures.
There has been success with students applying the text structures when writing their blog posts. Now it's time to teach and add the language features to this poster.
Here's the post talking about teaching language feathers.
TREE, TIIC, TIMES, the text type structure acronyms for recount, information report, and explanation respectively have been taught in my classroom for at least 3 years. So it was a bit of a shock to find that many students we have taught already (in some cases this is their third year with us) cannot remember them and how to apply them. See the blog post I have written about this here: https://ls1teaching.blogspot.com/2020/05/blog-post-structure-update.html.
