DFI #5 Collaborate - Visible Teaching and Learning

DFI #5 Collaborate - Visible Teaching and Learning

The concept of Visibility is simple - you can either see something or you can't. When we talk about Visible Learning Manaiakalani schools use Google Sites and Blogger as the vehicles for making teaching and learning visible, and in doing so have made parents genuine partners in the teaching and learning process.

Dorothy spoke about children having been unsuccessful at school in the past because much of the learning journey was hidden from them. 

That is was what school was like for me - trying as hard as I could but not actually knowing what was expected of me until I got my marked work back. Sometimes I would get an 8/10 and a comment 'good work' and other times I would get a 6/10 and the same 'good work' comment! As a cheeky 4th former I once submitted a book review assignment that I had written for an assignment in the 3rd form and had earned a C+. I was bemused to find that a year later and with no additions or improvements, it was worth a B+.

There was never any feedback as to how I could improve what I was doing.  No one ever talked to us about how to be successful at school - there was no such thing as WALTS or success criteria - we just knew that we were expected to be successful. 

For too long success in education has gone to the learner who had the ability to read the teacher's mind, - those who were able to 'learn' the teacher. 

I was interested to hear the discussion about See Saw, as it has become a bit of a sticking point in my school. Junior teachers love See Saw and the ease of its use for the younger children. Lots of schools seem to have continued to use it at the junior level, with blogs being used from Year 4 up - and I have not really been able to offer a reason as to why blogging is preferred. Today, I understood.. See Saw is not a visible teaching and learning experience because you need passwords for everything and only the people with the passwords can access the content. 

This article Be Careful With SeeSaw is an excellent read. It argues that because SeeSaw is so easy for teachers and children to use there is a danger that it will lead to a steady stream of low-quality images or videos that are captured with little or no thought or purpose and that provide parents with little or no substantial information about the nature of the learning that the students are engaged in, and also engages children in screen time that has little or no value. 

No doubt the same argument could be applied to blogging.

We need to be mindful that the aim is to make the learning visible. Unless we are purposeful, posting to any platform could become a  pretty pointless scrapbooking activity that gives parents a steady stream of images from within the classroom that they may start to depend on but not necessarily learn anything from.

This Week's New Learning

One of the ways that we can make learning visible is the use of Google Sites. Google Sites replace the blackboard, the worksheets, and even the things in the classroom that are there to help children learn are no use to the children when they are doing their learning at home.

While I take great pride in what I see the teachers at my school achieving with their Learning Sites before now I have never done anything in Sites myself - so today was a great example of me trying to catch up with them quickly. This is where being a perfectionist can really get in your way as a learner! I really like to know not just how things work and why, but also what is actually possible. I like things to look great - and the sooner the better. What this can actually do is slow me down to the point of inactivity!  

I did have a play in SItes to work out what goes where without getting too bogged down in 'is this the best picture I can find' and 'is that the right shade of blue'. Today was a slightly different DFI experience for me as I was learning alongside 3 of the teachers from my school - so it was good to have a 'reality check' every so often. 

As usual, far too much time is then spent getting my head around how to my new learning in a meaningful way. If I am going to spend time creating a site what will the purpose of it be? I have decided that making a site for the Board of Trustees is something that would be of benefit as they are not really managing the BOT Google Drive and all of the folders it contains. I haven't started yet - but the plan is to have something ready to share with the BOT at our next meeting on September 24th. I love a deadline!

 

Dealing with Data

I am really enjoying delving deeper into the various components of the Manaiakalani kaupapa, Learn Create Share. Hearing directly from Dorothy is filling in any gaps in my understanding and also reinforcing why I was so keen to have Rāhwiti School involved when the opportunity arose.

 

My big take away from this week was about sharing with an authentic audience and what that looks like for learners.

 

When I was at school, and in my early years of teaching, sharing was of the Morning Talk/  Show and Tell variety. This evolved to sharing with another person in the class, sharing with the teacher, the principal, and sometimes even sharing with parents and others in the community via the school newsletter. Some children may have had the opportunity to stand in front of the whole school assembly and share their work. 

However, what is missing from these scenarios is the authentic audience component. A school assembly is not an authentic audience because they have to listen to you – they have no choice.

 

Our involvement with Manaiakalani means that we make use of the Blogger platform to host individual student blogs for the public sharing of work. This means there is an opportunity for our students work to be read globally. Rather than completing work for the sole benefit of the teacher, our learners can share with others who share the same interests, or others who are invested in their learning i.e. friends and family.

 

Blogging is about sharing to learn. I thought the comparison between using Blogger and learning to drive was a great way of looking at things. Driving instructors use functional cars – they certainly don’t teach young people to drive in a top of the range Ferrari. Manaiakalani schools use Blogger as a vehicle to teach digital citizenship, it’s a bit like learning to drive online.

 

I am brand new to blogging – but I realised this week that if anyone actually reads my blog then they are choosing to listen to me, choosing to read, and maybe choosing to leave a comment. This has really made me think about how many student blog posts I read in a week (they come up in my Twitter feed) that I don't actually leave comments on. I am going to set myself a goal of contributing more when others are sharing to learn and setting time aside each week to comment on the student blogs from my school. 

My other learnings from the day......

• Google My Maps: This was not new to me but I really enjoyed having another play with it today and using it to plan out our upcoming (COVID-Alert levels allowing) Northland holiday in the next term break. 

 

•  Google Forms are something that I use a lot - but there is always more learning to be done e.g. uploading an image as part of the form was an option that I did not know about. Click here to fill in my form and help me out with some viewing ideas in case we end up back in Covid-Alert Level 4!
• Google Sheets: Lots of new learning here for me. I spend a lot of time looking at data that comes to me on spreadsheets created by other members of staff. I can do most of the basics but I really want to spend some time exploring the Conditional Formatting options as I can see lots of potential for using these to identify priority learners and those who have made accelerated progress. 

DFI#3 Media

Creativity has always been very important to me. On my first day of primary school, I took on the leading role in the class production of 'Are You My Mother'. (The original narrator was away sick, I could already read on arrival at school, and happily put my hand up to fill the gap.) I actually have a school report from my primary school days that says “Elizabeth has a fine sense of the dramatic”. We did not have a TV and so as a very young child, I used to put my dolls in the oven, shut the door, turn the light on, and narrate my own tv shows to entertain my siblings! I begged to learn to play the piano and then, much to parents' dismay, the violin, and any other instrument that the school had in the music room. At intermediate school, I joined my first ‘band’. We called ourselves ‘7 Day Dairy and the Milk Shakes’ and dreamed of becoming 70's rock chicks!

 

Eventually, I decided the stage was where I wanted to be and in my early days of teaching, I led a ‘double life’ of full-time teaching by day and acting at night, while weekends were filled with stand-up comedy and improvised theatre. To this day, my life outside of school has a strong focus on the performing arts and it saddens me when I hear teachers saying that they are so busy working at nights that they have no time for personal hobbies and passions.

As a classroom teacher, I was inspired by the work of Sylvia Ashton Warner. Her philosophy that volcanoes and children need vents of creativity, from her 1963 book Teacher, is still as relevant now as it was then. I can’t help but wonder if the reason that so many schools and teachers are reporting explosive student behaviours in the classroom is linked in some way to the decline of the arts in education?

 

I have believed for a long time that over time schools teach the innate creativity out of children. I frequently blamed the ‘dark years’ of National Standards for the absence of creativity in many classrooms. How could creativity flourish if children are being fed formula in order to learn how to earn the most points on a senseless standardised test?

 

At our school, one of our 4 RISE learner capabilities is Imaginative (Whakaaro Are).

“We dare to be creative. Being imaginative is not always about creating something new, but also, with a little ingenuity making old things work better. We are encouraged to reach far into the depths of our minds and come up with outlandish possibilities as well as practical ones. We undertake new and daring challenges and love trying to solve big problems. We do not always take the easy or expected option!”

 

 

I think that the Create part of the Manaiakalani kaupapa is one of the key reasons that I chose to involve Rawhiti School in the outreach programme when the opportunity presented.

Reflecting on My Learning

 

For someone who loves having the opportunity to be creative, learning about being creative using a digital platform was hard work! Today I was the kid who had to stay in and morning break and lunchtime to finish the work the others had all done in class. It felt more like a learning chasm than a learning pit! While frustrating, it has given me a real insight into how so many children must feel while sitting in our classrooms and not being able to keep up. It has shown me why rewindable learning opportunities are essential, and the tools focused on today are the ways to provide those opportunities for learners (young, and old!).

Eventually, I managed to get my About Me button in the right place on my blog page and went on to create my YouTube Channel and a Playlist of music we that could use in our school bell system that plays songs to indicate the end of break times. I did have to stop myself as I could have spent hours trawling YouTube music videos.

Google Slides and Google Drawing are my home learning for the coming week.

DFI#2 Going With The Flow

Today the tips and tricks just kept on coming! 

How to get the best out of our Gmail and calendar, Meet, Keep, and taming the tabs. 

I felt I already had my head around most of the basic having been really well trained by the late - and wonderful - @madmacnz (Carol Kendall) back in 2009 as a first time principal in a ‘Google’ school. Working with talented teachers like Elizabeth Kazmierczak (@rawhitibythesea) also keeps me on the right path. However, I notoriously have far too many tabs open at one time, which causes considerable angst if my computer shuts down and I can’t remember what I had open and why. I have now had a play around with One Tab and have also found that pinning the tabs is really effective for me. I have also sorted my bookmarks bar, removing the text and using just the icons saving so much room. 

 Having lived on Meet during the Level 3 and 4 COVID restrictions, and then not using it since it took me a moment to get my head back around the details – an excellent example of ‘if you don’t use it you lose it’. 

This was my first attempt at recording a meeting.

 

  

 I enjoyed chatting with Iain for this exercise – always great to connect with other principals to compare notes, and probably a good thing that we did not record our entire conversation! 

 The Manaiakalani kaupapa focus for the day was Learn – Ako. 

Dorothy posed the following questions: what does learning look like in your school? What does our school believe are the processes that lead to good learning? This took me back to some work we had started as a staff at the beginning of the school year, pre-Covid, on our annual staff retreat. We spent 2 days together as a team reviewing the shared beliefs about teaching and learning that were (hastily) determined 5 years ago when the three schools first merged. As part of this exercise we also asked ourselves the question – if these are the things that we believe about teaching and learning, what would we expect to see all of our teachers doing? The influence of our (at that stage) 2 years involvement in the Manaiakalani Outreach Programme was evident throughout the ensuing conversation. Dorothy reminded me on Friday to go back to our guiding document the NZ Curriculum and check out the teacher actions that promote student learning, as well as the Woolf Fisher high leverage practices. I am now going to revisit this work with the leadership team.

At Rāwhiti we have a vision for all children to Rise Above the Ordinary. As learners we want children to be Resourceful, Imaginative, Successful, and Engaged (our RISE learner capabilities). The Manaiakalani kaupapa has seen Rāwhiti move from the analog to a world, has increased teacher effectiveness and has accelerated learning outcomes for our children.