Critical Thinking: Assigned Q&A

It was so fun to expand Critical Thinking with some of my fast finishers today. 

After attending our first DFI session last week, I really wanted to have some students expand their critical thinking skills using an assigned Q&A Google Docs assignment that Dorothy Burt shared with us. Unfortunately, the way things were in our learning space this week, we ran out of time to trial it as a whole reading group (or class), but I did have three boys who were fast finishers. So, I took their spare time and turned them into guinea pigs. 

Using an article that was already assigned as one of their reading texts for the week, I quickly copied the text to a Google Doc and shared it with the three boys. I took a few minutes to show them how to assign comments to each other (+their email address in the comment box) and then instructed them to ask each other questions about the text. They were very excited to trial something new, and while they were getting started, I wrote a question individually assigned to each of them to answer. 

They boys were enjoying themselves so much, they didn't even realise that the entire learning space shifted from literacy to maths all around them.  Once I realised they were still working in our shared space on the Q&A, I told them they would have to finish up later and they were actually bummed to have to stop working and shift to maths. 

So very excited to add this into my lessons for upcoming weeks to see how it goes with a whole reading group working together.

PES PD: Manaiakalani LEARN

LEARN

Term 1: Dorothy Burt

This week was the Pt England Manaiakalani staff meeting.  During Term 1, the schools throughout Manaiakalani focus on the Learn part of our Learn, Create, Share pedagogy.   Below is are my notes and personal reflection from that session.

Recognise Effective Practice

Amplify Effective Practice

Turbocharge Effective Practice

In the digital world of our learners.

Looking at effective practice through the RAT lens in the digital world.

Effective practice is the key, but effective planning and individualised student goals are the gold and the digital learning simply amplifies our practice.

The ability to see what others are doing allow us the affordance to amplify our own teaching practice. We do this is many different ways, Blogs, PENN, Learning Environments.

Turbocharging comes into play when we use digital affordances to provide ways for rewindable learning, ubiquitous learning to take learning into the next level.

As a staff, we split into groups of 4 and looked at various progressions for the Level 2 reading curriculum and presented mini-lessons that focused on a particular progression. The rest of the staff had to guess which progression our deliberate acts of teaching (DATs) was being used with that particular group. This provided an excellent way for our staff to amplify our effective practice through modeling.

Now that we have reaffirmed our understanding of how to link the progressions to our micro-teaching through our DATs, we can continue to reaffirm the understanding of that progression through our turbocharged learning tasks that will ultimately provide an avenue for an increased level of student understanding.

Visible Teaching and Learning Workflow

This week, the staff at Pt England had their term Manaiakalani PD with Dorothy Burt.  I found it to be a very informative session as we reflected on the year so far, and the steps that Pt England teachers before me (and some other key Manaiakalani teachers) took to get us where we are today.

So, today's session could easily be summed up as a celebration for what we are blessed to be part of as Manaiakalani teachers using our Learn, Create, Share model to educate the children that come through our doors each morning.

Dorothy challenged each of us to spend some time reflecting on this year, before creating a video that demonstrates our visible teaching and learning workflow. 

The video I created walks you through a lesson that a reading group of my year 5 students students worked on the last week of Term 3 as we wrapped up our Inquiry Study on healthy living and Hauora.

Manaiakalani Staff Meeting: Create

Today the Pt England staff had an amazing time with Manaiakalani's Dorothy Burt focusing on the Create aspect of our Learn, Create, Share model.

The cognitive challenge we have with our students is to hook them creatively to do something with their learning.  Our children need to be better problem solvers and communicators and we believe that the hook to achieving this with our students is through Creativity. 

Create: is a doing word....students need to be doing things with all of their body utilising their senses.

Visual Representation of Create in Manaiakalani

Celebrating Accelerated Shift for ONE Maths Learner in 2017

Rewindable Learning
Class Site

Dorothy Burt: Visibility Enables Accelerated Shift

"Visibility Accelerates Accelerated Shift" 

-Woolf Fisher Research Centre

Today, during our PES Staff Meeting, we had Dorothy Burt come in for our Term 4 Manaiakalani PD.   Here are a few of my notes from what she shared with us prior to having some time to reflect on the shift in our own maths class. 

Just as Manaiakalani's Learn, Create, Share cannot be done without the other, our Kaupapa: Connected, Ubiquitous, Empowered, Visible needs all four parts to be successful.

What is the #1 Factor Influencing Student Achievement? -According to John Hattie, it is definitely: Collective Teacher Efficacy! 

As a school, we identified Maths as our 2017 focus for our collaborative inquiries. 

Data>Evidence

-School Inquiry: School/Department/Individual Teacher

-External Inquiry: Woolf Fisher Research Centre, Auckland University

-Teacher Inquiry: Teachers Inquiring into their own practice and learner outcomes. 

This led to us having some time to spend celebrating accelerated shift for ONE learner in our 2017 Maths class.  Click here to see my "Impact Burst" post.

Creativity Empowers Learning

Today, we had Dorothy Burt back at our Staff Meeting for our Manaiakalani Professional Development.  It was awesome to take a deeper look into Creativity, which is an essential part of our school's Learn, Create, Share pedagogy.

It was decided many years ago that children of Pt. England (and Manaiakalani) will be "creators of content, not merely consumers."

It was fun to spend some time going back into the archives and take a look at what Create has looked like through the years.  There were so many good reminders of some of the things that can easily be embedded into our classroom lesson plans to provide opportunities for our students to be creative to display their learning.

When movie making, you are ultimately providing an avenue to use and build an understanding of Key Competencies.  Your rubric will provide student guidance to achieve ultimate results.

Create is NOT a head knowledge thing.  It is an action using multiple senses and the whole body. Consumers are enticed by three senses: Sight, Sound and Motion (Saatchi and Saatchi). SISIMO should be applied to anything concept worth teaching the students.

The key to Create is planning.  All students have the opportunity to create.

Ubiquitous Learning is Rewindable

At today's staff meeting, the staff at PES was blessed to have Dorothy Burt come and share with us once again on the topic of "Rewindable Learning."  This was a great reminder for me about the importance of having learning rewindable for my students, especially since I am focusing on rewindable learning with my maths students this year.  Another great reminder was different ways to effectively blog with our students, on our class blogs, and more personally on our professional "inquiry to teaching" blogs.