PD - Creativity Empowers Learning

Monday's staff PD was filled with Ooohs and Ahhhs as we watched the caliber of movie making Pt England had 10+ years ago. Our wonderful Dorothy Burt conducted our PD on how 'Creativity Empowers Learning'. Teachers who's work was shown shared their learning process and how they made those 'create' activities possible, but most importantly, the learning and motivation (engagement) students received while carrying out these tasks as part of their learning. 

This was great for us teachers who have only been here at Pt England a few year to see the types of activities and learning that can be had through movie making and animations. At times during my teaching here, I have been guilty of making my create activities a writing task or creating something with no real purpose or learning behind it. 

But with the start of my CoL inquiry at the start of this year, I have been more mindful and purposefully provided time in my class for students to be creative in their learning through the use of animations, acting, song and dance. This PD has helped me think of new ways to make this a part of students' learning and the pedagogy behind it has strengthened my resolve to ensuring this is happening daily for my learners.

Dorothy emphasised how Create is a DOING word which uses multiple sense and involves the use of your WHOLE BODY not just your brain.

SISOMO - Sight, Sound, Motion. This is what create is all about!

One of the excerpts shared from the Create part of the Learn Create Share Pedagogy was:

"One of the foundation goals of the Manaiakalani Programme is to 'motivate our learners to engage with the curriculum' and a significant driver for engagement has been our intentional use of modern technologies to enable creativity to play a significant part in learning and teaching opportunities."

It was great having this in front of us as a reminder that we have the same vision and are on this journey together. 

One of the slides I really liked and will hopefully talk about more in a later post is this one aligning Blooms Taxonomy with a SAMR type graphic, using TECH - moving from traditional teacher-created tasks to student-centered, tech-integrated learning.

Success Criteria & Self-assessment

As a continuation of 'where to next' in my inquiry, I have been focusing the past 2 weeks on the Learn-Scan part of our inquiry framework as this is where I had gaps. 

This 'scan' area looked at how engaged students are with their learning. Can they articulate what they are learning about? Can they monitor their learning? Do they know what their next learning steps are?

To help me with this was the Assessment for Learning power point on TKI

Above is one the slides I found most useful and made me reflect on my classroom environment and how well I communicate with students how they are doing in their learning. Some of the things I felt I did well were:

• Creating a learning environment in my classroom
• Using assessment information to feed back into teaching
• Provide timely focused feedback

Some of the things I needed more work on were:

• Co-constructing clear learning goals with students
• Involve students in self and peer assessment
• Clarify learning outcomes with students.

Upon reflection, it prompted one of the readings from Michael Absolums' book 'Clarity in the Classroom' (2006).

"For students truly to be able to take responsibility for their learning, both teacher and students need to be very clear about what is being learnt, and how they should go about it. When learning and the paths towards it are clear, research shows that there are a number of important shifts for students. Their motivation improves, they stay on-task, their behaviour improves and they are able to take more responsibility for their learning." 

 

From this, I focused students in on Success Criteria's. HOW will you know you have achieved the learning intention? So as I worked with each group, we broke down the learning intention and worked out what this will look like. Our discussions around the success criteria as a group gave me insight into whether or not students actually understood what learning was expected from the learning intention. It was great being able to co-construct the success criteria with each group. We tried to make it very specific so it was easy to self-assess. Here is an example of our final outcome for one group.

Example: 

WALT (We Are Learning To): Interpret information from a pie and bar graph

Success Criteria: I will know I have achieved this when:

1. I can say what the x and y axis show
2. I can give 2 facts from each graph

CoL inquiry - LEARN checklist

During our first CoL meeting for Term 2 we were introduced to a new Inquiry Framework. It followed our Learn, Create, Share pedagogy and so I have made a summary page for the 'Learn' part and matched it up with my inquiry posts in Term 1. This is focussing the inquiry - "What is important? (and therefore worth spending time on) given where my students are at?"

As you can see, one of the areas I need to work on is 'Scan' - what outside factors are contributing to students not being able to retain number knowledge well in their heads.

This term, I will looking at the 'Share' part of our framework.

Gather evidence	Student achievement data eg. standardised tests, OTJs, internals and externals Anecdotal evidence eg. observations, formative assessment tasks, student voice,  parent voice, previous teachers, surveys,  learning walks and reciprocal visits	Accelerating Learning for our priority learners CoL inquiry - 3 weeks in Making learning rewindable through digital affordances End of Term 1 - Inquiry Reflection
Scan	Wider perspective on learning not just aspects that are easily measured eg considering perspectives of our young people and their whānau. How engaged are they with learning? Can they describe what they are learning and why it is important?  (AfL) Links to Key Competencies
Identify Trends	Looking at all the evidence, thinking hard about its “shape”. Noticing where there are cohort trends that extend out beyond the class, to the team or department, maybe even for this school across schools in the CoL Clearly identifying the common learning challenges or problems. Looking for and identifying strategies that are known to have the greatest impact on on this/these challenges	Accelerating Learning for our priority learners CoL inquiry - 3 weeks in End of Term 1 - Inquiry Reflection
Hypothesise	Analysis and interpretation often take place in the mind of the teacher, who then uses the insights gained to shape their actions as they continue to work with their students. These theories for improvement should connect with the inquiries related to the Achievement Challenge of the Department/Team, the School and the CoL.	Accelerating Learning for our priority learners
Research	“This involves asking questions about how well current strategies are working and whether others might be more successful. Teachers search their own and their colleagues’ past practice for strategies that may be more effective, and they also look in the research literature to see what has worked in other contexts.”	Number Knowledge framework - PD Making learning rewindable through digital affordances
Reflect	“Inquiry into the teaching–learning relationship goes hand in hand with formative assessment, in the cyclical evaluation process that goes on moment by moment, day by day, and over the longer term.” Assessment-in-the-classroom/Teaching-as-inquiry	End of Term 1 - Inquiry Reflection CoL Inquiry - Term 1 highlights

Weighting of OTJ's

As part of our school PD around mathematics, each team met with Jo Knox for further PD specific to their teams needs. Team 5 met with Jo on Tuesday afternoon and the first part of our session was clarification around OTJ's and how much weight each  of the different assessments and observations are when forming your OTJ's.

One of the main points that came out of this was: To meet the standard, a student needs to be working at that standard independently and most of the time.

One of the 'must have' documents you need to form an OTJ is the NZC Mathematics Standards Poster

Together with the Standards book and if need be, the NZ Maths books with illustrations.

Some of the questions we had as a team were around the weighting of assessments such as IKAN, GloSS, PAT and normal classroom/group observations - which do we put more emphasis or weight on when making our OTJ?

To clarify this for us, we took part in an activity practising how to make an OTJ based on some pieces of evidence she had gathered. 

We then circled which standard we thought the student best met based on the different data. From there we made an OTJ based on not just 1 piece of assessment, but several and always referring back to the NZC maths standards poster.

Of course you were not expected to do this for every single student in your class, but was a great way to moderate across the teachers of your year level and also the students who sat just on the edge of being either below/at or at/above the standard and needed a closer look at work samples.

There were so many clear and useful tips around number knowledge that I felt, even after 10+ years of teaching, served as a good reminder/ clarified some of my own misconceptions when making OTJ's. Here are a list of some points I found useful and hope they can be of use to you too.

• Number knowledge is for facilitating problem solving
• IKAN test is great for identifying how to support students with number knowledge to help them access more sophisticated strategies
• Knowledge does not have to be a tick box 
• Knowledge is never mentioned on its own in NZC poster - but HOW students are using knowledge to solve problems

  

Maths PD with Jo Knox - Part 2

Our series of PD's we've had with Jo Knox have been really useful in terms of content knowledge and also a reminder for all the things we need to consider when planning our maths lessons for our students.

One of the 'gems' I got out of the PD was the use of the IKAN test. Hearing from Jo that the 3 second rule was a bit unfair to measure students knowledge against put my mind at ease. Jo also shared how using the IKAN test papers after being marked was a useful activity. Getting students to revisit the questions they got wrong and quickly see why, and whether they need more help with it or it is something that can be corrected easily.

Here are some more highlights from our PD:

• Mathemagic time! - Have a go!
• Aligning NZ Number Framework, Curriculum and National Standards
• Explaining formative and summative assessment using the garden analogy
• Using a Spidergraph for GloSS and IKAN

Below are slides Jo Knox shared with our staff.

               

Number Knowledge vs Strategy

Last night was our first CoL meeting for Term 2. One of the highlights for me was listening to others share about their inquiries in our small groups. We were also given the opportunity to respond to prompting questions about our inquiries also received useful feedback from our colleagues. One of the prompts was 'What are possible next steps for planning my teaching inquiry?'. This has lead me to reflect on my Term 1 observations when my focus was mainly on teaching just number knowledge.

This lead me back to the NZ Maths Site. Delving into its numerous resources and research has helped me get a better understanding for what I need to target when teaching my priority students. In my haste to try and push for number knowledge I haven't adequately balanced the scales to account for the back and forth teaching of strategy too! Here is an excerpt from the online numeracy PD - Number framework.

So I will definitely be keeping this in the forefront of my mind when planning for my students. I was also reminded of some slides shared by Jo Knox in our first PD in Term 1.