CoL teachers leading staff meeting @ Pt England

Monday nights staff meeting was led by our CoL teachers. We had Matt and Andrea lead the intro for the whole staff before we split up into teams and each of us 5 CoL teachers were allocated a team to lead. I was with Team 4 who are 5 teachers from years 5&6.

Team 4 were very responsive towards what I had to share and the task they were to complete. Some of the things they found interesting were: Some of the blogs they read about Maths from other schools resonated with them as it was the same situation they are experiencing in class. Another commented about now nice it was to be given PD time to read and learn from other teachers as it gives them ideas to try out in their class or triggers other ideas rather than being stuck in their own world of inquiry.
It was great to hear this feed back and feel how grateful the team felt that there are teachers who are putting themselves out there in terms of their teaching practice for others to learn from.

Thank you to Team 4 and my fellow CoL teachers for writing such reflective and detailed blog posts.

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.

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.

               

CoL inquiry - Term 1 Highlights

The end of Term 1 is actually here!! As the term draws to an end, I have been trying to take stock of what changes I have made in my teaching and how I deliver mathematics to my students. Not only that, but also making week by week behavioural and learning observations in trying to find out what is making it so difficult for students to retain number knowledge as they move up through their years at school.

In my previous post, I shared a slide outlining the outcomes of my CoL (and school) inquiry. Some of the main points were:

• YES! - devoting class time to practising number knowledge makes a difference
• Students need a repetitive cycle of maths vocab, materials and use of scrap paper in their daily learning of maths.
• Students are stuck at the 'imaging' stage for fractions of numbers. They always revert back to drawing a fraction then sorting out the numbers into that fraction. (This is instead of using timetables knowledge to find the missing numbers)
• Familiar context of questions helped students understand questions better - therefore they can focus what is happening with the numbers more.
• A mixture of engaging activities (both hands on and online) are needed for my lower learners - even though they were not in my priority group.

So for the last two weeks of school, I have been trying to gauge what have students have picked up so far and where do I need to go to from here. One of the things was an IKAN test which was shared in my previous post and as I commented, although not everyone of my priority learners made a shift, you can easily tell by talking to them in their group that they have a better understanding of place value and fractions.

Now the big test was to see if students were able to transfer this knowledge by using it in strategies to solve questions in the Gloss test. Here is an example from one of my students and the gaps we are looking to address throughout the year.

This student is still going with his test, but already I can see where I need to address first - Proportions and Ratios - Fractions. Our work on fractions in class obviously hasn't made any shift for this student so I need to analyse why that is and pose more similar word problems for him to practice over the break. This is good for me to find this out now so I can plan for it next term.

Highlights for Term 1

• Maths PD by Jo Knox
• Priority learners engaged in their learning 
• Compiling evidence of students learning on video and on paper
• Making learning REWINDABLE for ALL my learners!
• Using digital affordances to support my teaching and helping to scaffold student learning
• Sharing our inquiries in staff meetings as well as CoL meetings so we are held accountable for what we say we are going to do. 
• Learning conversations about what's worked and new things to try from PES staff

Where to next?

• Collate learning evidence & data to analyse
• Plan according gaps and learning needs identified - Look back at PAT data
• How else can I help to 'increase the achievements of Year 7&8 learners in maths, as measured against the National Standards and agreed targets.'

Manaiakalani - Digital Immersion day - Term 3

Today was a good opportunity for us to have some useful learning conversations with other teachers across the cluster. We managed to start planning what our DLO will look like for next term incorporating and promoting cybersmart with our students. Here is an outline of what we came up with.