U Learn 2016 - Students at the heart of learning; growing learning through passions, interests and curiosities.

ULearn 2016

5th October 2016

Students at the heart of learning; growing learning through passions, interests and curiosities.

1:1 devices from Years 4-8  (Google Apps school - Ngatea School)

It is the people and how they interact which makes a successful learning environment.

Flexible learning settings - Mi Space, Presentation Space, Lounge, Creator Space, Meeting Space … All spaces are used for different things and the students know what kind of learning should be taking place in these areas.   Cloak Bays - now quiet learning space

Single Cell classroom - mixed cell classroom ( 75 students:3 teachers)  The kids are divided into 3 homerooms.

Inclusiveness - Pastoral care is  key factor in making the learning environment successful.  Acknowledge different feelings.  Everyone identifies how they are feeling when they arrive at school and places their name on an emotion along with identifying strategies with how they can deal with their emotions during the day.

Lots of time spent on building the team.

• Learning teams - group works, tasks, blogs, challenges, support group
• House Team Challenges
• Building a positive learning culture
• Play - encourage play, encourage games (Had a playdough area, brain breaks - go and play a game of cards)

• Building the team with parents
• Relationships with parents
• High Tea with mums for mother’s day
• Grandparents day
• Welcome parents to see learning in action
• Family amazing races

• Building the team with technology
• Student Voice- Class Twitter - live feeds
• Parent Voice - Class Blogs

• Building the Team through the school
• Relationships with younger students - interact with younger classes, leadership teams/mentoring team who run workshops in the junior school
• Giving back - helping younger students, mentoring, tutoring.
• Being leaders of the school

Encouraging and modelling a positive environment.

Students at the heart of learning.  

• It’s Good to be Me!
• The Marama (team) way
• Goal setting
• How do I learn best?
• What do I do when I am stuck?
• What am I curious about?
• Does my teacher know about me, my family and my interests?  All of me.  Does my teacher know the after school routines?

Growth Mindset is key!

Growth language used.  Being open minded.

Building students learning power.  Students understand that they are the key to that.

• Multiple intelligences  (Kids do a SMARTs test at the beginning of the year).  Teachers try and tap into that as much as they can.  Building students own learning power and knowing what makes them tick.
• The learning brain:  What helps me learn: Sleep, water, food….
• Students learn what to do when i’m stuck.
• Our learning powers: Creativity, resilience, being me, connecting, curiosity  (Co-constructed with kids and parents - what the students will be like when they leave school - Graduate Profile)

Being Me:

• Is knowing myself and how my decisions and actions affect my environment
• Being true to myself
• Managing myself
• Learning SMARTS
• I can choose my attitude
• What interests me
• What rocks my world
• Ignite!!!

Curiosity:

• Learning Smarts
• STRETCH myself to learn
• Questioning
• Making sense

Connecting… is creating a link within and across the community

Creativity… is the use of one’s imagination to think of and explore alternatives or new possibilities

• Learning SMARTS
• Being different

Resilience… is when I work through challenges and find ways to keep going even when the going gets tough.

• Guts and Grits
• Learning SMARTs

Graduate Profiles.

“What we learn with pleasure we never forget”  -Reading, writing, maths and the other curriculum stems from students interests and curiosities.

Individual Endeavours

• Inquiry
• Re-desgin curriculum - 1st steps - then school wide
• To use passions/interests to drive the curriculum

Conceptual curriculum (Inquiry)   (Being me)

Learning about:     Learning by:  

Question/Inquire:    (Curiosity)

• Pose real questions - refine questions, key words, what’s not a googleable word/question?
• Find Resources
• Learn with experts

• Planning - what will you make/create from this and how will you share it?

Inquire & Dive   (Connecting)

• STRETCH LEARNING
• Interpret information
• Experiment, explore and investigate (not just researching)  
• Connect new learning - connect with an expert
• Workshops
• Live docs- students record their findings, new words etc on a doc.
• Curriculum Mapping - Recording which curriculum areas are covered - individual for each student depending on what their topic is.  Conferenced with the teacher - students opting into workshops and track their learning themselves.

Create (Creativity)

• Create/make/design/build
• What have you learnt?
• Plan workshop to share learning  -run this with another group of kids

Share and Reflect (Resilience)

• How?
• Who? - Audience
• Share learning - Something you believe in important
• Reflect on learning

IE (Individual Endeavour) Assessment Rubric  

Being Me

Questioning/Inquire

Learn

Create

Share

Reflect

Google Forms to gather student voice and gather data.

“If we have learnt something we can teach it…”

Group Endeavours

A collaborative inquiry project, based on my interests and passions.

• Real context
• So what?
• Key Concepts.

GE ignition afternoon

• Lots of hands on stuff, books, pictures, things to touch, different stations - students look at what they were curious about,  students wrote questions about some the of things they saw, sparked curiosity.

Students then wrote down 2 things on post it notes that they were the most curious about from the afternoon.  Teachers then organised groups based on this.

Students got together then came up with some big overarching questions : (This took a lot of time, thinking, re-questioning and discussions)

How could we reduce our carbon footprint?

What impact does piracy have on society?

How do natural disasters affect us?

How can we support NZ made?

What influence does technology have on sport?

Trips to make the learning more purposeful.

Learner Agency

How?

Students at the heart of learning.

Collaboration

Kids plan their daily timetable and book themselves into conference slots and workshops.  If they are not in a workshop they are working independently on their Individual Endeavour - inquiry

Each student has a blog.  Their parents get a copy of everything that is posted on the blog so parents get updates in real time.  Parents can comment on the blogs and give feedback.

Students have a weekly goal that they are going to work on.  Teachers can also select a goal that they feel the student needs to work on.  The goals are around the learning powers - creativity, collaboration, resilience… The students then reflect on their goal at the end of each week and post their reflection on their Blog or Twitter.

Teachers refer to the goals everyday so it is at the forefront of the learning.

• Set goals each week
• Sharing learning
• Student led conferences
• Twitter
• Blogs

Personalised Learning Report

On Google Doc.  Updated all the time.  On student’s blog and parents can see this at anytime.  When a student sits a test, it can be updated once that test has been sat, or can be updated after the unit of work is completed and the work shows progression in learning.  Doesn’t state if the child is below, above national standards - this can be seen visually instead.

What has helped:

• Professionalism in collaboration
• Understanding what makes each other tick
• Tapping into different strengths
• Sharing the load
• Supportive environment for learning support and relievers
• Supportive leadership
• Consistency of personnel for more than a year (Team remains the same)
• Opportunities to learn in many and varied ways
• Flexibility

A Trust has been set up so that students can buy a cost effective device and the school can buy the devices in bulk - Chrome Books.  Students all have the same devices.  Devices are 1:1

Juniors have ipads but not 1:1

HOT Spot workshops run alongside individual endeavour projects - these workshops cover algebra, statistics etc.  These can be separate to the individual inquires - based on data, students needs etc.  There are also responsive workshops that teach students what might help them with their projects.

Each Individual project/group project runs for a term.  I big theme/unit per term.

Tuakana Teina writing sessions

Over the past few weeks, my Year 6 class has been working with a Year 3 class for writing once a week.  We have been supporting each other during writing times to up skill and learn from one another.  Both classes were taught some new sentence structures that they were to apply to their writing.  To give our writing an authentic purpose, each student needed to come up with a creative menu using the new sentence structure : A 3 Ad and a question sentence.  EG:  Hot, spicy, tough - would you like to try it?

After several weeks working with their buddy, practising the new sentence structure, each student had to independently create their menus for a competition where two Year 3's and two Year 6's would be chosen as having the most creative language and menus's.  Each student needed to present their menu to a group of 6 students (three Year 3's and three Year 6's).  Each group then picked the best Year 3 and Year 6 menu to present to both classes to find the overall winners.

Was the Tuakana-Teina writing program successful and how do I know?

The Tuakana-Teina writing program was a huge success.  Each student was both a teacher/mentor and a learner irrespective of age.  They helped each other to learn the new skills that were taught and worked together to practise applying this to their own writing.  The Year 6's and Year 3's were all paired up together and were given time to collaborate on their writing.  They reminded each other about using correct surface features, neat hand writing, as well as higher level vocab.  For the Year 6's it reinforced their learning as well as they now were responsible for being the teacher and teaching their Year 3 buddy.

Also, because we had a presentation/competition day where every student needed to present their menu, each student put in an amazing effort into their menu because they knew their peers would be judging it.  Both written and visual presentations were amazing.  The presentation day also helped ensure students met their deadline for completing their menu.  It also improved the standard and quality of work by having an authentic audience and a purpose for creating the menu.

Over half of the students who made the finals were priority writers who were either current ALL students or have been part of the ALL writing program last year.  It was amazing to see they were chosen by their peers as having some of the most creative writing out of the 60 students.

I also know that the writing buddy program is successful because student engagement, enthusiasm and motivation was high.  Everybody was keen to share their writing and boys in particular created some weird and wacky creative menus.

Here are some photos of our sharing/competition day.

 

 

 

 

What next?

Because the creative menu writing was such a huge success, our classes will continue to do one writing session together per week.  I hope to continue this program next year by getting more classes on board to work together once a week.

I believe that Year 6 & Year 3, Year 5 & Year 2, and possibly Year 4 & Year 1 would be excellent buddy classes for each other because their is a big enough age gap for the older students to be inspiring mentors, yet not too big a gap that the younger students wouldn't be able to do the work.

 

 

 

Let the finals begin...

 

 

 

 

 And the winners are...

 

A huge congratulations Room 16 and Room 11 on your fabulous creative menus!

 

 

Students self-assessing against PACT

Today I worked with a mixed ability group of students who have been working together on their chosen topic for a statistical investigation.

I introduced them to PACT for the first time.  Their task was to read through set 4, 5 & 6 of the statistical investigation big idea and assess where they thought their own statistical investigation sat.  The students had to articulate what set their investigation sat and how they knew.  They also had to explain why they thought they weren't the set above or below and what their next learning steps are in order to achieve the level above.

Here is a video of the group self-reflecting and self-assessing their statistical investigation using PACT.

The group looking at PACT and discussing where their statistical investigation sits.

Can pupil conferencing replace after the event written feedback?

Link to a great article of the importance of verbal conferencing with students rather than after the even written feedback.

Can pupil conferencing replace after the event written feedback?

Teaching as Inquiry Reflective Log - Tracking Priority Writers

Photos of our combined Year 6 and Year 3 writing session : 1-9-2016

Here is an email a priority writer sent to their family because they were so proud of the descriptive language and sentence structures they had used.  The email also shows the mums reply.

PACT PD for teachers

Yesterday I lead a PD session for four teachers (including a deputy principal) from another school out of Rotorua.  The session was based around the PACT tool and how I use it to inform my teaching practise.  We spent most of the day looking at how to use the tool, the reporting capabilities and how each of the big ideas can be used to inform teaching practice.  We also talked about the links between PACT, the curriculum, and the need for integration.

Today I received two lovely emails about my PD session:

Thanks Tineke for your presentation and showcase of The PaCT to Mount Primary teachers yesterday. I think you are instrumental in our direction for the next 3 years!!!

The teachers were really pumped after visiting and want to continue down the path we were contemplating. We had no idea that The PaCT would have an impact on the teaching and curriculum... truly blown away!

In terms of what we can offer to you, it's limited, but Ive attached an online progressions google Doc sheet whereby the student adds their learning in the middle and highlights the parts that demonstrate an understanding.

If there's something your looking for and I have it then please ask.

Again, thanks for showing and sharing your journey with us. We are totally buzzed!

Regards

******    *******

Deputy Principal

Hi Tineke,

I wanted to tell you that yesterday was awesome and I can't thank you enough. I have come back to school invigorated today. Thank you so much for sharing the kid speak rubric with me. Can I please ask for another favour? Could you please share a week of your planning with me so that I can see how you include PaCT across the differing curriculum areas?  

Kind Regards

******   *******

Year 5/6 Teacher

B is for book, bored and below - compulsory school age reading

Last night I came across an interesting article about young children being forced to read as soon as they are 5 versus letting them learn to read as they develop their experiences and oral language.  This is a very timely article to consider as our school currently reviews its curriculum and the way we teach literacy.

Here is the link for the article:

b-is-for-book-bored-and-below-compulsory-school-age reading

Some key points from the article include:


For some children, learning to read is a marathon, not a sprint, and in an environment where the process is treated as a race, it might set them up for feelings of failure and frustration as they strive to cross an ever-moving finish line .

If a student who is 4 or 5 is struggling with reading;

To back off a little.

To give them space.

To give them time.

To wait until they’re verbally and mentally ready to deliver the intonation and emphasis that makes what they’re reading ‘sound‘ interesting to their ears (and inside their head).

To wait until the words they’re actively learning to read are the more interesting ones, the ones that will really bring the stories in books to life, and enrich their reading experience.