Kahui Ako Within School First Meeting 2020 - Thurs 12th March

Kahui Ako within school day - Thurs 12th March

Morning Focus - Coaching with Susan Arrowsmith

Active Listening - what skills are involved?

Full attention – listen with your eyes and your ears. ➔ Making notes – ask the person you are coaching if they mind first. ➔ No interrupting – do not interrupt; try not to make any noise! Even limit the amount of nodding you do! ➔ No war stories – this is the hardest thing for teachers! Your role is to listen, not to compete! ➔ No advice – coaching enables your colleague to build their own solutions, not have problems solved for them. ➔ What is not said? – often what is not mentioned can be as important as what is. ➔ Clarifying questions – only once your colleague has finished talking. Your questions should just be to gain more information on what has already been 

mentioned and should not be leading, or judgemental. ➔ Summarise – check at the end with your colleague that you have heard all of the facts correctly.

Coaching - Use GROW to support coaching sessions

Using the GROW and SMART tools. Adapted from J. Robertson (2016), Coaching Leadership, Wellington, NZ, NZCER 

Step Focus Check Questions 

GOAL SETTING 

REALITY CHECK 

Identify the topic for discussion Imagine what the ‘dream’ situation would be Define what is to be achieved

OPTION EXPLORE 

Understand what is happening now Gather factual data (Who, what, when, where, how...) Encourage self assessment 

WRAP UP WHAT NEXT 

Discuss a range of options Identify priorities Ensure choices are made 

Make steps in action plan with timing Identify potential barriers and how to avoid or overcome

SPECIFIC What will be happening when your goal is achieved? What would you like to take away from our session? 

MEASUREABLE How will you measure the success of the goal? 

How do you feel now in relation to your goal from 1-10? What will be the indicators of your success? 

ACHIEVABLE What has worked already? 

What might hinder/ will help your progress? What resources can you use to help you? 

RELEVANT What could you try? 

What is the most creative thing you could do? What would someone else do? Which options will work best for your needs? 

TIME-FRAME What is your first (2nd, 3rd...) step and when will you do it? 

What might stop you doing this? Agree on support needed 

Who can support you to do this? When shall we meet up to review your goal?

Reflect: Great to have role play opportunities to try out coaching (coach, speaker & observer) and particularly in our group to have someone who has worked with this last year as this gave us plenty of guidance.

Afternoon Focus

Discussion around focus/calendars etc this term.

Facebook Page & Twitter will be set up to assist with communications.

Careers Day for Year 8s - Tuesday 24th March @ KC - KIS attending 9 -11am

Student Agency Tool - no funding left. If wanted for use again, email Elise

Next Kahui Ako Meeting Thursday 4th June.

7-8 Schools involved in Mana Potential. Student training days postponed to later date - Possibly end term 1 or beginning of term 2. Next staff training day early Term 2.

Shelly Dormer - Feedback on 2019 Inquiry in accelerating students in writing.

Mana Potential T.O.D. Fri 7th Feb

Teacher Only Day - Intro to Mana Potential

Unpacking what is mana?

Discussion in groups & sharing ideas. Mana can be built up/added to and can also be squashed and diminished. ideas - authority/power/courage/leader/looked up to

REFLECTION - Looking forward to embedding Mana Potential within our school. Also like the idea that we have 7 or 8 school across our Kahui Ako that are also involved including the College that the majority of our students will move on to.  Be great to all be using the same language, processes and strategies. An exciting journey to be on!

TOD Mon 22nd July Creating High Expectations

CREATING HIGH EXPECTATIONS

Christine Rubie-Davis

Thoughts from previous session shared by others (Missed due to our school TOD)
* Wait time - giving all students time to process and give answers
* Mixed ability grouping

https://gazette.education.govt.nz/articles/no-streaming-of-mathematics-students/


https://www.tvnz.co.nz/shows/thats-a-bit-racist

'When we believe we can achieve something, we're much more likely to'

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER

* Some evidence of teacher bias both explicit and implicit

* Ministry initiatives may have reduced explicit bias

* Still a gap between the achievement of Maori and Pakeha.

ENHANCING MOTIVATION IN THE CLASSROOM

* Giving students a voice and allowing choice

* Regular monitoring

* Setting goals and re-setting goals

* Self-monitoring

* Learning intentions

Goal Setting

https://www.toolshero.com/time-management/smart-goals/#download

REFLECTION

How will I set a high expectation classroom?

* Adding to our Pathway goal setting with more specific steps for achieving/working towards their goals and a specific time frame. I have set up a template via google slides to make this more user friendly for the students. Planning to start these tomorrow ready for sharing with parents on Thursday at Parent/Student/Teacher Interviews.

* Focus on Mixed ability groups for all topics rather than just the ones that suit it easily. 

* Learn more about backgrounds and interests of my students rather than just the superficial/easy to know stuff.

Kahui Ako Hui 23/5/19

Why Collaborative Inquiry?

John Hattie -
New evidence around the most effective thing that teachers can do in schools for improvement - collaborative inquiry (1. 75 effect size)

Helen Timperley-
Engaging in inquiry is a process of developing collective professional agency. Motivation and energy build as educators together find compelling reasons to change what they are doing. Inquiry must lead to action.

Discussion post view - what stood out?
* Allows you to really get to know learner, especially having others perspectives.

Collaborative task to create slideshow of Spiral of Inquiry process. Each group had different part of process. Ours was Checking. A great task to do back with our own school.



Reflection on what's happening in our own schools with Collaborative Inquiry. Some interesting thoughts shared through small group discussions.

What has gone well?
What are the barriers?
Next steps
Any questions that have arisen from your discussion.

Some school have had a lot of success getting everyone on board with collective focus, others still working on getting the process right for their staff. Barriers included teachers being time poor, getting everyone into the same waka and paddling in the same direction.

Shared ideas for recording Inquiry. Shared my starting point with teachers in my group as am trying out using google slides.

RESOURCES

Upcoming Dates for Te Hiku Kahui Ako

DFI #9 Revision

EXAM DAY!!!

Can I become a certified Level 1 Google Educator?

Woohoo! Yes I can! Quite surprised as was a bit worried that I was rushing it a bit but if you using a lot of the tools, most tasks come as pretty straight forward. The theory at the beginning definitely required careful reading and I was glad I re-read each one before I continued on.

Summer learning journey
Cool opportunity for keen kids to encourage blogging over their school break. Definitely something to remember.

Google Classroom
Some benefits but I feel that google sites and Hapara provide a much more user friendly service for myself and my students.

Ubiquitous
I can see the huge benefits of allowing students to have access anytime, anywhere. BUT! We must keep our own sanity as teachers, professionals, parents, partners etc and draw a line that allows us to cope with the ever-growing pressures of this career. Sometimes it is great to respond to emails or give feedback/feedforward at crazy hours because it suits you at that time. But don't let it then become an expectation by others. We need our space and time away from these pressures.

The DFI experience has been challenging, rewarding and overall an incredible experience to take part in if you are ever given the opportunity. A huge thank you to Kerrie and Venessa for the coaching, patience and incredible expertise.

DFI #8 Computational Thinking

Empowering learners & Student agency a big focus today. How can we provide the tools, experiences and opportunities for our students.

Computational thinking
A very cool example of incorporating a local context into something that many kids are already so into. Fortnite in a Maori context - imagine! What would be the most valuable weapon? How would you fly in to an area? What would the different areas be called?
Some great resources to explore for use in the classroom. Some super frustrating and it will be interesting to see if the kids experience the same frustrations or whether it's just us oldies. Some great resource links...
https://code.org/
http://lightbot.com/flash.html
http://games.thinkingmyself.com/


Unplugged Coding
Language level appropriate for differing abilities was definitely something to consider, especially making sure that we were not using 'codes' that they would not have had exposure to or understanding of yet; for example coordinates or angles.
Clarity of coding to avoid any 'bugs'.

Loved the money grid - students could have the goal of achieving as much money in least amount of moves, or a certain amount, or give a certain amount of lines of code to gain the most amount - or avoid 'losing any money' by avoiding landing on them.




Chromebook Apps
Because I only have access to chromebooks with my kids I have been really interested in exploring applications that will work with chromebooks.
https://www.autodraw.com/ for drawing own backgrounds on chromebooks

Clap motion

Stop Motion Animator


How could you use computational thinking to allow your students to explore digital storytelling? The stop motion sites above will be great. Scratch is another great programme available to turbo charge the learn, create and share process... and I am sure the kids will much quicker at it than I was! Here's my little example.


Everything we touched on today helped to provide us with more useable tools to empower our students. Yes there are many barriers that our students face on a daily basis but we can do our best to minimise these or provide awesome opportunities for our students to experience success regardless of the negative impacts they are enduring.
It is becoming increasingly obvious how much support is available in the form of tutorials and online video to make me realise that I don't have to be the expert and can use these as resources with my students as there are so many things they will pick up and run with a lot more quickly than me.
I am interested in using Scratch, ClapMotion combined with green screen or by using photos with the background removed using https://www.remove.bg/.
The Google exam next week has played on my mind a lot and I know I have not managed enough revising to keep me up to the play, however I decided it was still worth giving a go and I'm not going to beat myself about it. Even if I don't get through it next week I will still be keen to resit at a later date. There has been so much amazing stuff to take on over the DF1 time but it's the learning that I have applied immediately that I remember and the rest is all a bit hazy in the background.

DFI # 7 Dealing with Data

A full on day today with so many great ideas to try and get my head around. I think my brain might just explode!

My goal before next DFI is to get every student to complete one blog post and give at least 2 ‘positive, helpful, thoughtful’ comment.

Using My Google Maps and google sheets together to populate a map of particular places. It would be interesting to use when looking at current events and where they are occurring around the world. Possibilities are endless I have used google sheets to create graphs before from data but I loved learning how to embed this so that it will automatically update when the data is altered or added to.  Lots of learning opportunities for this but also imagine having a class competition and kids being able to see the results being represented in a graph like this whenever the data is altered.

 I also appreciated the reminder about freezing columns and deleting unnecessary columns and rows.   I do my planning and keep my assessment notes as well as data all on sheets and have never known about the 'text wrap' tool. Way easier than having to press enter when the space runs out!

Break outs! What a fantastic way to motivate students by giving them a break out made in google forms for students to work through as a bit of a challenge. To move on to the next section in the challenge, they have to be able to enter the correct answer.

I started one on Number and added a link in to the slide deck that will allow students to revise a strategy if they have forgotten, however if they know the strategy they can just go ahead and solve the problem. 

If the enter an answer incorrectly it will let them know 'Sorry! Try again' but if they answer correctly, they will be directed to the next section where they can record their clue (a number, letter or word) that they will use at the end of the challenge once all sections are answered correctly to 'BREAK OUT!'