Beyond a Blackboard

Today was my final MIT day at KPMG. What a year it has been! It has been great to reflect back on the entire process and to consider what we have accomplished through our inquiries this year. After presenting at the Manaiakalani Principals Wananga I have refined my presentation and created this video that reflects on my journey this year.    It has been great to have the opportunity to take the time to do a solid inquiry and to develop a tool to support other teachers. I intend to keep building my site and adding resources over time. I am hoping to gather more writing exemplars from students around the clusters. I'd like to thank Anne, Dorothy, Justine and Jenny for providing this opportunity. The food and facilities at KPMG have been amazing - it has been great to have a 'thinking space' outside the classroom.

This year I have created a text bank website. The texts within the site could be used for reading or writing - to provide exemplars or to be analysed. I am asking other teachers to share texts with me so I can keep building up the site and I see this as a growing resource.            Check my website out here. This a video of my students discussing one of the texts on the site.

This year my inquiry has focussed on accelerating my students learning in reading and writing. I identified a real need in this area, as the Woolf Fisher data illustrated that our year 7/8 students were not making as much shift as they had in previous years. During our mid year reports, my team collected writing samples from our students and met to identify what level our learners were achieving at. While I could clearly see that my students writing had improved when I compared this writing sample to the one that we conducted earlier in the year, I was still concerned with their levels and wondered if they had improved as much as I had first thought. This weekend I decided to create a graph to compare my students beginning (blue) and mid year writing (red) results: In term 1, my lowest student achieved a score of 1P, yet in their mid year writing sample the lowest score achieved was 2P. The average shift was 10 months and the graph illustrates that accelerated shift was ...

During our third session at MIT we had the opportunity to pair up and share feedback regarding our tools. I got the lovely Kariene from the Kaikohekohe cluster and this was the feedback she shared: Danni’s inquiry started off focusing on literacy learning in years 7 & 8 and how that school and cluster data was showing that the rate of learning in many senses was stalling or dropping.  Her inquiring focused totally on what she could do to prevent this in her classroom. Today Danni started out by sharing her site - a resource bank of texts she has created and used in her classroom.  This was broken into different pages relating to Text Analysis exemplars, Writing Techniques and Connecting Reading and Writing. This provided us with rich examples and questions based around different genre/examples.  This looked like a fantastic tool at a glance. When we delved deeper it appeared to be even more of a rich tool.   One of the challenges that Danni had ...

After following the inquiry cycle for six month, today the Manaiakalani Innovative Teachers met to present our tools. These were designed to provide somewhat of a solution to the problems that our inquiries were based around. I was particularly interested in hearing about Kariene’s tool, not only because it is concerned with writing, but because I have visited her cluster in Northland and I am particularly interested in following their journey with the Manaiakalani Kaupapa. She has focussed on creating a website that shows other educators how to teach writing in an engaging, collaborative and rewindable way. I could immediately see the value in her site. It connects seamlessly with her inquiry about accelerating students learning in writing and it will hold a plethora of resources and information to support teachers. It contains the kind of information that was invaluable to me during my MDTA sessions; how to use technology to enhance teaching. For teachers who new to the le...

I am now just over six months into my MIT inquiry, which focusses on accelerating learning in literacy for students in years seven and eight. I have begun to go around the inquiry cycle once again as I am discussing the term 2 literacy data with my team and responding to it, considering what it means for my inquiry and what adaptations I need to make.    

I am now six months into my inquiry about accelerating the literacy progress for students between years 7 and 10. I have been making the connection between reading and writing explicit to my students - check out my findings so far!

We, the Manaiakalani Innovative Teachers, met once again at KPMG today to discuss our inquiries and collaborate to extend our thinking.  My inquiry is focussed on addressing the issue of decelerated achievement in literacy for students in year 7 and 8 who attend Manaiakalani Schools.

Today has been both fustrating and rewarding, as I have spent the day grappling with big issues with the Manaiakalani Innovative Teachers. The purpose of the day has been 'design thinking' to think of a prototype that would address the problem that we have identified. We were fortunate enough to spend this time at KPMG with Justine Todd. My original problem was looking at the connection between Intermediate and High School, as I was concerned that my students were not being adequately prepared to meet the literary demands of college. However, as I explored the problem in greater depth, I realised that this was just one of the affects of the true issue, outlined below. I then gathered information about this issue by talking to a range of experts in the field and collecting more data. I realised that my students struggle to use academic language and to comprehend the language of learning. This means that they use a lot of colloquial terms in their writing and that it is n...

Later in the MIT retreat we looked at the people involved in the issue and those that could support us to facilitate the approach. I created this diagram to represent those that are involved in my issue to support me to explore it in greater depth. It was during the creation of this diagram that I realised how helpful it would be for me to discuss the issue with other educators - those teaching at year six, at intermediate, at the college and with Manaiakalani facilitators and senior management. After unpacking the problem we were tasked with imagining different approaches that might address the issue. We had to create eight ideas to ensure that we were thinking broadly and widely (we could be as imaginative as we liked). The hearts indicate which approaches the educators favoured From creating these possible approaches it became obvious that a link between college and intermediate might not help my year sevens, although it might make life a little simpler for the year e...

On Friday the Manaiakalani Innovative Teachers were fortunate enough to travel to the Coromandel for a retreat. There we discussed the problems that we had identified in our teaching and the hunches that we held.

As the year draws closer and I reflect on 2017, it is time to consider what aspects of my practice I wish to work on next year. This year I completed an intervention and dissertation on mathematics; specifically using differentiated approaches to accelerate the learning of all of my students in a mixed-ability setting. I learnt so much from this intervention and it has altered much of my mathematics pedagogy and use of my class site.  However, next year I would like to focus on writing, as this is another area of the curriculum that some of my learners struggle with. As I will be teaching a year 7 and 8 class, I must ensure that my teaching will support the students to transition between intermediate and high school. It is also vital that I facilitate accelerated learning so that they can cope with the literary demands of college. I would like to investigate the use of text analysis, peer and self assessment to make the connection between reading and writing explicit. ...