Gretchen's learning

  This webinar had important messages for schools that will guide us as we welcome students back. All teachers at our school have watched the webinar. We want to ensure we welcome our children back by going gently. We have permission to, and it is important that we work differently.  Professor Carol Mutch who researches the role of school in disaster and crisis settings (such as Canterbury earthquakes, the Christchurch terror attack and covid pandemic) was a on the panel as well as Professor Peter O'Connor who is one of the leads of Te Rito Toi. It was interesting to think about the fact that some families will have 'cascading trauma' - event after event (Lynn Mall Attack, West Auckland floods..) Children will return to school with different 'baggage' and need to reengage gently. We can't assume but must show awhi, aroha and inclusivity.  It's important schools acknowledge there's a lot we're trying to do and to take support offered.  From Carol...

 Thanks to Louise from Papakura Central who hosted this. It was good to have breakout rooms, polls and jam boards used in this toolkit too. Slides (There is another toolkit also available that Louise has done on Minecraft - Education Edition (M:EE).) We were encouraged to take some time to just get in there and have a play, cos apparently it's fun and you can't break it.  Keep in mind when using with our students, we'll be teaching to the experts - so they will be doing much teaching, talking, sharing etc. Minecraft is a great fit with learn, create, share. From the Minecraft EE site  you can join communities and the Minecraft Teacher Academy which offers training and badges! You can work towards becoming a Minecraft Certified Teacher. Louise recommends having a mouse as it is harder with a track pad apparently. This jamboard  from the toolkit shows learning topics/contexts and possible Minecraft tasks that could support learning. There are also pre 'built'?? lesson...

 This toolkit was hosted by Erin Connolly who teaches in Greymouth. Erin shared how she uses what she has learned about the Hikairo Schema . Her school has had impactful professional learning with authors Angus and Sonja McFarlane and she has used this resource to guide her own professional learning. Erin uses he poutama - a cultural competency framework - to track and scaffold her practice. She says it is clear and easy to follow. This gives Erin a structured approach to improve cultural compentency. She shared how she looks at these with a colleague and reflects on next steps. Erin also shares her own learning goals with her students. Her current focus is huataki (see image below) and Erin talked about how she starts her lessons and includes pepeha and music to connect with her students and also ensures her online learning easy to follow and is reflective of 'us and where we are'. I thought that was an important comment prompting teachers to consider our students' learnin...

 Rebecca Jesson ( slides ) is asking us to consider what has the greatest likelihood to work for our students. What is likely to work for a child and what is working for that child? Look closely and interrogate our practice. Refine and review.  executive function / inhibitory control - how children manage and regulate themselves. Important in reading.  making sure what you are doing is going to be successful for you. Reading with intent: 1. Purpose, 2. Learning Intentions, 3. Strategies. If we don't have purpose for reading - will we care? (affective?) Learning intention telling children what to notice. Strategy that you think is important. We think with language. background knowledge important underpinning of what we're reading. Avoid 'hodge-podge' vague collection and use connected text, layers, builds from one to another. Building unified theme.  Knowledge of learners to influence text selection 'mirrors, windows and glass sliding doors'. Opportunities to be...

Notes from Cognition Events wellbeing webinar - Transitioning Back to School: Dwell in Possibility presented by Rebecca Thomas and Steve Saville. What is the best environment for the students to come back to? Key message is the need to create a calm environment . Students and families might be anxious about what they've missed out on. It would be a mistake to think we need to 'catch them up'.  Teacher credibility is key ( research paper here ), as is the importance of routine, clarity of message and competent and trustworthy adults. Actively teach tolerance (this was brought up in context of high school setting - it was recorded by presenter prior to mask wearing in high schools being mandated, how will teacher manage transition back in terms of mask wearing and potential conflict) Tips: disconnect from devices for part of day - teachers and students. Engage in conversation, genuine connection, responsive interactions with others. caring for things - class pet, plant etc. ...

 Last week I attended a couple more sessions of maths PLD with Rob. The first was an 'open invite' zoom hui session - he's run a series of these. This one was looking at engagement and diversity . 1. using ARB s (Assessment Resource Banks). Rob's first guest was Jonathan Fisher from NZCER. He explained that ARBs support evidence-based teaching and learning practices. They are targeted assessment tasks and many suggest ideas for next teaching steps. For more info you can go ' about the arbs '. Arbs are flexible assessment tools - e.g we might use some of the multi-choice questions for a diagnostic move'n'prove activity, use them for small group explicit instruction or use for consolidating learning. Many can be done online or  on paper. They support teachers build pedagogical and content knowledge. Also - the researchers working on these tools really appreciate any feedback. A next step for me is to explore the  conceptual maps  within the arbs platform w...

 I've had Read&Write hanging out on my browser for quite a while now (it's free for educators) and more recently our school got funding to install it on all of our students' chromebooks (it's the little purple puzzle piece with 'rw' inside it). As far as I'm aware it gets little use.  I attended a webinar for parents yesterday run by Ben Dyer at Texthelp and was reminded what an amazing tool it is and how it can support our students. We can use it to increase reading accuracy, improve comprehension, improve vocabulary and improve writing quality and quantity. You can use Read&Write with google docs, PDFs and websites. You can even use it if you have a screenshot of some text - it can work on the text within the image. Some reading tools   Ben shared: Text to speech  (the play button) - this reads the text on the page to you - either highlighted text, the whole doc or text you have masked with the masking tool. This will assist many of our students a...

I'm exploring how I can use Mantle of the Expert (or imaginative inquiry) to teach social skills within small group circle time sessions. It is inspiring seeing videos such as this one below to see what learning using this pedagogy can be like. The first step will be carefully planning the sessions including scripting key parts of the lesson to ensure my language is inductive rather than instructive. I need to plan for and practise using this inductive language so it becomes fluent and natural. Learning notes below for inductive language copied from Tim Taylor's Mantle of the Expert online course: Inductive language: - Invitational – it invites students to participate: “If you were...” “Perhaps we might...” “Shall we try...”   - Collaborative – this is something we are doing together: “How shall we start...” “Can we all agree...” “What do you suppose...”  - Questioning – there is something under investigation: “Did you notice...” “How could that happen...” “What might be wron...

 After seeing what offerings were available in our online Term 3 Toolkits - I decided I'd use some of this lockdown learning time to upgrade my skills with sheets. The first toolkit Dave offered was Autocrat to Automate. Autocrat is an add-on for google sheets. It's a mail merge tool that takes raw data from sheets and merges it into docs, slides etc. that could be used for personalised letters, certificates etc. In this video Dave shared, Eric Curtis uses Autocrat to show how easy it is to generate certificates for his webinars. He has a google form (which includes participants name, email and a quiz) which is completed by participants that populates the sheet. He had a template certificate ready in docs for those that passed and a template letter ready for those that did not pass. Using Autocrat, you can insert text, hyperlinks and also images (by inserting a web address that points to an image). He shows how he can set rules in Autocrat so that those who pass would get email...

 We signed up for a free maths PLD offering that was shared on the NZ Maths Facebook page. I am doing this PLD with Sam. So far we've had one zoom hui, with another second one scheduled this week. We were also very fortunate to be able to spend a full day with Rob at our school. In addition to this, there is a series of zoom webinars on offer on Thursday afternoons. The notes below are from a Zoom webinar he and Jenny Ward presented last week on assessment. Rob has been prompting us to think about what are we assessing, whether our current assessments are sufficient and a good use of teacher and student time, and how we can formatively assess more effectively. Assessment tools are useful but take much time. If these (above) are the 'need to know' concepts for by the end of Number/Algebra Level 2, how could we use formatively assess these? Also in our current assessments - do we have evidence of all of these concepts - or will next years teacher find gaps? What can we do to ...

 How can we increase student voice using Seesaw? one thing we could do would be to set up an activity asking children what they thought of our fun run? Was it fun? What ideas could make it better? This could be multimodal and include drawings, labels, speech, photos etc. It would be valuable and useful feedback for planning future events.

 A part of Sharp reading PLD is the online learning. I've been working through Stage 3 and have just completed the unit 'Convince Me'. Key points:  this part of the lesson allows children to attend to meaning in sentences it's a quick, guided opportunity to collaboratively improve understanding and lift thinking and engagement it's a change of pace in the lesson - teacher adopts role of judge, it's quicker/timed and more of a game During 'Convince Me' the teacher selects one sentence from the text for the students to rework successfully within two minutes. The teacher is judge and prompts student thinking.  Prompts: Repeat a phrase/word from sentence Say the trigger (direct don't question) 'Got it' etc. to affirm that's enough, we can move on The limited prompts provides a constraint for the teacher so it's the students doing the thinking, not the teacher. The teacher motivates the students to 'dig deeper'. A helpful part of t...

 In preparation for our new student (E) enrolling next term, Beth (Speech Language Therapist), shared some excellent learning about Down syndrome, Makaton and Core Boards. Down syndrome: ( full presentation ) students with Down syndrome may take longer to acquire social skills, communication and thinking skills and physical skills (gross and fine motor) visual learning is helpful e.g. matching, selecting, naming Auditory memory and auditory processing delays mean we will need to increase our response time (wait time) and presenting information one step at a time Muscle hypotonia - lower muscle tone - avoid highly physical activity such as trampolines Due to differences in structure of ear, children are susceptible to frequent ear infections and children will have lower immunity so respiratory/sinus infections more frequent (maybe more absences) Gross motor skills - discourage 'W' sitting, foot stability in chairs important Positive reinforcement will be really important.  Beth...

After today's session with Hilton I feel really motivated about continuing working with the small group of Year 2-3 students on stage 3 Sharp Reading strategies. Before this session I had only worked with this group one time. I'd attempted explicit teaching of unpacking sentences and it was probably quite a confusing lesson for us all! Afterwards I was wondering if they were ready for stage 3 so today's session with Hilton was great timing. Explicit teaching - My explanation of the learning for the lesson and orientation to the book ( The King's Birthday) was fine. Hilton said at stage 3 you wouldn't normally do such a front load of the story from the pictures but it was appropriate for these learners. My modelling of unpacking sentences was ok too, though I need to remember to ask the students to look at the text while I unpack. Guided practice - this is where my first lesson fell over (well I didn't really do it) and what Hilton stepped in and modelled today....

Learning the  narratives of our land  and the history of where we are will be an important part of  renaming our school and working in partnership with Ngati Tamaoho.  For our own learning I'd suggest taking the time, if you haven't already, to watch Stories of Tainui . (links to video in article below). Spinoff Article  'This one was personal: Mihi Forbes on the new Tainui wars documentary' .  Other resources for learning/teaching Māori History: MoE is inviting us to test draft content for Aotearoa New Zealand's Histories and are seeking feedback by 31 May 2021 Matauranga resources Much of the Papakura was historically wetlands -The Science Learning Hub  shared  Repo (wetlands) - a context for learning    I think prioritising learning such as this will go some way towards making the 'identity, language, and culture of Māori students and adults evident in teaching and learning experiences'  Define the classroom culture -TKI ...