Communication and eMails

As I wait for responses to emails that I have sent out, it occurs to me that emailing may just be the latest digital technology to become obsolete.

People get a lot of emails every day - some of them from commercial sources and some that they have subscribed to as well as from their colleagues and leadership people.  So my (presumptive) conclusion is that they are too busy to reply to my emails when I want to know some information that they do not perceive as being important.

Not replying to emails in a timely fashion seems to me to be the equivalent of walking away from someone when they have asked you a question in real life.  Now if that someone walking away says, I'll get back to you in a minute, or tomorrow, then I am quite happy to let it wait for a day or two, but not responding at all seems to say "you/your kaupapa are not important in my agenda."

But wait, I know that the younger generation prefer to communicate through text and messaging apps.  The point is, how do you make carefully constructed text as succinct as you can?  Ah, the secret is video perhaps?  I am not sure what the answer is.

Recording Your Professional Journey - For Teachers

I just created a new video on blogging since Google has changed the look of the platform recently.  This video runs through how to start out from scratch, and shows you how to set up labels which is an awesome way to keep a record for your professional recertification.   You can label each post with teaching standards or codes each time and if your appraiser would like to look at some evidence that you have complied with the code or reached the professional standards, then you just click on the labels.
Once you have set up a blog, it is easy to add posts.  Teachers forget to keep records of how they have grown and continue to grow as professionals, so I find it really easy to post up every few weeks or whenever I feel something important has happened in my teaching and learning space.  I can keep a track of my inquiry (teaching standard 2) easily as well, and while your appraiser may not require you to do an inquiry, the teaching council certainly expects that you do.
Blogging is a great way to order thoughts and decode your reflections.  As you write or express in a video or audio file, you are focusing on making sense of what you have done.

Of course, if you are just wanting to keep a travel log, it works just as well, if you add place names as labels.  Happy blogging!  I'm sure you will enjoy it as much as I do.

My education story

 When I look at my own primary schooling, I cannot think of many moments where I was truly excited by what I had learned.  It was relatively easy for me as I learned reading, writing, and arithmetic without trouble. I suppose this gives one the foundations with which to work.  I had one teacher who seemed to show a real interest in me as a person - Mr Morgan - who took the time to talk to my parents about my strengths and weaknesses.  He spent time with me after school to improve the look of my writing and also introduced me to the concept that Art was not beyond my capabilities. Hardly earth-shattering but it seemed the break-through to my idea that my capabilities were fixed.

Secondary schooling seemed to be a preparation for a lifetime of exams.  I was good at them, but how relevant was it?  

Your Education in Hindsight (by Hynessight)

What was the impact of your education on you? Did it affect the person you became and, if so, how?  By education, I am thinking of the more formal contexts of primary, secondary and tertiary for some, rather than incidental learning throughout life.   As I meet and talk with people about their education, it becomes less clear to me how valuable formal education is.  Starting questions could be:-

1. What learning can you remember being excited by?
2. How did this influence your career choice?
3. Did you stay in the career you had chosen?
4. What did you learn at school/university that had the biggest impact on your life?
5. What did you learn outside these 3 sectors that had the biggest impact on your life?

If you are prepared to share your answers, I will be more than grateful.  Just write in the comments below or email me direct lhynes89@gmail.com. With your permission, I will share any stories with comments. 

Image from Flickr

All The Good Things in Education during Covid Times

Student agency, student-centred learning, learner inquiry, reflection, learning how to learn, parental interest and participation, and making sense of the real world, all the good things that education should and could be, have been enabled through the Covid 19 pandemic level 4 lockdown.

We all know that school is a societal construct to enable all children to participate in education but as the economy and social organisation has been evolving away from industrial models, through information societies and into knowledge societies, not all has changed at school. And so this lockdown should not be seen as a restriction of education, it is an opportunity to see how things could be so different if we are prepared to make changes.
Let's look at each of the "good things' listed above to start with. 

Simplified, student agency is when learners have choice and control over what they learn.  Perfect in the home situation - let learning fit in with what you are doing at home!  Student-centred learning is when learners seek out and find their own understandings, rather than being given screeds of instructions on what to do or tasks to do. Students build their own understanding rather than being told the answers.  Learner inquiry (inquiry learning) often arises with a "hook" - a video or a book or a discussion which piques the learner's interest. It is often embedded in a framework which enables the learner to focus on answering questions that they are interested in finding out the answers to in relevant and meaningful contexts.  Reflection is an important part of this process - what have I learned, how have I learned it and what else should/could I learn? Frameworks often give learners the structure through which they can learn about anything - that is, they are learning to learn. 

Parental interest and participation is something that parents often feel less confident about. Parents are the first educators, we know this well.  They help their children learn and develop through a wide variety of contexts and experiences to grow their literacy skills in oral language,  reading and numeracy.  For example, they spend time developing attention to language, symbols and texts, and they also instill social norms through their behaviours.   And then they send them off to school, and while they may support them to develop even further, they may often feel that they are really on the sideline or do not have the expertise to be the "primary educator." 

Now parents are forced into a situation that is beyond their control - they are the primary educators in lockdown.  They are the people that the learner sees every day, the person that their children (the learners) look to for advice and direction on what they should be doing to be "educated".  Here is the opportunity to make sense of the real world.  What nature stories are the children learning now?  They are having more time than ever out and about in their yards or going for walks.  What observations are they making? Now is the time to encourage children to think, by asking them open-ended questions.  Here are a few that can be applied to many different contexts.

• What do you think about that?
• Why do you think that?
• What do you think Hemi thinks about that?

Image from Flickr and https://www.personalcreations.com/

So we ask our parents - have your children been managing themselves, getting themselves out of bed at a time you have agreed, helping out with household routines, being where they should be, following the routines of washing their hands, having a bath, eating healthily, getting their clothes into the wash or cleaning up after they have made that fort out of blankets and chairs? Are your children participating and contributing to the household conversations?  Are they ensuring that everyone has a part to play including them?  

Recognise a few of those phrases?  Yes, these are the key competencies that our curriculum aims to develop in every child in New Zealand.  If parents can focus on continuing to ensure that their children work on these, then their education will be in great shape.

In addressing the New Zealand Curriculum, teachers have always been urged to focus firstly on the front of the document, not on the achievement objectives of each curriculum area.

Teachers may start to focus on achievement objectives for their learners when they are teaching online.  When they do this, I can only hope that they will be clear about learning outcomes i.e. what they need to learn and why, rather than the way they learn it.     While teachers around the country are working hard for online learning to be a thing, it is also important to reassure parents that they do continue to educate their children in so many ways.  After all, education does not start at the gate of the school and stop when the learners go home.  Children learn constantly.  They will at school and they will at home.

It is also the time to learn to relate to others.  Are you showing respect for people from different cultures or circumstances to your own?  As Jacinda Ardern says - are you being kind?  How are you demonstrating that kindness?  Do you appreciate the kindnesses shown to you by others?

Are you continuing to use language, symbols and texts to make sense of the world, by reading, allowing your child to read and write about their days at home?  Can your child tell a story about a photograph that they took with your phone?  Can they make sense of digital clock faces, pedometers, visual representations of data that they see on the television or on the internet?  Keep the oral development going - try a challenge for all of your family of learning a new word every day. Model learning.  Keep repeating that phrase, well I learned something new today.

The most important thing for parents to remember is that their children will be alright and that they will continue to learn, just in different ways and in different contexts. 
So is there anything that learners are missing out on during lockdown?  Yes, a few things but that's a subject for another day.

In today's connected world, parents should not be afraid of their children missing out on education.  They are not missing out on learning and that's what it is all about.

Teachers - inquiry is essential!

What has happened?
As the result of industrial action, the Education Council of Aotearoa is looking again at the role of appraisal and removing the 10% auditing of appraisal records by ERO.  They say that they are looking to rebalance "our accountability to the public with professional trust." The link to this information is here.  Teachers felt there was too much workload associated with an emphasis on compliance.

The removal of appraisal as an accountability tool tells me several things are likely to have been happening.
1. Appraisal of teachers has had an accountability focus rather than a growth focus.
2. Principals and leaders have been overzealous in a tick box approach to appraisal and observations.
3. Appraisal has been viewed as a punitive, pass or fail process, that teachers fear.
4. Inquiry has been an onerous compulsory recording exercise rather than a natural approach to teaching, with the benefit of deep reflection allowing changes in practice that are beneficial to all.

What should have happened?
I have always been taught that appraisal comes from the root word of praise.  It is about acknowledging what is going well and looking for goals for the further improvement of teaching practice.  A teacher cannot engage positively if it is just used for accountability purposes.

Inquiry is essential!
From what I have heard, teachers are saying that they don't have to do inquiry any more and there is certainly no legal requirement to do an inquiry for appraisal.  But the thing is, inquiry is one of the six professional standards for educators, so of course teachers should be doing it if they want to be recognised as professional.

There are so many benefits of carrying out an inquiry related to your school's annual goals as well as your own goals.  You can improve your practice through finding out what works best for the learners that you have in front of you. Teachers do inquiry quite naturally in the context of their work, but following a process like the spiral of inquiry, reminds us to look for research on best practice, and allows us the "permission" to reflect deeply on the effects that our changed practice has.

Inquiry is, in my opinion,  the most pain-free approach to appraisal, where all stakeholders get benefits.

Do you "need" a portfolio?
The other aspect that has come under scrutiny is the need for portfolios.  Once again there is no legal requirement for a portfolio for appraisal purposes but it seems that teachers have been collecting screeds and screeds of "evidence" to meet appraisal requirements.  There is simply no need for that.

The benefits of a portfolio are directly dependent on the purpose of the portfolio.  There are three main types of portfolio:-

• Showcase portfolio
• Process portfolio
• Accountability portfolio

The showcase portfolio is to show off your best work, and if you don't collect images, learner voice, videos, words of praise from your leader etc as you go along, it becomes a mammoth task when you want to apply for another job.  You often simply don't have records any more, if you don't collect.

The process portfolio is to record your journey through learning, or inquiry.  It is like a learning journal.  A framework like the spiral of inquiry keeps you focused on the objective and you can see the progress that you make over time.  The biggest benefit from my point of view is the opportunity to reflect through writing down or videoing your thoughts.  These small actions alone allow you to order and make sense of your thinking.  This process portfolio can also be used as a showcase because some of your best work comes out of the realisations of your goals.

The accountability portfolio is to keep records to show you have met the standards, as in an art or technology portfolio in NCEA assessment.  For teachers, the process portfolio will easily meet the purposes of professional standards and is best implemented by tagging (or labelling) sufficient evidence in your process portfolio.

So if you use one portfolio to meet all of these purposes, you will have awesome professional records to tap into at any time.  In this day and age of phones, laptops and other devices to hand, to record and organise artefacts in the cloud seems a no-brainer, so start collecting, and select the evidence that you do need according to the purpose of the portfolio.  It only takes a few seconds to take a photo.

Image -pixabay free images

So there you have it - why I think teachers must be professionally appraised through an inquiry approach and why you would be mad not to have an e-portfolio.

Consistency - who needs it? Just a little rant.

One of the worst excuses for rationale, in many different contexts, that I have ever heard is "for consistency purposes."  Consistency was for industrial or military models of society.  Those days have gone. We wanted everything to be the same so that employees and products were consistent, and soldiers were compliant and knew what was expected of them. In contrast, creativity and adaptability are important skills for the future.

 In the same way, "treat everybody the same" is just as offensive to me.  We are not all the same - we are each rooted in the culture of our forebears, our genetics and our current environments.  One of the things I learned as a senior manager in a school is that every "behaviour" incident and the circumstances leading to it were different.  Listening and understanding different viewpoints and consequences are the first steps to accepting a need for reparation.

So what can we do in our schools to ensure that consistency is not a cornerstone value or justification for important decisions?  We could ensure that there are a variety of approaches to learning by using the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles. This would mean a variety of engagement, representation, action and expression in learning as these are the three principles of UDL.

In the digital world, we could ensure that our learners have a variety of digital tools and devices at their disposal and that they are given choice and control (agency) about how they demonstrate their learning.

In "behaviour management", for want of a better phrase, we need to start communicating more. Expediency is often practised at the expense of rationale.  Be more open to alternatives.  Reserve judgment until we have heard all sides of a story.  This is why our justice system makes use of minimum and maximum sentences rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.

Start being mindful of different values, cultures and approaches to life.  The colonial systems that we work within may not always be the best ones.  Ask, include, adapt. Don't "do to" people.  Remember the treaty.  Our nation is founded on equal status of Te Ao Maori and the crown.  We are partners, not enemies. 

Phones at School - Yes or No?

Well, the Australians have just proved that they are not very future-focused, with the state of Victoria deciding to ban mobile phones at all schools. Even in New Zealand recently, an intermediate school was also reported as banning the use of cellphones at school because staff said that the "devices were the biggest learning hindrance."  This is so disappointing as cellphones can be the biggest learning support that a learner has 24/7 access to in the school day. Research has shown that screentime is not harmful for learners. I am trying to get my head around why a school community makes a decision to ban use of these phones which have computer systems which are more powerful than the computers that sent mankind to the moon.  So here goes.

Negatives (all that I can think of):  

• Learners are distracted in class.
• Learners are using the devices inappropriately for off-task behaviour, because they go online, using apps and texting each other during class time.
• Learners are using platforms to bully other students.
• Learners are sexting and sharing inappropriate content which by-passes the schools' internet filters.

Positives:  24/7 access to all of the following.  

• Access to the hugest accumulation of knowledge and information ever compiled.
• Learners research information (google, youtube, search engines).
• Learners create evidence of learning (- Photos and videos, Keep, OneNote, Docs, slides)
• Instant communication - obviously contact with home, but less obvious - learners make local, national, and global connections for learning (consultation with experts for example) using phone, email, messaging
• Learners use learning aids - google classroom and a zillion other apps that teachers should know about which make literacy, numeracy and all curricular learning come alive.
• Learners use memory aids - take videos and images in class as prompts
• Learners use accessibility aids - for those with additional learning needs
• Calendar for organisational tools
• GPS tracking (for parents)
• Store emergency contact information
• Classroom Collaboration (eg kahoot, socrative, slides, padlets, Thinglink, OneNote, Diigo social bookmarking)
• Create new artifacts (Voice Notes, snapguides, screencasts, stopmotion videos, use pedometers and other physical activity measures, make maps,).

So let's see if we can address some of the negative issues that teachers are faced with.  

1. If learners are distracted in class, what does this tell you about the quality and relevance of the learning that they are doing?  Surely it points to changes needed in pedagogical practice rather than taking away a valuable tool.  I always ask teachers to focus on the outcomes of the learning for the day rather than what the learners may be doing at any one instance.  What outcomes are you expecting from your learners?  What product? What evidence of learning?NOT what evidence of carrying out a task!  "Busy work" may keep your learners quiet but are they really learning?
2. Simon Sinek's golden circles. Let's go back to this idea again.    I always ask teachers what they want their students to learn. I am often given a list of tasks that they want to students to do which describes how they imagine the students are going to learn.  If you can identify what you want your learners to learn and why they should learn it, then the "how" gives learners licence to create their own knowledge and understandings and demonstrate it to you.  Learning should be steeped in collaboration, communication, connectivity, creativity, critical thinking and citizenship.  Why are we not making use of the tools that we all have that allow these things?  Yes, Chromebooks can do many of these things, but not all, and why not use phones as supplementary devices, if not the device?  Don't they need to be able to use their phones in much more creative ways?
3. As with all behaviour, we can use digital citizenship issues to teach learners how to behave and react, based as always on the values of our school community.  Every teacher and parent should not be afraid to address digital citizenship issues as they arise, just as they normally address behavioural issues in class.  Discuss, debate and agree on acceptable behaviour, work as a school community to eliminate poor behaviour.  Teach resilience - how to cope with the unexpected and nasty curve-balls that life throws our way.  What to do when someone bullies you?  How should you deal with people who find that the only way they can feel superior is to put down others? Because most people are actually pretty nice.  It is a minority who need further education.
4. Sexting and other inappropriate behaviour must be dealt with as it arises.  Not your crime and punishment approach, but an approach that incorporates restorative practices for victims.  Stop talking around it and start talking to the learners.

I think that many teachers are still determined to be the sage on the stage in their classrooms.  They want control over how students learn and that control usually means - "listen to me, I am the font of all knowledge."  But they are not and should not portray themselves as such! 
There are down-sides to having phones in class but they are far outweighed by the positive  possibilities and I think it is about time our learners were allowed to use the devices they are most familiar with to be able to demonstrate their learning.  These are the tools they will be equipped with in the future - they are currently using the most primitive tools they will have in their future lives.  It is time that parents, teachers, education sectors and our communities caught up with the realities of the future.

References 

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47825826

https://cellphones.lovetoknow.com/Pros_of_Cell_Phones_in_School

https://www.teachhub.com/how-use-cell-phones-learning-tools

https://cellphones.lovetoknow.com/apps-students

The New Zealand Land Wars - How News Media Can Agitate Societal Rage

Stuff News seems to be determined to outrage people with inflammatory headlines.  Point in case: -

Now let's get my own opinion out of the way first.  Yes, I totally believe that every school in NZ should include the NZ Land Wars history in their curriculum and I sincerely hope that they do.

But, here's where misunderstanding of the NZ Curriculum structure gives Stuff the opportunity to rile the ire in many NZers.  The NZ Curriculum is a framework.  We are so lucky in NZ to have the ability to build our curricula around the framework, compared to most countries who tell their people exactly what they must learn and when.  What it means is that using the 8 principles as a foundation, school communities can pretty much build their own content with a vision of having confident, connected, actively involved lifelong learners who are thinkers, able to relate to others, understand text and symbols, manage themselves, and participate and contribute!

So, with the hugest admiration of Waimarama and Leah, whom I think have done an invaluable job of raising awareness of the NZ Land Wars through their student-led petition, the MOE tried to clarify how forcing certain subject content is just not feasible in our NZC framework.  And Stuff goes ahead and reports it in the headline "MOE refuses....".

The two young women, Waimarama and Leah, are a lot more educated than Stuff.  Their petition asked for physical and online resources to be provided.  Perfect!  The Learning Outcomes and Achievement Standards that they also asked for already exist in the curriculum and NCEA.  But teachers build their own content and context around these, depending on their school or kahui ako's local curriculum.

Inflammatory headlines are nothing but clickbait, and a disgraceful example of why digital citizenship needs to be part of every school's curriculum.  But that's another story!

Does Your School Have an Authentic Local Curriculum?

How timely that the Ministry of Education has released new resources on TKI to support the review of your local school curriculum.   The resources come in the form of three booklets:

• Local Curriculum
• Assessment for Learning
• Information Sharing and Building Partnerships

I say "timely" because schools will need to review their curriculum as they integrate the new digital technologies curriculum into their existing curricula.  The rider on each of the progress outcomes for computational thinking (CT) and designing and developing digital outcomes (DDDO) is that these outcomes are couched in authentic contexts.  

We are so lucky to have a national curriculum framework that asks our schools to build on a vision of having confident, connected, actively involved, lifelong learners.  We, as NZ teachers, are also so fortunate to have the opportunity and responsibility to build key competencies in our learners.  While I have seen a lot of schools spend time on developing their local vision for their learners, the thing I see most often lacking in local curricula is coherence across the school, and learning happening in authentic contexts. 

Some leaders think that by having an arbitrary theme for learning each term or year, this will bind the curriculum together.  I see things a little differently.  By asking your wider school community what is important to them in terms of their people, surroundings and actions, you can build a better local curriculum together.  You also need to consider the future - and how to prepare our young people for a future which is radically different from anything known before.

The MOE resource booklets have a guide which states:
               Your local curriculum is the way you bring the New Zealand Curriculum to life in your school. It should:
                  • be responsive to the needs, identities, languages, cultures, interests, strengths, and aspirations of your learners and their families
                  • have a clear focus on what supports the progress of all learners
                  • help students understand Te Tiriti o Waitangi – its past, present, and future (you will also be planning learning that helps students live the Treaty as citizens of Aotearoa)
                  • help learners engage with the knowledge, values, and key competencies, so they can go on to be confident and connected lifelong learners

The MOE resources also identify 4 high impact practices that help in the design of your local curriculum, as illustrated in this image:

So how do schools start to review their own curricula, build on what they have, and design a flexible, adaptive curriculum that reflects the culture and desires of their community but also looks to the future?  The guide from the MOE suggests some activities for each of these practices, but here are some thoughts around each of the practices that might prompt you to start your review.

1. Enabling Relationships for Learning:
Let's start by asking the question: -  Who are our learners?  What varied and rich family backgrounds do they arise from?  How do we draw on their strengths and cultures?
I have been imagining and "possibilising" what I might do as a leader in a school.  I live in Taupo, so let's start there when thinking about a local curriculum design.  If you asked me who are the people here with which the school needs a relationship, I would firstly say it is crucial that we discover, honour, and respect customs and tikanga of the tangata whenua - Ngati Tuwharetoa, so that becomes an integral part of the curriculum in every class. The school curriculum should grow out of this bicultural heritage, not just give a passing nod to it.
We also have the current population of Taupo, many of whom are employed in the service industries of our tourism-based economy, lots of owners and workers in forestry and farming around, but also lots of retired people and lots of tourists/ holiday home owners. We have global connections with incoming tourists and scientists working in this area.  As well, it is important that our lake and the geothermal, volcanic origins of our environment are valued and protected so that there is a positive relationship with our surroundings.    We want our learners to be able to hold their own in any corner of the globe, so using the context that we live and interact in, how can this be incorporated?
2. Strengthen Collaborative Inquiry

It takes a village to raise a child.  We are all in this battle of life together.  No effective education system works in isolation from the rest of society.  Deciding priorities each year should be a shared work, with strategic goals being understood widely.  If everyone in a school community is involved in decision-making, everyone should be able to see and articulate the needs of the learners and therefore the curriculum.  And most importantly, how do we put the understanding of the needs into actions?  This involves collaborative inquiry.  Knowing what we want, and working out how to get there, by researching together and supporting each other and developing best practice.  This segues quite naturally to the next high impact practice:
3. Building Coherent Pathways
For a while now, schools have a concept of their graduates - often coined a 'graduate profile' - but how well do our schools and teachers know what that might look like for a learner after each year of learning?  Do we have a school- and community-wide understanding of the steps taken at each level to develop the graduates we desire?  Is your curriculum publicised and promulgated (shared widely) in your community?
4. Provide Rich Opportunities for Learning
Too often, rich opportunities for learning are not utilised. It involves a certain amount of letting go of control by schools' teachers.  I don't mean letting the students riot.  I mean using that teachable moment when a learner asks a question totally unrelated to the "topic of the month" or comes to school with a burning thought, or something happens in the playground or the environment that prompts fascination.  It also means looking at your curriculum and NOT teaching that unit on monarch butterflies that has been untouched in 20 years, unless a monarch butterfly makes its way into your classroom and lands on the nose of your most vocal student who suddenly becomes very quiet and still.

The purpose of this blog post is to set you wondering about what you can do about your local curriculum.  Do not expect an overnight fix, after all, it has taken 10 years of the NZ curriculum implementation for some to realise that they have not done it well yet.  It will take time and effort by all stakeholders, and sometimes you will have to start by convincing some people that they are stakeholders in your school.  No doubt, I will have more to say about it, but as usual, I invite your thoughts.

Since I started writing this blog earlier this year, it is interesting to note that the MOE has suggested that Local Curriculum Design become one of three new national priorities for professional learning.  Have your say about this proposal on their website. 

Footnote:  Thanks to Amiria McGarvey for providing the prod to write this post!

Authentic Contexts For Learning - When Did Make-Believe Become Authentic?

The new digital technology areas in the New Zealand Curriculum both urge learning to be carried out in authentic contexts, as does the whole Technology Curriculum.    I really like the idea of authentic contexts for learning as it implies genuine, real-world, problems that learners are able to explore in a flexible, engaging way.

However, I have heard a number of definitions which leave me scratching my head about what is an authentic context.  Some say if it engages the learner and that they can see where it is applied then it is authentic, but I disagree.  To me, that sounds like applied learning and is not much different to the way I was taught, where we were told the "law" or "truth" or "fact" and then provided with 2 or 3 examples of this.  For example, some bacteria are helpful to humans eg they are present in the gut and stop harmful bacteria from causing disease, or bacteria help in the breakdown of dead organisms.  Some also use the "mantle of the expert" approach, so that learners can imagine and explore how real-life situations might pan out.

An authentic context, however, is a real-life problem or project that is relevant and engaging for the learners as they work toward solving the problem.  Because real-world problems are often messy and even "wicked", the learning is often not linear and can lead the learner down all sorts of rabbit holes.  The one thing for learners to keep in mind, in this distracting situation, is the problem.  Will the learning help solve the problem?

It is very difficult to plan in depth for this type of learning, other than to spend some time working together to identify a real-world problem or project that is interesting to them and will engage them.  From there you will need to do some backward planning (what have the children learned during this work?) to ensure that your students are making progress.

There is danger in the authentic context being too teacher-directed or externally imposed on learners. Sometimes community contexts are not engaging for learners as described in Themes of Future-Oriented Teaching and Learning: A New Zealand Perspective on page 53.  Piquing the interest of learners can happen in a number of ways - perhaps something they heard at home, there was something on the internet, or a principal talked about something in assembly or they watched a youtube in class.  Whichever way the interest started, discourse helps learners understand the complexity of the problems.  Talking amongst themselves and asking questions is so important.

Remember, too, that not all learners will engage in a specific authentic context, and you will need to allow for more personalized learning approaches.  Inquiry learning which is less teacher directed should meet the needs of these learners.

In this video, two authentic contexts are shown.  In the first example, the students are younger and there is more teacher direction about the questions that are posed, while in the second, the students are older and are charged with teaching other people about the water quality of one of their community rivers.

Computational thinking is about understanding the computer science principles that underlie all digital technologies, and learning how to develop instructions, such as programming, to control these technologies. Designing and developing digital outcomes is learning how to design quality, fit for purpose, digital solutions. Both of these areas need to be explored in authentic contexts. How are you ensuring that your learners are doing this?


When you explore some of the contexts in which the progress outcomes are embedded, do you consider that they are authentic? Does anyone have any relevant readings?

If You Are Using Google Classroom, It Isn't Enough.

I have a fear that in 20 years time when I am probably ready for dying, that school will still be the same as it is now.  There are still too many teachers still standing in front of classes "delivering" the lesson to the learners.  Andreas Schleicher says in this 2017 video, at about 12mins 30 seconds, that we have 21st-century technology and 21st century learners, with 20th-century pedagogy, in 19th-century institutional structures.

This is why we are in a position where technology has not necessarily been helpful to learners yet, because we are doing old things with new technologies, which means students have "mile-wide, inch-deep understanding" as Schleicher puts it.  Deep conceptual understanding is not there, as shown in the PISA testing.
Schleicher says to overcome this, we must find a way to amplify the relationship (13'56") that teachers have with their students, because learning is a very social, relational process.  Just replacing a teacher with technology is doing more bad than good.
I have noticed teachers telling me that they are using digital technologies really well because they are using Google Classroom. This is not enough.  Don't just use the technology to "deliver" a lesson in the same way that you would have delivered it in the past.

So how can you amplify the relationship?  You as the teacher are the person that they know and trust.  How can you make sure that you multiply your availability without wearing yourself to a frazzle?  Some of the things that I would try would be to

• have a class blog or site that your learners can refer to for aspects of their work, like resources.  Personalise it as much as you can with your face, interests, and snippets of what you thought was exciting on the news or in school.  
• make little instructional videos with your face embedded (yes, get over it, it is a 21st century requirement).
• get involved in social media - professionally!  Use Snapchat, Instagram or Twitter in your classes for learning.
• reach out to your students through feedback forms (getting to know your learners, finding out their questions, formative assessments).
• make the conversations two-way.  Respond to their work (through commenting, posting, voice notes).
• ask an open-ended question on Flipgrid at least once a week and review/respond to the answering videos.
• explicitly include collaborative digital activities in your classwork, and assign a group leader each week to give feedback to you and each other on how work is progressing.  Ask them their next steps.  Develop their collaborative problem-solving and social skills so that they can work with people who think differently to them.
• teach and learn about digital citizenship (that is, how to be a good person, no matter what the medium).
• use social bookmarking (sharing resources through an app like Diigo) and share your comments, while asking for their comments as well.
• make connections to your learner's whanau through google classroom, Seesaw, Flipgrid or whatever your poison, through positive affirmations on achievements.
• acknowledge talents and adjust students' work accordingly

Doing any one of these things takes time to set up, so start with small steps and build up from there. Your aim is to amplify the relationship that you have with your learners digitally so that your face to face time with them is a lot less demanding and easier to manage,

I will be really interested to hear of other ways that you have amplified the relationship with your learners, and of course if you try any one of these things then what have been your successes and failures?  

Schleicher says you have to believe that education can change.  I hope my fear is not realised.

I

Google Summit 2018 - Portfolios for the Teaching Standards

Last week, I attended the Google Summits, run by the EdTechTeam, in Auckland and Whangarei.  So much learning still!  These are the best events I attend in terms of professional development because they are well organised, friendly, and provide inspiration and learning in such a variety of ways, with overseas and local presenters.
As I am a Google for Education Trainer, I presented a workshop on 'Good Google Tools for Portfolios for the Teaching Standards', a subject that all teachers need to address. There are so many easy ways to get your portfolios together for certification, and appraisal, through which your principal must ensure that you meet the standards.
I am sharing my slides here and also will shortly add a video which will talk you through the slides.  Hopefully, you will find some gems here which will suit your purposes. What you actually need for your portfolio is shown in slides 10 - 15.  Some examples can be found on how you can do that in later slides along with some of my youtube videos.

And here's the video which will talk you through some of the slides - GOOD LUCK!

National Standards are Over? What Are We Going to Do Now?

It scares the hell out of me that educators are so entrenched in assessment-driven curricula that they are panicking about what to do in class now that National Standards are abolished.

• Step 1. Do some reading around future-focused learning and new pedagogies for deep learning.  Go on, google it!
• Step 2. Start by getting your learners to talk about what is important in the world.
• Step 3.  Let them think about ways they can have a part to play. 
• Step 4. Teach them ways of working on being communicative, collaborative, connected, creative, critically thinking, and expressing their character or culture
• Step 5.  Build on their individual skills and talents.

You won't stop wondering why you ever thought National Standards were so great.

The Age of the Textbook is Over - Own It!

In talking to a friend recently, I discovered that her teenager, who has just started college, and is still small, as boys often are at that tender age of 13, has a backpack full of textbooks to carry every day, along with a laptop as well.    This just about makes my blood boil.  What on earth are teachers doing, still expecting kids to carry textbooks? And exercise books?  This is the age of the digital school, isn't it?

If your school has moved to a digital environment (and there is no reason why it should not have in this eighteenth year of the 21st century), then you need to ditch the textbooks and the countless exercise books.  There is absolutely no need for huge stationery lists anymore.  You need to protest and make sure the school makes changes so that stationery lists are minimal and the only book that the learners carry is the occasional one that they might borrow from the classroom or the library for a bit of extra reading or study (yes, chuck out the homework, too).

Why on earth are schools spending their budgets on textbooks?  Please, can someone explain?

My five minutes of fame slipped by.

I was invited to appear on TVOne's Breakfast programme on Friday 16th February to answer a burning question from a viewer who wanted to know if Modern Learning Environments (MLEs) were better for children. 

Unfortunately, because I was due to be working at a school in Masterton, the cameraman could not get to me, and the organisers decided to "go down a different direction" which meant that they interviewed Leon Benade from AUT instead.  Leon is a senior lecturer in education, researching MLE's and was interesting to listen to.

I wanted to add in my ten cents worth, as you do, and thought I should post another blog about it.  I have blogged about MLEs before in this 2013 post and this (April, 2015) and this (also April, 2015) and this (November, 2015) and this ( January, 2016), but thought it might be useful to revisit since the discussion is freshly at the forefront, and I don't want to think that my potential 5 minutes of fame has fizzled into nothing.

Leon identified modern learning environments as large open spaces, with multiple use zones, modern brightly coloured mobile, furniture for up to 120 learners and 4 teachers.  I would like to add that a modern learning environment can also happen in a single cell classroom with one teacher, and that it is more about the pedagogical approach than the space.  (Leon alludes to this later in saying that the people in the space make the difference.)

The advantages of having more than one teacher in the space were covered by Leon - giving flexibility to the teachers, utilising different areas of expertise, and load sharing.  Enabling the conditions for personalised learning can also happen in a one cell classroom, with the support of digital technologies. 

Jack Tame interviewing said that parents are scared, and Leon advised them to acknowledge and embrace the changes because we can't go on teaching the same way.  Why not, I hear you ask?  Because we were preparing our learners for a different industrial model of work and now we are preparing them for an uncertain future but one in which individual strengths coupled with ability to integrate into team approaches, collaboration and knowledge building and sharing, and innovation will be valued, rather than compliance and standardisation (hurrah for the end of standardised testing in New Zealand!).

Jack said (and Leon confirmed) that the learners much prefer this way of working.  When the viewer was asking if it were better for children, she was not clear by which measure you could tell if it was "better" for children.  If you were looking just at the results of standardised tests, then you might see some differences (I don't believe there is substantial research about this out there and do hope that no one feels the need to do this).  If, however, you are talking about the well-being of learners, their ability to grow their own strengths and expertise and interests, and their preparedness for an uncertain future, then I think you will find that MLEs (or ILEs) will win, hands down.

Harking back to the people in the spaces, the teachers need to be well prepared and have had time for professional learning.   It is not a simple switch from single cell to MLEs.  Oh yes, the furniture and environment can be changed easily, but it is the practices of the teachers and learners that have to change hugely.  The MLE's must be supported by the use of digital fluency (teachers and learners knowing how to use a variety of tools to support and innovate their learning) and they will also be identified by the themes of future oriented teaching and learning espoused in Bolstad, Gilbert et al's 2012 work. 

And if you say you have a child who only likes working in a quiet space with no distractions, I do understand that, and there will be some quiet spaces in a MLE , but it is important that your child works at developing other ways of working so that they become flexible in approach, and able to adapt to very different working lives.

So there you have it: - what was my five minutes of fame, reworked into a blog post. 

A typical classroom in a Japanese junior high school (Wikipedia)

Keeping the Lines Open

As the school year starts up and I start hearing ways of connecting with parents and caregivers, I am reminded of the importance of having conversations with those at home.  I don't just mean having a casual chat when they call at school to pick up their children, big or small, although there is no doubt that those are crucial times to establish relationships and plant seeds of thinking about education.

No, I am talking about all of that, and more - making phone calls, sending newsletters, keeping an open and informative website and/or classroom blog, seeking information and feedback, having a parent/teacher meeting to open learning conversations, consultation or new initiatives, and individual, tete-a-tete conferences.


These events are so crucial for the welfare of children and particularly the welfare of their learning.   It is difficult to break down barriers built up by lack of communication and misinformation.  It is hard to fit everything into the school year but keeping the lines of communication open must be one of top priority.

Some teachers think that by sharing the work done in class, that is enough. But there needs to be a lot more to it than that.  Blogs and Seesaw are awesome ways of sharing, but they also enable you to move beyond the sphere of showcasing into the realm of co-constructing ideas about learning and what is important for the child.

Teachers roles have changed.  They are not to be seen as the font of all knowledge and so should not be publishing only the best, "corrected" work of their learners.

The most powerful blog posts that a child can make are ones where they are open to learning - that is, they demonstrate knowledge as a process.  They do not just publish a final product, but they post the stages in building knowledge and get feedback from teachers and parents and hopefully both.  They learn to become critical thinkers.  How can a parent contribute to this learning?  The same way that teachers do.  Through acknowledging, questioning and suggesting.


How are you keeping the lines open so that conversations are not just one-way traffic?

Images acknowledgements.

1.  Teachhub 
2.  Apple 
3. Pixnio

Dream It, Learn It, Do It

And so the holiday is over.  I am relaxed, refreshed and renewed.  Tweeps have been twittering about #oneword2018 and I just have not been able to agree (in my head) on one word.  Every time I think that I have a good word, the following day I think I have come across a better one.  I have been through a number - improve, focus, learn, strive, gratitude, kindness..... the list goes on, as I come across others that the tweeps have posted, and thought, yes, I need to do that.

This morning the phrase "dream it, learn it, do it" is reverberating.  So here it is.  My #oneword2018.  And, I am not sorry, but it is six words.  I think it encapsulates what I wish for every learner, not just myself.  I am not going to dissect its meaning - I just wish that every person in the world, but especially those returning to classrooms, have the time and space and opportunity to carry it out without being bound by restrictions of topics and direction from above.

Happy New Year!

Last of the Year

I have to end the year with a good cheer story.  From a photo cue on Facebook, I was reminiscing about a new immigrant, 16 year old young man visiting the DP's office (next to mine when I was AP.)  He arrived one day, just as a bouquet of flowers from my husband was arriving at my door.  He looked admiringly at them.  The (male) DP scoffed, "Waste of money, don't get into that kind of habit!"
The student smiled and agreed, and I said abruptly, "Don't listen to him.  What would he know about women?"  This went on every day for about a week, associated with great hilarity and then one day, the young man walked into my office with a handpicked bunch of flowers for me.  I told him, "You have learned a good lesson.  You will be a great success if you give flowers to the people you admire."  I am pleased to say that 10+ years later, he has gone on to become engaged to a lovely young kiwi woman.   I like to think I had a hand in his success!  And therein ends my tale.

Happy New Year!

School - what's the point?

What do these successful people have in common?

If you haven't already guessed it, they were not successful at school.  Either dropped out, were labelled as not amounting to anything,  were bottom of the class, hated school, or even worse, expelled.  At prizegiving every year, I remember, in my role as a leader in a college, sitting in the front row on the stage in my black gown, groaning as yet another successful guest speaker got up and told the students how he/she was hopeless at school, but succeeded anyway, and here they were, trying to inspire them on to greater things in their school years and beyond.

So why do we still have this ridiculous system that moulds people into compliant citizens - "prepares them for the world" as we are so fond of saying? 

My guess is that we retain a schooling system for convenience.

• It is convenient, as parents, to have all of our children out of our way so that we can get on with the job of making money.  
• It is convenient, as teachers, to have large groups herded into manageable lumps to incubate compliant students.  
• It is convenient as a learner to have everyone educated about the same things so that we know what each other is talking about.  
• It is convenient for politicians to slip inadequate sums of money to institutions to bulk-educate our masses.  
• It is convenient for the economists to prepare our young ones for the same kinds of work that we all know about, to make the financial world, as we know it, go around.

We are one of only a small group of animals who prepare their young for the real world by handing them over to others.  Fish do it, send them off on their own in schools (lol) and a large pack of African wild dogs will all take responsibility for bringing up the pack young, as do ostriches, but relatively few hand over responsibility for prolonged periods of time, like we do. Dominant meerkats will force submissive ones to wet nurse and look after their brood, even going so far as to kill off any progeny that the submissive ones have. 

I am not really into anarchy - I do think we need some sort of order in our communities.  But, I do think that we could be a bit more imaginative about what goes on with our progeny.  I am not saying everything that we do at school is bad.  But, honestly, to those unconvinced members of the public, we need to get real about some of the reforms that we are trying to bring into schools, like MLEs (ILEs) and start thinking maybe there is a purpose for differentiating, individualising, and personalising learning.

So let's be relatively pleased about the convenience of school and start supporting different ways of thinking and doing in schools that will develop individuals who have their own strengths and skills.