Plan and conduct a detailed inquiry

Plan and conduct a detailed inquiry into specific aspects of your current teaching that are relevant to the hypotheses you identified in the literature.  

Reality: The latest research is out. In math and reading, students are behind where they would be after a normal year, with the most vulnerable students showing the steepest drops, according to two new reports from the consulting firm McKinsey & Company and the NWEA, a nonprofit organization that provides academic assessments. The students did not just stall early on; the setbacks accumulated over time — and continued even after many students had returned to the classroom this year. Perhaps even more troubling, the students who were most affected by the crisis were already behind their peers before the pandemic, and the added losses have pushed them further back.

What can we do to bring back and retain more students at school and develop (or sometimes ignite) their love of learning? Teachers have to collaborate to address all these needs and use our strengths to engage our tamariki along with accelerating their learning. Covid affected everyone! That's why I believe that teacher collaboration is an extremely powerful approach that can be used to not just benefit our students but support teachers' well-being too.

For teacher collaboration to be effective, we (teachers) should want to participate rather than feel like we must. Like any other skill, collaboration can be improved upon with practice. This is my and, hopefully, my team's experience and reflection on the past two terms of our collaborative work. I look forward to continuing to improve our team's practice to maximise our tamariki successes in all areas of school life and support them to become life-long motivated learners. He waka eke noa!

The focus and plan of my inquiry into teacher and student collaboration to improve learning outcomes and well-being.

• Continue to  develop and refine our shared vision and goals, team culture
• Continue to refine and reflect on our collaborative planning and creation of shared resources
• Create a habit of frequent and consistent team data analysis (formative and summative) to reflect on best practices and plan the next steps.
• Continue to develop trust and positive professional relationships. Like any relationship, collaborative teams take time to build and have the potential to increase in strength and productivity over time. 
• Collaboratively advance our professional knowledge, skills, and beliefs about student learning. 
• Model positive collaborative behaviour to our learners.

Create Staff Meeting - Silhouette Art workshop

Each term the Manaiakalani Kahui Ako hosts staff meetings as an opportunity for Manaiakalani teachers to connect with our COL Kaupapa and Pedagogy.

This time, my school hosted the Create Staff Meeting and I enjoyed the opportunity to share my practice with other wonderful and creative Manaiakalanai teachers. I was privileged to be supported by my team as this was the first workshop that we presented together. Well done Team Kea!

Refining my Inquiry Focus - Team Collaboration and Student Engagement

Over the past 2 months, my Team and I experienced many changes in our teaching approach and pedagogy. I would say, that we naturally started to collaborate in order to address new challenges of hybrid learning and the transition of students returning back to school after lockdowns and isolations. 

As a team, we are heading into a new era of collaborative planning, teaching and learning, and it looks and feels exciting. During my TAI, I want to understand how collaboration can support and better our classroom practice and also our professional well-being. We are at the beginning of our collaborative journey as we have to develop a common understanding of what effective collaboration looks like.

Does Teacher Collaboration improve student achievement and their learning experiences?

Does Teacher Collaboration improve the team's professional well-being?

I read an extract of an article about 'the outcomes of four Australian schools' efforts to promote greater collaboration between teachers in each school by Bruce Johnson: Teacher collaboration: good for some, not so good for others', and found it very interesting. 

"Collaborative ways of working helped most teachers feel better about themselves and their work and provided them with opportunities to learn from each other. However, a minority of teachers were negative about the new teaming arrangements claiming that the changes had led to an increase in their workloads, a loss of professional autonomy, and the emergence of damaging competition between teams for resources, recognition and power."

I definitely want to develop an effective team that is happy to collaborate without experiencing any of the above-stated negative situations. We already addressed the issue of the extra workload by having our daily and weekly reflections on our planning and teaching and developing a model of team planning that is clear for everyone and can be recycled over the next terms and years. We found out that having the planning schedule helped us scaffold our understanding of the NZC and learning progressions.

TAI during Lockdown - Supporting other Teachers - #18

I was impressed with how our teachers took on board the latest PLDs and conversations about Maths in our classes and continued to improve their practice during the lockdown.

To support other teachers, I compiled and shared a number of digital resources. I keep getting positive feedback about this collection as it's easy to use for online learning at all levels. I hope you might find it useful too. 

Below is a number of great resources and online tools for teaching Maths in-class and especially online. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or need support.

Steve Wyborney's Blog - Numerous pptx like Splat, Subitising, Estimations, Cube conversations, Hundred Board etc

Learning at Home - weekly plans 

Place Value 3 digit number representation - interactive

Problem Solving - all levels and strands

Problems and solutions for students

Picture books with mathematical content - all NZC levels with activities. Most of the picture books can be found on youtube.

CyberSmart and the Purposeful Use of Google Meet Chat for Distance Learning

In this post, I'd like to focus on the purposeful use of Google Meet Chat and being Cybersmart during online meets. 

My students felt confident and comfortable during our online meets and, and at some stage, I noticed that my students started to take initiative in our online learning by sharing their ideas and experiences and inspiring each other to try new activities. I was very proud of my learners but also realised that talking ONE-At-A- TIME was a challenge for my young learners. It looks and feels different in class as I always use Think-Pair-Share and other strategies for my students to talk and share. During our 2 x 45 minutes long daily online sessions, it was a bit challenging for my young learners to stay muted. Soon, we decided to use the Google Meet CHAT! 

It became our new opportunity to cooperate and communicate with each other simultaneously. For example, when we solved each other's riddles, brainstormed rhyming words or answered Maths questions, all student could text their answers/ guesses to our Meet Chat and we all could see and respond to individual ideas, discuss, talk, give reasons and explain our thoughts. 

For me, it was a great opportunity to monitor my students' knowledge, skills, progress and gaps and then address their learning needs by assigning individualized tasks and/or giving timely feedback.

Maths:                                                                                               Rhymes:

Answering our Riddles:

From time to time, I had to remind my students to be Cybersmart. Reflecting on some of their comments (digital footprints), we also went over our School Values: Fun, Integrity, Respect and Excellence to support our Cybersmart learning and smart relationships.

Post-lockdown reflection:

When we finally returned back to school, I shared some of our Meet chat comments with my learners on a big screen and asked them to reflect on their online behaviours and digital footprints. It was a huge surprise for some of my learners who had obviously thought that their chat comments would have disappeared after we finished our calls. 

I hope this will have a big impact on their future online behaviours because I have provided my learners with real evidence and proof that everything that they send online stays there forever! 

It was a great CyberSmart life lesson!

Whanau Engagement during Home Learning

Learn-Create-Share culture, Whanau engagement and Smart Footprint

The students were very active during our online meets and on their blogs because they felt proud of their learning. They knew that all of them were important and their contributions greatly appreciated! Every day we had our Talanoa time when my students had opportunities to share what they did independently pursuing their personal interests or passions. Sometimes I was blown away by my students' abilities and creativity! Ka Pai, Room 5!

Our home learning was great and we will take on board the best of our new experiences. But we are looking forward to coming back to school on Monday!

The Importance of Teacher and Peer Feedback during Remote Learning

I believe that we all know that giving feedback to students can be the bulk of the workload. Is the payoff worth the immense effort and time? In Visible Learning, John Hattie noted that feedback is “one of the most powerful influences on learning and achievement”, so if you’d like to increase student achievement in your classroom, feedback can be the key to making it happen.

Blog commenting is a great and powerful teaching and learning tool which cannot be disregarded. Reflecting on my own experience,  I believe that online feedback helped promote good communication and build stronger positive relationships within our Room 5's classroom community.  Blogging and commenting provides authentic experiences to purposefully utilize students' reading and writing skills. I always encourage my learners to check out their peers' blogs, give, receive and respond to feedback. 

My 2020 lockdown experiences proved that promoting peer blog commenting helps connect students with their friends, teachers and wider communities. Moreover, according to research, through exposure to a multitude of opinions and through awareness of writing for a wider audience, blogs also foster cognitive engagement and critical thinking because learners need to reflect on the possible reactions of others to their postings.

Examples of my Y2-3 learners' comments: 

Adapting to Remote Teaching and Learning

In my last post, I wrote that our school's Year 0-3 students are not part of the 1:1 Manaiakalani programme. My challenge was to establish accessible remote teaching and learning for my team and all junior students. Glen Taylor school decided not to change the term dates and we had to quickly adapt to the new teaching environment.

Emergent Stage: establishing online connections.
I decided to start small and assess what we had in place.  Our junior school had been using Seesaw and some families were connected to their children's blogs. During our Term 1 Talanoa time, we had updated the contact details of our parents and now we had to e-mail and/or call them to explain how they could access their child's Seesaw blog.
Tools used: 
-Seesaw blogs - to establish connections
-hard copy learning packs

Beginning Stage: implementing whole-class remote instructional teaching
My class was the only class from our junior school that had the class site. I also used the class site to reach other families of our Junior school and promote their Seesaw class blogs, Google Hangouts and other available online learning apps.
At the same time, we started to run daily Google Hangouts, engaging more and more learners.
It was a short period of whole-class teaching and I felt that it was not structured and engaging enough.
Tools used:
-Seesaw blogs - whole-class instructions (recorded videos of teacher morning greetings and daily instructions)
-hard copy learning packs (now with recorded video instructions on how to use some of the activities)
-Google Hangouts (3 daily sessions)
-My class site for the entire Junior school

Developing Stage: leading a change to improve remote teaching practices.

Reflecting on my remote teaching, I noticed that the change of my planning format and the constant use of my class site was a great tool to connect with my students and their families. It helped achieve a more structured programme and engage more learners. I felt that our junior school would benefit from having individual class sites and called for the syndicate meeting. I was very impressed by the GTS management and my team's dedication. However, some of my team members had no experience with Google class sites. I created a template of their class sites and ran a few online sessions on how to use their sites and implement our new planning format to improve our remote teaching practices.
In less than 2 days, our class sites were up and running! Well done, Team!

Current Stage: differentiated teaching, increasing student engagement and motivation
Everything described above happened within less than 5 days of our distance teaching.

My next step was making sure that my learners were engaged at the right level (differentiation) and motivated to keep learning.

The tools that I use now are:

• New daily planning format using Google Slides - easy to follow differentiated tasks.
• Google Hangouts - daily communication, oral language, feedforward and feedback, brainstorming ideas, students voice, sharing news and learning. A special thank you to Mrs Logan who was co-teaching during our online Meets and via Seesaw.
• Class site - design for learning - making learning differentiated, accessible, rewindable and visible.
• Seesaw - assigned individualised tasks based on their learning needs, ongoing feedback and feedforward, private messaging to improve individual learning outcomes.
• Hard copy learning packs - allowing more time for purposeful non-screen learning, providing video ideas of how to use some of the hard material.
• Learning apps - assigning group and individualised tasks, checking their progress, giving feedback and planning next learning goals. (ixl, SunshineClassics, Reading eggs, Hit the Button, Story Online, Matific)
• Class points based on their visible learning - drawing on my students' motivation and competitive nature. Constant reminders to bring all of their other work (on paper) after the lockdown to earn more class points.
• Learn-Create-Share pedagogy and the integrated curriculum have been utilised to keep my learners engaged, motivated and feel successful during these uncertain times.
• Students have been encouraged to pursue their own interests as I believe that this fosters the development of life-long learning.

By the end of Term 1,  my team prepared online holiday activities. We tried to select fun but educational activities that our students can do by themselves or with their families.

Please check out my class site and Seesaw blog.   Today is the 2nd day of the school holidays but my learners keep sharing their learning on our class blog. I believe it proves their engagement and motivation. 

I would like to acknowledge and thank the GTS leaders and teachers who have been working together to quickly adapt to the new learning environment.                                     

Relationships, Relationships, Relationships

I would like to share this Nathan Wallis's video interview that we watched during our staff meeting at Glen Taylor School. Nathan Wallis is a Neuroscience Educator & Director of X-Factor Education.

I believe that setting up positive and respectful classroom norms, creating feelings of trust and safety for students are extremely important and definitely worth teachers' time and effort. The high-quality relationships are at the foundation of students' deeper thinking and engagement.