The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. (Alvin Toffler)

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.  (Alvin Toffler)

Week 27-Activity 3-Practice-Broader Professional Context

Implementing effective strategies to support priority learners in our school.

Working in a low decile school, we have many students arriving at school without the traditional European knowledge of reading, writing and arithmetic.  Many also have a limited vocabulary and are passive learners. “Priority learners are groups of students who have been identified as historically not experiencing success in the New Zealand schooling system.  These include many Maori and Pacific learners, those from low socio-economic backgrounds and students with special education needs. (Education Review Office 2012 p4)

The Education Review office (2012) discusses trends in education relating to Priority learners.  They identify three aspects, which they recognise as ways of narrowing the gap between these learners and other students.  

These are:           student centred learning,

knowledgable implementation of a rich and responsive curriculum,

effective use of assessment.  

In my class we are trying to narrow the gap through blended learning with a STEM basis.  In other words, science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) taught through both a project based learning environment and a discovery based inquiry.  This provides authentic learning experiences for the students. “Authentic learning is seen as an umbrella for several important pedagogical strategies that have great potential to immerse learners in environments where they can gain lifelong learning skills.” (Adams Becker et al 2016 p 26)  The result is student centred learning in a rich and immersive curriculum.

Assessment in our STEM class has used SOLO taxonomy with students peer and self-assessing.  Initially students struggled with the concept of SOLO taxonomy but gained confidence in their self-appraisal by also using a peer assessment strategy.  Peer review forms a huge part of the world of science and teaching students to effectively assess / discuss / query work rather than the person has made a positive impact on both collaborative learning and class culture.  Students began to recognise each other’s skill sets and ask peers for help and support to overcome personal challenges.  Again this links to traditional assessment practices of peer assessment, whanau assessment and teacher assessment, appropriate behaviour and performance in context-specific situations as identified by Mahuika (2008).

In traditional Māori education, inter-relationships between learning areas were embraced.  STEM learning brings this cultural practice into the classroom but with a 21^st C agenda.  It prepares our students for a world of collaborative work teams, of problem solving and innovating solutions.  .  It also addresses issues of social justice and equity as scientific literacy and critical thinking support students in tackling the ‘wicked problems’ and opportunities currently faced by our society

References

Adams Becker, S. F. (2016). NMC/CoSN Horizon Report: 2016 K-12Edition. Austin Texas: The New Media Consortium. .

Johnson, L. A. (2015). NMC Horizon Report: 2015 K-12 Edition. Austin Texas: The New Media Consortium.

Mahuika, R. (2008). Kaupapa Māori theory is critical and anti-colonial. . Mai Review, 1 - 16.

Office, E. R. (2012). Evaluation at a Glance: Priority Learners in New Zealand Schools. Retrieved from http://www.ero.govt.nz: from http://www.ero.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/Evaluation-at-a-Glance-Priority-Learners-in-New-Zealand-Schools-August-2012.pdf

Current Issues in My Professional Practice

Critically analyse issues of socio-economic factors, school culture and professional environments in relation to practice

“School culture is one of the most complex and important concepts in education” (Stoll, 2000 p9).  Almost anyone who has walked into a school will agree with this statement.  Each school has a defined character that meets a visitor head on.  At Koraunui we are unashamedly a multicultural school which celebrates difference and inclusiveness.

 “School culture is influenced by the school’s pupils and their social class background.” (Stoll 2000 p 10) 

The Education Review Office (2013) listed the following as important factors, which have an impact on learning at our kura:  

·         Students come from a diverse community

·         Students are taught in either English or bi-lingual Māori mediums

·         There is a high level of parent participation in the school   

All three points are true but there is more.  We are a decile 3 school and poverty is a very real issue for us.  We have families who cannot afford to feed their children and live in damp, overcrowded housing.  A hungry child cannot learn and so the basic needs must be met.  We have normalised the issue of food, providing for all who come but poor housing creates health issues. 

We have 45% Maori and 12% Pasifika students.  The diversity brings life and joy to our school.  We learn from each other and celebrate our wide variety of cultures.  We run the Hutt Valley Polyfest, which involves all staff and in 2016 had 30+ schools participating. Although a HUGE effort, this brings our community together and working hard towards a common goal brings cohesion, recognition and appreciation for each other’s strengths.   We are a beacon school for students with special needs.  The families love the inclusiveness and the students learn to accept and acknowledge difference.

It is not all a bed of roses though; there are cultural divides, misunderstandings, occasional violence and widely differing expectations from our parent community.

We need to look carefully at the cost of schooling, $5.00 is the maximum we can charge for a school trip and the idea of 1:1 devices or a trip to Mindlab are out of reach unless we can access alternative funding. Gargiulio identifies that a teacher who is an educated person is unlikely to “understand the perspective of a child from an impoverished background”. I am still learning this lesson and am regularly confronted by issues of inequity within our society. So how do we then develop students who will become competent 21^st C learners and citizens?

1.      We work hard to build positive relationships with our students and their whanau

2.      We empower ourselves with professional development which then leaks out into our classroom and into the wider school community.

3.      We are a ‘Glasser’ school basing our behaviour management systems on Choice Theory.

4.      We have recently picked up PB4L and KIVA to support behaviour management.

5.      Teachers walk the talk.  We have staff meetings on our local marae, we learn te reo and other Pasifika languages and we use them.  Through this we role model learning, risk taking and mistake making to our students.

6.      We trust each other and we support each other through our differences. 

7.      We expect our students to succeed.

The children are at the centre of our world.  They are our priority and we hold high expectations for them.  We try to expose them to experiences and ideas beyond their immediate environment.  When your family is multi-generational unemployed, or your next-door neighbours are a gang, your life experiences differ from those of children in more affluent suburbs.  Providing hope, belief, love and opportunities then becomes critical to foster the possibility of future change.  In relation to practice, this makes you a social worker, a teacher, a friend, a trusted adult or an untrusted adult (depending on the situation).

When I look at Stoll and Fink (1996) Norms of Improving Schools. I would tick every box on this list. We create shared goals annually, we take shared responsibility for success and we measure the success in multiple ways.  We believe we can improve our academic results and work collegially to achieve this end. Gargiulio (2014) alludes to the importance of education in alleviating poverty in society and to the crucial role low decile, multicultural schools play in achieving high educational outcomes for their students.  The BOT and management team support us to take risks in our teaching.  We model ourselves as lifelong learners and we celebrate achievements.  Best of all, we are open to change; we talk with each other when there is a problem and try to come up with a resolution together.  (Stoll, L. and Fink, D. 1996)

References

Gargiulo, S. (2014). Principal Sabbatical Report. Auckland.

Office, E. R. (2013, November 04). Koraunui School 04/11/2013. Retrieved from Education Review Office: http://www.ero.govt.nz/review-reports/koraunui-school-04-11-2013/#1-context

Stoll, L. &. (1996). Changing our schools: Linking school effectiveness and school improvement. Buckingham: : Open University Press.

Stoll, L. (2000). School Culture. Set, 9 - 14.

My Community of Practice

I am currently a classroom teacher and leader of science in a small urban school in Stokes Valley, Lower Hutt. In describing my “community of practice”, I reflected on Wenger’s definition:  “communities that share cultural practices reflecting their communal learning” (Wenger 2000 p 229) and “groups of people who share a concern or a passion or about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interaction on an ongoing basis” (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002, p.4).  Using this definition, I have an affiliation to a large number of Communities of Practice.  Looking only at education these include: my teaching colleagues, the students, the science teaching community, the enviroschools community, the Mindlab community, the twitter community...... All of these groups have their own unique beliefs, practices and educational relationships. As described by Knox (2009) these are groups of people who have the passion and purpose that leads to an exchange of knowledge and professional development.

Using the first definition of community of practice (Wenger 2000 p 229) I can see that in our school which has both a bilingual whanau unit and a Pasifika class, some cultural practices are shared while others are not.  This does not stop us being a community of practice, but it does bring into question, the validity of the definition.  I find that the second definition (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002, p.4) resonates better for my own situation in our school.  A cultural divide arises from a lack of knowledge of the traditional tikanga of each group.  While we work hard to address this, it is a constantly moving target as families and staff move into and out of our kura.

Wenger (2000) describes three essential elements of these communities of practice as

The domain:   Within Koraunui, this is to give our students opportunities to develop the knowledge and skills required by 21st Century learners.  Learning forms the core of our domain. This includes aspects such as learning about ourselves, about each other, about our multicultural community, academic learning and culminates in providing rich opportunities for our students. 

The community:   Our community has a foundation of mutual respect and trust.  That said, there are communities within the larger school community.  Our whanau community, our Pasifika community and our Aoraki community.  Each has its own focus and develops its own purpose.  From these groups we then move together to design the purpose of our school community working collaboratively to ensure that it meets the needs of our children.  Sometimes there is conflict and dissonance within these communities but we routinely reflect on our practice and continue to address issues and further develop our skills and competencies.  

The practice:   Within the various Koraunui communities there is sharing of capabilities and opportunities.  We grow our skills, knowledge, and understandings collectively, through face-to-face and online discussions, sharing, encouraging and supporting each other.  This collaboration is enhanced by reflection, both self-reflection and team reflection. 

References

Knox, B. (2009, December 4). Cultivating Communities of Practice: Making Them Grow. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhMPRZnRFkk

Wenger, E. (2000). Communities of Practice and Social Learning Systems. Organisation, 225-246.

Wenger, E. M. (2002). Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge. Cambridge MA: Harvard Business School Press.

 

Mindlab Week One

What a great group of educators to begin this journey with.  We were asked to reflect on two questions?
What is knowledge?
What is the purpose of education?

It has been interesting to see the results on our Google plus community.  There are many similarities and I am left asking myself if this is a result of how we have been educated?  Do we all really believe the same things or are we, as teachers, confined within the box of pedagogy?

I am hopeful to find the answer to this question over the next year as we take this journey together.

Tony Wagner in his talk on "7 skills students will need for the future"  provokes  us to think about the capabilities that students will need in the future; for  a successful career, for continuous learning and for active and informed citizenship.  How do we re-imagine education for the future?
1. Critical thinking and Problem Solving
2. Teamwork and Networking.    Skills: Understand and respect differences and lead by influence
3.  Agility and adaptability.  Skills:  Being able to work across areas
4.  Initiative and entrepreneurism.  Be willing to set stretch goals.
5.  Effective oral and written communication.  Use analytical thinking and personal voice for       persuasive writing.
6.  Ability to access and analyse information.
7. Curiosity and Imagination

These skills dovetail beautifully with the aspirations of the NZ curriculum.  They also fit with key competencies and science capabilities.

MindLab Session 2

Reading Nicholas Tuleb, The Black Swan about bringing past experiences into the future.

What is the difference between knowledge and wisdom?   Wisdom is knowledge plus experience where you use judgement to value the knowledge.

What is the purpose of education?  What are 21st C skills?

Grant Lichtman, what did he find out?  Lack of collaboration between schools.  If we want self evolving Ss we need to be self evolving establishments.  The anchors, the dams and the silos, the three things that stand in the way of learning.

Solutions:
Teach into the unknown
Self evolving learners
Self evolving organisations

How 20th C and 21st C skills differ?  Do we need both?

20th C  Literacy and Numeracy
21st C  Adaptive, collaborative,

How well do our thoughts align with the ITL research results?  Innovative teaching and Learning with Microsoft PIL
identifying the characteristics of strong and innovative teaching.  Connection between design of teaching activity and skills students are learning


Video
Three act structure required.  Movies that encourage empathy are more effective than those that objectify problems.  Worst type of video is slides with music, it needs human participation e.g. your voice or your classroom shots

Tools Tag Cloud

Tips and tricks for filming and editing:


How do the Key Competencies relate to 21C skills?
Are real world problems and ICT for learning implicit in the KC's?

How do KCs apply in a leadership context?  CORE video

In assignment think about practice and apply KCs or 21C skills to our own practice.

How much do we know about leadership theories, styles and attributes?

What did you gain from reconceptualising Leadership?

Do people want to lead or administrate and manage?
 Teacher Agency?  How does this fit with teacher agency?
As we move to ILEs does teacher Agency diminish?

Leadership is not about administration and managing.

Think about area of practice you want to focus on first, then come up with solutions.
The issue that i have is.....
What areas of digital and collaborative practice could i use that would help to solve this issue.

Saturdey July 23rd Mindlab

Adaptive Competence

SAMR and TPACK models  allows you to evaluate where technological innovation sits.  Is it innovation or substitution.
TPACK, technological, pedagogical and content knowledge  TPACK in 2 minutes
Content is the what
Pedagogy is the how direct instruction, inquiry
Technology is the partner, what tool will make the content more accessible to Ss

Substituition, tech acts as a direct substitution
Augmentation, direct substitution with functional improvement
Modification  tech allows for significant task redesign
Redefinition:  Tech allows for creation of new tasks, previously inconceivable.  SAMR in 120 seconds

Google Maps, Google Earth or Tour Builder.  Create a Google Doc where you can design a learning activity to last 20 minutes.  Go for an integrated approach.  Inform it with SAMR and or TPACK

What are the limitations of using a map compared to using google maps.

Article:
Technology proficiency of teachers plays a major role in classroom technology innovations

Knowledge of the enabling conditions for a technology.

Knowledge of whats out there

Doesn't align pedagogically with the way teachers are.

What is the difference between being innovative and creative?  There is a difference, to be creative is the process of ideas but as an innovator you are doing something with your ideas.

APA referencing  check out Daves screencasting on blogging and learning theories and check out the referencing.

Qualities of an innovator:  risk taker, confident, not fragile, curious, open to new ideas, persistent, collaborative

References can be got through google scholar.

Are dispositions as important as skills?  What is an innovation video.

Disruptive Technologies, advances that will transform life, business and the global economy.  A paper check out google scholar.

Gada, K. (2014) The education disruption:  2015  retrieved from http://wwwsingularity2050.com/2014/07/the-education

Google Project Loon for internet accessibility with balloons.

Google expeditions  accessible if kids have a device.
Tilt Brush by google, virtual reality art concept.


What are the potential uses of virtual reality in education?
Minecraft  Gallipoli in Minecraft.  Map and topography    Made for schools and teachers to use in education.  (use this in fish passages work)

See things through other eyes and in a new way.
The Sims

I have been thinking about peer review and how this fits in with NOS in the classroom.  I have been attending weekly team meetings where one person presents their work and there is an open discussion about it.
It is not personal, and it is definitely helpful to the presenter.  How can I replicate this in my classroom?  As Andrea Benwell​  said in her post on NOS, we are surrounded by it in all aspects.
Under the values section of the curriculum we are asked to help students "develop their abilities to discuss disagreements that arise from differences in values and negotiate solutions."
It seems to me that science might just be the perfect vehicle for this.  How do you all go about this in your classes?