Staff Meeting - Nathan Wallis

Reafirmed what DSS are doing in the juniors
How many reading recovery are second boys?
Where should we start first
Te Ao Marama - how can we put into practise what Nathan discussed?
Keeping kids for two years
kids ready to learn - target learners
self belief
essential assessment

The dials - keeping for two years develop relationship with parents
Different experiences from different teachers

Reading - Designing Active Learning: What's in your lesson plans?

After meeting with Michelle and discussing my goals after my video observation, Michelle suggested that the following article might help me to make some positive changes to my lessons.  Here are some of the important notes I took from this chapter:

• Students are most likely to remember what is taught in the first 10 minutes of a lesson.  But after about 10 minutes the sheer volume of incoming material makes organising the material difficult.
• Towards the end of the class brains can begin to make headway again, and they remember the second most from the closing minutes of the lesson.
• Memory storage is more efficient when their is a linkage to prior knowledge and personal meaning along with the need to capture the students attention.
• Considerations for the opening minutes
• the learning target is clearly established
• Students have linkage
• students intellectual curiosity and relevance is engaged
• experience hands on active thoughtful learning right out of the gate
• opening minutes last an appropriate amount of time around 10% of the time
• 'my partner said'....... responses

Links to the Registered Teachers Criteria:

4. demonstrate commitment to ongoing professional learning and development of personal professional practice

i. identify professional learning goals in consultation with colleagues
ii. participate responsively in professional learning opportunities within the learning community
iii. initiate learning opportunities to advance personal professional knowledge and skills

Professional Development - Teacher Observation

During the first week of this term my first art lesson for PLG release was recorded so I could watch and reflect on it with my coach and mentor Michelle.
Overall I thought the lesson went pretty well, but once I had watched it and talked through it with Michelle I quickly realised two main things that I think I really need to improve and make changes with.
Firstly and quite importantly, the students ended up sitting for a a huge amount of time.  At the time I thought that my enthusiasm for what we were discussing would transfer to the kids and the time sitting and discussing the rainforest was justified, however, when you totalled up the amount of time that the kids were siting for, it equaties to over 20 minutes which is too much time. 
My purpose for the discussion was to introduce the children to the rainforest and it's animals, and give them some prior knowledge before enabling the time to research and choose an animal they would like to draw for their artwork.  However I realised watching the video that I doubled up with creating some prior knowledge with the kids.  I firstly had quite an in-depth discussion with the kids about what they knew about rainforests.  It was here that I should of shared the picture book and discussed the illustrators artwork.  Instead I then sent the kids off to do more research and then we spent more time sharing this back as a whole group.  Michelle and I discussed here that often when children share back as a whole class, it is often just the teacher and the person sharing who are giving the discussion their full attention.  The rest of the group often switch off.  Am a little frustrated at myself as I know this, and when I had a class full time i used a wide range of strategies to enable students to brainstorm and to set the scene for a new focus and for also sharing back knowledge that had been discovered.  I think i've perhaps got a bit lazy and it is timely for me to relook and perhaps do a little researching and thinking into how I introduce topics to students and get students to share back learning with the group.
secondly I realised that I spent a great deal of time discussing the rainforest and the animals found in the rainforest.  However, I now question my reasoning for this as the focus of the lessons is about creating a chalk drawing of a rainforest animal.  The time would have been much better used exploring drawing techniques for drawing their chosen animal and experimented with the chalk pastels.

These were the notes that came out of our discussion:

Observation:

Elyisa identified the following areas as a focus for the analysis of the recorded lesson:

• Questioning
• Teacher directed learning
• Amount of time students are spending sitting on the mat
• Voice projection above students

Outcomes

• Mat time -the students time spend sitting is not necessary. Elysia to try other ways of supporting students to gather knowledge and get started on their learning.  
• Michelle to give Elysia a professional reading from Teaching in the Fast Lane Suzy Pepper-Rollins.
• Sharing back time Elysia to consider ways of making this engaging for all learners.
• Teacher talk time- discussed the amount of scaffolding and support given to students.  Get students to indicate they know what to do or strategies to use if they don’t know what to do.
• Record next week’s lesson for own viewing to see if teacher actions are changing.

After reflecting on all of this I would like to make some positive changes to what I had planned to do for the next lesson this coming Thursday to try and make improvements on the first lesson. My focus for this lesson was originally to give time for the students to have a play and experiment with the chalk pastels. I want to have a look over my plan and review how long I had originally planned for the students to be sitting and listening, and make sure it isn't for too long. They majority of the lesson should be for the kids to work on their piece of artwork.

Will also have a read of the article given to me by Michelle and see if there are some key pointers I can use to achieve my goals.

Make it Monday - Art

Recently I have had the opportunity to be involved in the Senior teams 'Make it Monday'.  I have heard a lot about this learning experience from the other teachers.  They had discussed how powerful it was and how the students really looked forward to it each week.
As I was stepping into Nina's role while she was away for the last three weeks of the term, I had the opportunity to take over and run her art make it Monday focus group for their last three sessions.

We discussed together what the focus of the art sessions would be and talked briefly about creating a doc to plan the lessons out together.  She would be taking the first day - so the set up stage and then I would be running with the rest of it.  We thought culture would be a good starting point as that was the teams focus for the term.
So off I went home, and got so inspired by traditional tapa cloths and thought this would be a fantastic art project for the kids to do for make it Monday.  I sat down and planned the whole unit and what I would do for each lesson - researched the traditional techniques and the symbols the Fijian/Tongan/Samoan cultures use to represent different things in their everyday environment.  I shared the plan with Nina and thought i'd done a fantastic job . . . . until she messaged me back saying how great the unit was . . . . . . BUT - explaining the purpose of make Monday was for kids to lead the learning.  For the lessons to go where the students wanted it to go, for the children to be inspired and to take it where they wanted it to go.  So realistically you can't really plan ahead, you have to go where the students lead you.

Arrragh - I had a mini freak out - no planning!  I'm such a structured, organised teacher.  I like to know what we are doing way in advance and find it hard to go into a lesson with only a loose idea of where we are heading.  So this was definitely a new and scary experience!

Nina set the scene with the group explaining the purpose and getting them to explore and discover different cultural artworks that they liked, using this as a inspiration for their own artwork they were going to create.
I then was there for the next lesson.  I decided to start the day discussing art and symbolism.  Also how each piece of art tells a story from the artist.  We then relooked at our inspiration artwork from the previous week.  We talked about how we were going to create our own artwork and the goal today was to create  our draft sketches today.  The structured, organised teacher couldn't help myself so we then create some success criteria together.  See below:

During my first session, I got into a discussion with some of the group about Indian Ink.  This group had no idea what this was, so the following session I got the children to experiment with Indian Ink.  This was a good compromise for the structured teacher in me as it meant that I knew for at least the first 40 minutes the kids would be involved in this and I had some 'control' over the learning.  This could also be a fall back for something the kids could continue with if they finished their own personal art piece early.

For the last session I exposed the students to Rangoli artwork - something completely different that I knew none of them had ever seen before and it tied in nicely with Dawali that was happening at the time.  This was to provide some inspiration and direction for those students who had finished their art piece were keen to give it a try.  There were quite a few students who were really inspired and created some really amazing chalk artpieces out on the courts.

Positives:

• The kids were so inspired.  I never had a child come up to me and say the dreaded "What do I do now?"  They were so into whatever artpiece they were creating, and were so willing to experiment and try things.
• It was really awesome as a teacher to have the kids come up and ask advice about their artpiece and be able to offer suggestions without having a image in my mind of what it should roughly look like in the end.  We could have some real indepth discussions about what could done and what the outcome might look like.  Rather than asking me about whether their artwork looked 'good' etc, the advice I was giving was based around what the different art media would do - i.e. how chalk pastels would look and what type of paints should be used on a wooden surface etc.

Negatives:

• I was so tired!!  Because each child is making something different, and using different media the demands on support to get what they need is really intense.  Definitely no time to sit down!  I wonder if there could be a way to make this run better?
• Even with all the inspiration and discussion on the focus for our artpieces there were still a couple of kids who just want to draw cute deer and didn't really understand how to create some kind of cultural aspect within their art pieces, or to use a cultural piece of artwork to inspire and shape their own.  In the end i left these students to create what they wanted as it was supposed to be lead by them.  However in this same situation next time I would have liked to find a way to inspire them to to create something a bit more cultural inspired.

Some images from the sessions:

Links to the registered teacher criteria:

Conceptualise, plan and implement an appropriate learning programme

• Through their planning and teaching, demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of relevant content, disciplines and curriculum documents 

Promote a collaborative, supportive and effective learning environment

• demonstrate effective management of the learning setting which incorporates successful strategies to engage and motivate ākonga 
• foster trust, respect and cooperation with and among ākonga 

Demonstrate in practice their knowledge and understanding of how ākonga learn

• enable ākonga to make connections between their prior experiences and learning and their current learning activities 
• provide opportunities and support for ākonga to engage with, practise and apply new learning to different contexts 
• encourage ākonga to take responsibility for their own learning and behavior 
• assist ākonga to think critically about information and ideas and to reflect on their learning 

Establish and maintain effective professional relationships focused on the learning and well-being of ākonga

• engage in ethical, respectful, positive and collaborative professional relationships with:  
• ākonga 
• teaching colleages 

Matariki Stars

Matariki 2019

I had the opportunity to teach a lesson about Matariki with the seniors this term in early June.  The purpose of the activity was to provide an interactive and engaging way to learn about Matariki – The Māori New Year, and specifically, the stars of Matariki.

As students read the fact cards and their question puzzle pieces, they hunted for information. Students then synthesised this information to create symbols to represent each of the Matariki stars.

For example, Ururangi and Waipuna-ā-rangi are both related to weather, while Waitī and Waitā are related to food and water. Additionally, Tupu-ā-nuku and Tupu-ā-rangi are both associated with food. 

The kids worked well in the mini groups to create an informative and attractive display of the research they had found.

Link to the practising teaching criteria:

Demonstrate commitment to promote the well-being of all ākonga

• take all reasonable steps to provide and maintain a teaching and learning environment that is physically, socially, culturally and emotionally safe 
• acknowledge and respect the languages, heritages and cultures of all akonga

Demonstrate commitment to bicultural partnership in Aotearoa New Zealand  

• demonstrate respect for the heritages, languages and cultures of both partners to the Treaty of Waitangi 

Demonstrate commitment to bicultural partnership in Aotearoa New Zealand 

• demonstrate knowledge and understanding of social and cultural influences on learning, by working effectively in the bicultural and multicultural contexts of learning in Aotearoa New Zealand 
• select teaching approaches, resources, technologies and learning and assessment activities that are effective for diverse ākonga 
• modify teaching approaches to address the needs of individuals and groups of ākonga

Work effectively within the bicultural context of Aotearoa New Zealand

• practise and develop the relevant use of te reo Māori me ngā tikanga-a-iwi in context 
• specifically and effectively address the educational aspirations of ākonga Māori, displaying high expectations for their learning 

DSS Rock Hunt

What an exciting time we've had with the seniors this term.  As a team we decided to have a focus on creating something that the seniors could then use to help build relationships with the juniors (tuakana teina).  We thought that creating a rock hunt would help the seniors to interact with the junior syndicate in a positive way.  It would also provide the students an opportunity to be creative and create something that would help to beautify our school.

The A.O.'s and S.L.O from our plan:

We introduced the idea to the seniors at the start of the term and they were so excited.  Many of them had done a similar rock hunt using the 'Tronrocks' in Hamilton so were familiar with the concept.  They were also really inspired by the rock images we had found to show them.

The students were really focused researching, discovering and planning original ideas for their rocks.
It was really neat to see the children who really understood the purpose of the rocks and were creating images that the junior students would really keen on, like the 'Paw Patrol' group who painted pictures of the paw patrol cartoon.

We spent 1 session choosing our rocks and painting our base coat.  Then 2 sessions painting our details and creating our group hunt cards.

Students creating:

Our last session was the actual hunt.  We hid our rocks in our preplanned hiding spaces and then meeting with our junior classes and completing the hunt.  We had a small amount of time for the children to reflect on how the whole process went.

We were really impressed with the students during the hunt with the juniors.  We saw students crouching down to talk to their younger group members, highfiving and cheering when a rock was found, being excited to encourage their younger people and making sure their group stayed together.   We noticed children who often stood back and were quiet in class really shone in this situation and were great leaders for their group.  We also felt the kids were very reflective, and had many children comment about how they needed to create clues were easier or more specific, or that they needed to hid their rocks in harder places.

Photos from the hunt:

Changes we discussed after our last session to make the unit even better:

• Was difficult after the group cards were created trying to access students cards as they hadn't been shared with us or some photos hadn't been loaded.  This resulted in a lot of our own personal time getting them finished and printed in time.  Not sure how we could of managed this better.
• That's the nature of school, particularly in a MLE, however an extra session would of meant we could of spent a greater amount of time reflecting on how the hunt went with the kids and discussing things they would of changed to improve their hunt.
• Another session would of been great after this so we could have perhaps invited the middle students and then completed the hunt again based on the things the students would modify to make their hunt better.

Link to the Practising Teaching Criteria:

• Design for learning
• Design learning based on curriculum and pedagogical knowledge, assessment information and an understanding of each learner’s strengths, interests, needs, identities, languages and cultures.
• Design and plan culturally responsive, evidence-based approaches that reflect the local community and Te Tiriti o Waitangi partnership in New Zealand.
• Select teaching approaches, resources, and learning and assessment activities based on a thorough knowledge of curriculum content, pedagogy, progressions in learning and the learners.
• Learning-focused culture
• Develop a culture that is focused on learning, and is characterised by respect, inclusion, empathy, collaboration and safety.
• Develop learning-focused relationships with learners, enabling them to be active participants in the process of learning, sharing ownership and responsibility for learning.
• Foster trust, respect and cooperation with and among learners so that they experience an environment in which it is safe to take risks
• Demonstrate high expectations for the learning outcomes of all learners, including for those learners with disabilities or learning support needs