Updating my Class Site for the PENN crew roles

 I realised when assessing my teaching that I could be adding more to my class site to explain the roles that are available for the PENN crew.

I have begun adding to my class site so interested children can explore and find what News Roles may interest them:

The next step could be have the more skilled children make promotional movies to encourage other children to join up. They could mention such things as:

- What they love about their role

- What they learn or have learned in their role

- The great opportunities they have had in their role

Inquiring into my teaching practice

Hypothesis:

If a less experienced classmate is supported by a more experienced classmate to learn a new skill, then their confidence in this skill will begin to develop. Confidence will begin improving in this skill as well as in other areas of school and life once they are out making decisions for themselves as members of the PENN (school news) crew. 

What specific aspects of my current teaching are relevant to my hypothesis:

How am I teaching the more experienced classmate how to follow the values of the Tuakana Teina approach?

- Ako (learning/teaching)

- Manaakitanga (caring/uplifting each other)

- Rangatiratanga (uplifting students)

- Whanaungatanga (relationships)

- Tuakana Teina (apprentice-expert)

At what point do I as the teacher let the less experienced classmate start having more independence from their more experienced peer?

What is my role in this if the more experienced peer is taking on the 'teaching' role?

Formative information about your current strengths and areas for development:

Student voice (also in previous blog post):

Findings: Three children felt confident with knowing how to tell their teacher that they needed help. Four children felt that their confidence with this dropped compared to their primary responses. I'm not entirely sure for the reason for this however, it could result in the fact that in a Tuakana Teina relationship, the more skilled peer is like their 'teacher' and my role as the teacher was to step back from that "traditional" role. The children need to be seeing their peer as their teacher in this pedagogical approach which may still feel slightly uncomfortable to the children.

Practices which are currently implemented to support the hypothesis:

I was fortunate enough to have a whole day with my target group and their more skilled peers during our recent Matariki day. However, what practices am I implementing for general day to day improvement?

- Daily PENN crew - photography, video editing & presenting, studio technicians

During the daily PENN session, I teach children skills for developing their photography, video editing and presenting.
Presenters come in at 8am, open the script and rehearse before their turn to present.  I give the presenters in the moment support and tips based on their own individual needs.
Photographers get opportunity to develop their skills learned through Creative Space. I give them feedback on their photos on their return, explaining what makes their photos good.
Video editors get autonomy to learn how to transfer files between SD card and iMac. They also learn editing skills through iMovie.
Studio technicians set up the studio (lights, green screen etc).

- Sports events - Videographers and Photographers

Students attend sports event with video camera and still camera. This is a challenging area as I cannot attend the sports event with these children to teach them new skills and techniques. 

What changes can I make to my practice?

Currently, there is no implementation of a weekly training time for the children who are photographers and videographers. This is something I should definitely be implementing to explicitly encourage confidence for these children. This could be a before school on Friday session (since I don't run PENN on this day) OR a weekly lunchtime session (where we go and film sports trainings to learn skills). 

What do I need to do to implement this?

Videographers lunchtime club - Meeting together regularly to learn the skills of videography and photography.

More mileage of videography and photography for these children.

How can I measure changes to my practice?

I will measure changes to my practice by:

- Continuing to gather student voice about how students feel they can ask for help.

- Making a comparison of the interventions and implementations that I have added during the year.

How did the children respond after the first opportunity to be videographers?

 After the group of children had an opportunity to be videographers at our school Matariki Day alongside more skilled peers (Tuakana Teina), the children filled in a similar survey to their primary survey. I was interested to see if their levels of self confidence altered after just one opportunity to be videographers. 

Here are the comparisons of the students responses between the first survey and the second survey:

Findings: All but one child either kept the same level of confidence or improved in their responses to this question.

Findings: All but one child either kept the same level of confidence or improved in their responses to this question.

Findings: Interestingly, this question gave quite a mixed bag of responses. One child remained with the same level of confidence. Four children's confidence levels improved. Three children's confidence levels dropped.

Findings: Two children felt more nervous being given this opportunity. One child's levels of nervousness remained the same. Five children's levels of nervousness dropped once doing the videography.

Findings: Two children levels of confidence remained the same when it came to speaking. Only one child felt less confident with their speaking. Five children felt more confidence with their speaking during this experience.

Findings: Four children were consistent with how they felt about their ability to talk about their learning. Three children felt their ability improved. One children felt their ability dropped.

Findings: Three children felt confident with knowing how to tell their teacher that they needed help. Four children felt that their confidence with this dropped. I'm not entirely sure for the reason for this however, it could result in the fact that in a Tuakana Teina relationship, the more skilled peer is like their 'teacher' and my role as the teacher was to step back from that "traditional" role. The children need to be seeing their peer as their teacher in this pedagogical approach which may still feel slightly uncomfortable to the children.

Findings: All but one child felt that their confidence and ability to let the other person speak either remained the same or improved. 

Findings: Six children remained highly confident with listening to their group mates' ideas. Two children felt this confidence dropped slightly with this.

These findings suggest that these children are going to need longer implementing use of videography for the school news, to improve their confidence. I hypothesise that confidence will begin improving once they are out making decisions for themselves as members of the PENN (school news) crew. 

Beginning implementation

 Last week, I had the perfect opportunity to implement my change in practice. We had a Matariki celebration day where I had a whole day to focus on capturing the day across the school! I created five groups of 3 students who worked in teams to capture the learning from the day for their allocated team. In each group, there was an 'expert' (a child who had already done some videography and editing) and two students who were to learn the skill.

The day was a great success! The groups talked lots, there was an instant improvement in confidence from the students who were learning the skill (as well as the student who was teaching the skill) and every group managed to film and edit a movie to get a finished product. From my point of view, I noticed the improvement in confidence through:

- Laughing, smiling and talking
- Focusing on the task
- Sharing of ideas
- Taking turns
- Asking questions

It is going to be important to find out from the children what the positive's were for them from this one day of Tuakana Teina. Today I am going to construct a survey to get feedback from the children about the day.

Cycling back to Hypothesis generation now I have identified a potential catalyst

"If you carry one handle of the kete and I carry the other handle we share the load." (Aroha Puketapu & Graeme (Kereama) Smith).

Check out this great description of Tuakana Teina on TKI.

Important Māori values in this Tuakana Teina approach to be aware of (see video below to see these explained):
- Ako (learning/teaching)
- Manaakitanga (caring/uplifting each other)
- Rangatiratanga (uplifting students)
- Whanaungatanga (relationships)
- Tuakana Teina (apprentice-expert)

Article from Inclusive Education with some great ways to build confidence in the classroom. Many of these are things we are currently doing at our school.

Potential Catalyst for Change: Using the pedagogical approach of Tuakana Teina

What I am trying to develop: Confidence/ Self-esteem

Potential Hypotheses ("If _____ then ______")

1. If I pair children up with more experienced classmates, then confidence of the less experienced partner will develop.

2. If a less experienced classmate is supported by a more experienced classmate, then their confidence will improve.

3. If a less experienced classmate is supported by a more experienced classmate to learn a new skill, then their confidence in this skill will develop as well as their confidence in other areas of school and life.

4. If children have opportunities to learn a meaningful and purposeful skill alongside a more experienced peer, then they will develop in their confidence to speak up and lead.  

Stopping, Reflecting and Refocussing my Inquiry

 Today I continued looking into research but realised I was still uncertain about what I was actually trying to achieve. I stopped and reflected on who my target group are. The target group are children who showed low confidence in terms of speaking, presenting and sharing ideas. Understandably, I have gone down the path of oral language and what makes a good 'speaker' however when considering the big picture, I don't believe I am going to get good results if this is my focus with this group of target learners. I first need to support development of their confidence before I even consider supporting them to become better speakers. 

During a Kāhui Ako meeting at the beginning of this term, Across School Teacher Amy Tofa, suggested using Tuaka Teina to develop children's confidence. I am in a unique position where I have children ranging from year 5 up to year 8 who are all experienced and skilled in Presenting, Videography and Video Editing. I also have children who could benefit from being paired up with a supportive, patient and experienced student who can support my target learners in developing  their confidence through various roles in the production of our school news.

This week, I plan to introduce these Tuakana-Teina partnerships.

How this will look: 

1. Presenters. Any children who have been paired to develop a potential presenter will attend our news filming at 8am on Monday through to Thursday. They can being by practising the same script as the Tuakana and as buddies, will decide when the Teina is ready to present. They can use tools such as quicktime to develop the confidence of the Teina, even if they don't yet have the confidence to present in the actual news. 

2. Videographers. Each Tuakana will support a Teina by taking them along to sporting events and other school events to film together.

3. Video Editing. Each Teina will work with Tuakana to edit footage from sporting events, student movies from around the school that have been filmed by Videographers. This could be the same children who were the videographers.

Assessing speech

 To assess children's speech, I need to create a rubric. I researched ways that people have previously used rubrics to measure speech.

Fountas & Pinnell's (2010) Six Dimensions Fluency Rubric

This rubric can be used to measure:

• Pausing
• Phrasing
• Stress
• Intonation
• Rate/pace
• Integration

This article clearly explains these six dimensions.

Fluency Rubric. This includes:

• Expression & Volume
• Phrasing (also in Fountas & Pinnell's rubric)
• Smoothness
• Pace (also in Fountas & Pinnell's rubric)

Morrison & Wilcox (2020). Assessing Expressive Oral Reading Fluency.

• Rubric with same focus points as the fluency rubric above.
• Expressive oral language has been seen as important for a long time. In American education, many children read from the bible and there was an expectation that they read fluently.
• Early 1900s: a push for silent reading over oral reading, with valid justification for this, oral reading became less expressive.
• Report of the National Reading Panel (2000): 3 aspects of fluent oral reading: rate, accuracy, expression. 
• Prosody: How one reads with expression (not just the superficial features of consonant and vowel sounds).
• Prosody <---> Comprehension (Schwanenflugel and Kuhn)
• Automated measuring tool: Praat (2001) by Paul Boersma and David Weenink
• Multidimensional fluency scale (MDFS). Zutell and Rasinski - Found to create reliable and valid scores.
• This article recommends that human scored assessment tools are more effective than computerised tools as more is picked up via observation in terms of oral reading aspects. It is important for the human assessment tool that the rater/scorer is consistent otherwise reliability and validity reduces. 

From this, I put together a rubric which combines categories from all the above. I will share this in my next blog post.