Manaiakalani Create Staff Meeting

Several weeks ago, we had a Manaiakalani Create Staff Meeting. During this meeting, we each got to attend two workshops about creating digitally. Danni Stone and I ran a workshop on creating a times table quiz using scratch.

Coding is great in maths because of computational thinking - a skill that’s in both the maths and digital technologies curriculum. Creating a maths quiz in scratch is a great way to empower the students, encouraging sharing of learning and ako (teaching others).

Learning from this workshop (or these slides below) could be used by teachers to create a quiz as an independent task for the children to work on OR a task where the children create the game.

This was a great opportunity to share some knowledge, learn from others and to show some of the learning from the classroom.

Here are the slides from our workshop:

So what am I going to do differently?

Task: Write a reflection in which you summarise your main learning about your teaching and next steps. This will prepare you to design an intervention next time.

Hypothesis: A focus on critical thinking and causal reasoning when responding to texts will support increased levels of critical thinking and ability to create causal links in online written interactions with others for year 5 children reading between 10 and 12 years.



1. Choose a text - image or story with no words OR story read aloud.
2. At the start of the instructional time, provide a provocation/dilemma for the concept of this text.
3. Let children discuss, encouraging use of causal reasoning.
4. Move onto guided reading session.
5. Children go off and create a video diary entry, in pairs, responding to the provocation. Each person to take a difference stance - agree or disagree.

I feel that this will be a great introduction to new texts to get the children thinking and engaged. It will also provide the children an opportunity to practice their critical thinking. The video diary task at the end will give the children a chance to draw on the new ideas from their peers and share their learning on their blog.

Texts to support me with this:
- See links above
- Once upon an if: The storythinking handbook by Peter Worley
- The Philosophy Shop: Ideas, activities and questions to get people, young and old, thinking philosophically - edited by Peter Worley
- The Numberverse by Andrew Day
- Bloomsbury: Conversations and Controversies

Activity ideas:
- Bloomsbury - The If Machine

Once Upon an If by Peter Worley:

This text explains the use of stories to get children thinking deeply/critically. It teaches questioning. It also touches on The Concept Box.

There are different types of stories to consider. This will help me in forming a provocation or dilemma for particular texts.
- Myths/Legends: jump between fiction and non fiction. Explaining why things are as they are.
- Fables/ Parables: Teach a lesson or moral.
- Fairy tales: passed down through generations
- Anecdotes: short stories about things/events that have happened
- Humour stories: Jokes
- Tales with a twist: Not what you expect.
- 'What if' stories

The Concept Box (page 78-79, Once Upon an If by Peter Worley)
1. Read the text/story/poem OR could look at an image.
2. Comprehension Stage
     a) Talk with neighbour
     b) Free response to text (statement/question) - important for children to lead - sit back / observe.
3. Concept Fishing
     a) Talk with neighbour - what is the text about?
     b) Talk with neighbour - 1 word
     c) Share 1 word (key word) - each child to share.
4. Concept Funnelling
     a) Look at key words
     b) Choose best word to describe the text.
     c) Share both strongest word justifications and weakest word justifications.
     d) Get down to list of around 5 key words
5. Exploring central concepts
     a) Debate

Season 2 of NZ's Lockdown

In a time full of seriousness and worry, there is some humour coming out. In particular, the 1pm daily update has made it onto IMDB, the well known international website reviewing movies and TV series. Amusingly, it has 2 seasons and has a rating of 9.6/10! Therefore, here I bring to you an update from inside season 2 of NZ's Covid-19 lockdown!

We have made it through the first week back in lockdown up here in Auckland. The children have been amazing - the real stars of the show! We had 20 children show up to our daily google meet today and have had 31 active children posting, commenting and attending google meets. What a success!

Once again, this latest blip in the year 2020 has caused me to stop and rethink my professional inquiry for the year. After some consideration, I am determined to continue with my focus on children and their ability to think critically. The reason for this is that in many scenarios I am noticing how much our children could benefit from learning how to think deeper about their learning. Here are some examples from the last week:

During a google meet: During a conversation about food in Canada, one child ran to their kitchen and brought back a bottle of maple flavoured syrup. They confidently declared that they had some maple syrup. Here is an approximation of the conversation:

Child 1: "I have some maple syrup" [holding maple flavoured syrup up to the screen].

Child 2: "Miss West, I don't think that is real maple syrup."

Me: "Oh, why is that?"

Child 2: Because maple syrup comes from Canada.

Me: Can you think of any other reason why it might not be actual maple syrup?

[No response]

Me: What does it say on the front of the bottle?

Child 1: Maple flavoured syrup

[No elaboration]

Me: What do you think it means by maple flavoured?

From this point on, it required a lot of prompting from me for the children to be able to contribute to a critical discussion with causal reasoning. In a group of about 12 children, only 2 children contributed fully to the discussion. In this example, there were signs of one child thinking critically, however they struggled to elaborate, add causal reasoning and justify their critical thinking.

In other examples, when children were completing a task where they had to find facts about animals in Canada, many interesting facts were found however a level of causal reasoning/ critical thinking was lacking.

Examples:

"There are Polar Bears in Canada."

No elaboration. A response that could provide elaboration could be, "There are Polar Bears in Canada because Polar bears live in cold climates. Northern Canada has an extremely cold climate with snow and ice. Polar bears thrive in this climate and eat many animals that also live in this area."

"The marmot is the most endangered animal in Canada."

No elaboration. A response that could provide elaboration could be, "The marmot is the most endangered animal in Canada. This could be because of predators that eat the marmot or it could also be due to such issues as climate change or humans destroying parts of their habitat. To understand this more, we could look at whether temperatures have changed much in the area of Canada where the marmot lives or whether their habitat has been threatened by humans."

These are just examples. To get children showing this level of causal reasoning or critical thinking, I could create a causal chain template for the children to learn to use and work through when working on tasks. This causal chain template could be something to help the children when working independently. This will be important, particularly when we don't know how Covid-19 could impact us going forward. 

In-school Reading Professional Development

This term, we have begun some in-school reading professional development. This professional development has some overarching goals:

1. For learning to be transparent, explicit and cooperatively owned.

2. To have a shared understanding around best practise and a shared language in reading that is explicit and consistent.

There are some critical components of reading that we have to be aware of. We are using a number of resources to support us in this, including:

- Effective Literacy Practice

- Sheena Cameron and Louise Dempsey: The Reading Book

Image: The Dimensions of Effective Practice, NZ Curriculum

This diagram shows the different dimensions of effective literacy practice. During this reading professional development, we will be focusing mainly on the instructional strategies section of this diagram.

After the first session, we were asked to go away and observe the errors that children in our target group were making.We needed to think about what they were doing, why they might be make that error and the needs of this particular child to move them away from making these errors.

Here are some of the patterns I noticed in a group of children reading at 8-8.5 years.

- 6/6 children showed signs of missing the middle of longer words. These children need strategies to attend to and correctly decode medial blends.

- 4/6 children showed signs of not attending to the ends of words. These children need strategies to support them in attending to the ends of the words.

- 5/6 children seemed to lack confidence when it came to decoding. This showed in a number of ways. Sometimes these children froze on challenging words and did not attempt to use any strategy to decode. Some children read extremely quickly and did not correct errors (either add ins or omissions). 2/6 children often added words in or omitted words and did not go back to correct themselves.

In my next blog post about in-school reading PD, I will explain strategies and prompts we are learning to support each of these above errors that are happening for these children.

How am I going to monitor my teaching and the children's learning?

Task: Write a reflection in which you summarise your main learning about your teaching and next steps. This will prepare you to design an intervention next time.

Hypothesis: A focus on critical thinking and causal reasoning when responding to texts will support increased levels of critical thinking and ability to create causal links in online written interactions with others for year 5 children reading between 10 and 12 years.

Based on the main learnings from observations of my teaching as well as articles by Richard Anderson that I have read, I created the following monitoring spreadsheet. Once I implement the intervention, this will allow me to efficiently keep track of children's levels of critical thinking and my teaching without taking away from the lesson. I will respond with a drop down response each week.  I have also created a tab on this same spreadsheet for my teaching, focusing on areas which I need to adapt, based on observations of my teaching.

Reflection: Summarise your main learning about your teaching and next steps

Task: Write a reflection in which you summarise your main learning about your teaching and next steps. This will prepare you to design an intervention next time.

Hypothesis: A focus on critical thinking and causal reasoning when responding to texts will support increased levels of critical thinking and ability to create causal links in online written interactions with others for year 5 children reading between 10 and 12 years.

Main learnings from peer observation and self assessment of my teaching practice:

Over the last few weeks, I have done both a self assessment and had a peer observation of my teaching practice. The focus of these observations was on how I encourage critical thinking and causal links in a reading group. Below are my main findings from this process:

1. I am often too quick to repeat or rephrase my questions. This doesn't give the children enough time to think and respond to what I have asked.

2. I need to be thoughtful and careful with the questions I ask so I provide a good prompt/provocation to get the children thinking but not too much to take over their ability to think critically.

3. I need to take a step back and allow the children to do more of the talking. This will be a fine balance because I still need to be providing support and teaching the children new strategies.

4. The children are quick to respond to me as the teacher but not so much to each other. The children do not tend to ask each other questions. It is very much a conversation between each of them and me. The experience needs to be more of a network where the children feel they can ask and respond to everyone in the group.

Next steps:

- Observe a number of teachers taking reading groups of a similar level to this group. Observe the types of questions these teachers ask and how they encourage the children to do the thinking.

- Encourage the children to respond to each other and to ask each other questions from the text.

- Encourage more causal links by the children. Teach a number of ways that this could look. They don't just have to use the word 'because.' 

School pre to post lockdown

What a year we have had! Let me give you a run-down of our year to date:

February-March: The year started as any year would. Our team of teachers met up in January to set up the classrooms, discussed pedagogy, set up our spaces and began planning for term 1. The school year began as normal - we welcomed our class of excited and enthusiastic children and we developed a classroom culture and expectations. The year ahead was looking great!

We began to hear talk of covid-19 causing concerns around the world. I remember the shock of hearing that America was closing it's borders to Europe and thinking how 'over-the-top' this seemed! But then we did it too! The reality of the pandemic was reaching New Zealand.

Mid-Late March: Throughout mid-late March, our numbers of children at school began diminishing. On the 21st of March, the government announces the four-level alert system. We were in alert level 2. At school, we began wondering what each new day would look like. School was beginning to look at lot different to how we knew it. 

Monday 23rd of March: Now this was a day to remember. We had about 15 children in our space which usually had 60 children. To begin with, the novelty of having such a small group of children was great! The children found it exciting that there were so few of them and we had a great morning of learning. And then at lunchtime, while the children were all out playing, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that schools would be closing the next day and that by midnight on Wednesday, we would all be in level 4 - total lockdown. The realisation of what we had to achieve in such a short time kicked in - we had to get all the chromebooks home so the children would be able to continue their learning. In the hour after lunch, we managed to send all the children who were at school home with their devices. But we still had 3/4 of our space whose devices were still at school. Over the next 48 hours, we worked to get all the chromebooks home. Parents came to pick up the devices and we did home deliveries. 

Wednesday 25th - Friday 27th of March: School holidays were brought forward. We spend these three days before the holidays hooking our children into learning from home. We jumped straight into google meets multiple times in the day to support children with their online learning.

After the 2 week break for the children (during which a holiday blogging experience was set up), we were straight back into online learning. Our site changed so the children were accessing all of their learning from the same page of the class site (rather than separate pages for each learning area). We were producing new content each day for the children in our class. Check out my page from lockdown by clicking this button:

On Tuesday 28th April, I returned to school for a level 3 'Bubble School Teacher Only Day.' School felt very different. Not all the staff and children were back. Three bubbles were set up, each with a small number of children. We had about 19 children in total at school.

We had to stay at least 2 metres away from anyone who was not in our bubble and we could be at least 1 metre away from anyone who was in our bubble. We had nine children in our bubble, ranging from year 2 to year 5.

Here is our website from bubble school:

While I was back at school, my class merged with another class for online learning. This is the site they continued to learn from with Miss Tuiā.

Monday 8th May: Return to school for everyone - level 2!

On Monday 8th May, school reopened for everyone!! However, school still looked very different. Over the next few weeks, the children all gradually returned. For the first few weeks, we were extremely strict with hand hygiene (hand sanitiser and hand-washing) and children were seated at least 1 metre away from each other. Children were dropped off and picked up at the gate. Our doors opened at 8am and children had to come straight to class. Our day began as normal at 8:50am and finished at an earlier time of 2:30pm. Because of the physical distancing rules that were still in place, lunch time was shortened to just half an hour.

Since we returned on Monday 8th May, we have made some big changes to how we run things in our classroom.

Having the shorter lunch time has meant that we have had children who are much more calm, settled and ready to learn in the afternoon.

The children have been so much more settled and focussed in class with everyone having a set seat. It has reduced the amount of walking around and distraction. The noise level in class has been remarkably quieter as well. 

We have also changed the way we have organised learning for the children. As a team, our five teachers are collaborating to create detailed independent tasks. Each week, there is a new topic and this topic is developed throughout the week. The structure of this independent task is similar from week-to-week. You can explore our team site here. Hover over the home button in the banner to see the different weeks of work (from week 6 to week 12):

Having well-planned independent work with new content each day has allowed us to have more focussed time with the children we are meeting with in a group. We have been able to focus on the group in front of us.

This has been such a big take-away from the experience of lockdown. Our children were able to manage themselves so well in their learning from home, using our class site. The transition from school to home learning was able to be smooth and they were empowered in their learning. The focus we saw from our children during lockdown was able to continue as we came back to school with a similar independent task model. The only different was that we were able to see groups again rather than being on google meets 4 times a day.

Going into term 3: Going into term 3, it is going to be really interesting to see what we embrace and keep from this experience. The big question will be how we set up out classroom spaces from next term. Currently, we do not have a mat space. However, this has actually been beneficial for our children. The lack of transitions around the physical space has kept our children settled and more focussed. In terms of our online space, we will be continuing with the weekly independent inquiry topics, however this will be based around our school term inquiry.

This 6 months has definitely been a massive year of learning, change, flexibility, resilience and an amazing opportunity to reflect on our teaching to decide what is best for the children in front of us. There have been so many opportunities to make changes for the better in education that have come out of this global pandemic.