Part II: Hypotheses about patterns in my teaching that could be changed to more effectively address the student learning focus.

Kāhui Ako Achievement Challenge 5: Improve the achievement of students with additional needs in the learning areas of English/ key competency using symbols, languages and texts.

My Inquiry Problem/ Challenge: Children living in a digital world, where key competencies are essential, require ubiquitous access to cybersmart scaffolds and resources which are not currently available.

Last week, I met with Fiona Grant who is in the Manaiakalani Innovation Team. The purpose of meeting with Fiona was to discuss my inquiry and to come away with some stronger and more directive hypotheses about patterns which were shown in the data which I have collected. 

The two major areas which we thought should be focus on for my inquiry into the cybersmart curriculum were:

- Interpersonal skills (smart relationships)

- Critical thinking

The hypotheses that these were two areas of cybersmart which could be connected, changed and effectively addressed in terms of student learning came about after analyses of the data (see previous blog post).

We discussed how Manaiakalani has a focus on the positive in everything which we teach. We wondered how we could pose a question which would connect interpersonal skills and critical thinking. This brought us to the question:

How do we make connections which will build positive self worth/ critical thinking/ connecting with others?

On the whole the children were able to demonstrate how to be positive online through blog commenting however, the ability to add elements which were helpful and thoughtful were lacking more. Interestingly, this could suggest a need for more explicit teaching of critical thinking skills as well as interpersonal skills.

In addition, the data also suggested that a large number of the children put trust in information online when it was clearly a false news article. This was explored through giving the children a news article from kiwikids news which was put up as an April Fools joke. I asked Fiona whether it could be possible that our focus on positive all the time could be impacting on the children's level of trust when engaging with symbols, languages and texts online. This made me start thinking whether we need to be thinking about how we can introduce critical thinking in a positive and effective way so they are not blinded to the reality of information online. In other words, how can we elevate the positive around something negative? This is something that many advertisements on television aim to achieve.

A final point we discussed was that when Fiona goes into classrooms to model and teach the cybersmart curriculum, she always makes a link back to the Kawa of Care. She suggested that whatever tool I create through this inquiry should ideally link back to the Kawa of Care.

This final point made a clear connection for me back to our CoL meeting two weeks ago where we discussed reasons why the latests trends from the Woolf Fisher Research Centre showed acceleration in writing data however not so much in reading and maths data. Russell Burt asked us to think about why we thought this was. The common response that came out was a hypothesis that in writing, we have managed to achieve a consistent use of language across year levels as well as across schools however this consistent use of language has not yet been achieved in reading and maths to the same level. Linking my tools back to the Kawa of Care would support this consistency of language across the CoL.