Teaching and Learning

Many people who use, or have tried restorative justice in their school are entrenched in the conception that there are no consequences, or that people who do things get away with just having a conversation with someone. Recently I have trialled something more. Three boys had a fight in the classroom. One grabbed the second in a headlock, and the third kicked the first in the head. As restorative justice dictates, we met individually with the boys first. We talked about what had happened, who they had affected, and how they were going to make it right. These boys are pretty good at this kind of stuff now, they decided they would make it right with each other in different ways. Some apologising, some inviting others to join them in projects, and others making promises for the future. We then discussed who else they had affected, and discussed how they had affected The School. "We live by a set of values here, and by fighting in the classroom you have jeopardised those. You...

Life, as a journey of self discovery, has been a main discussion point for me of late with two students, in discussion around bullying and being bullied. Wikipidia explains a journey of self discovery as: "The term "journey of self-discovery" refers to a travel, pilgrimage, or series of events whereby a person attempts to determine how they feel, personally, about spiritual issues or priorities, rather than following the opinions of family, friends, neighborhood or peer pressure."  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-discovery We talked about the need to understand yourself, the need to understand how you react to different stimuli and in different situations, and the need to understand why others have decided to react in a certain way. I don't know how much of this the students actually understood, but it's a step in the right direction and if we continue to have these discussions with them, they may see themselves and their lives in a different l...

As I walked around the group of students I was working with yesterday, I saw some students with devices out who were looking at ideas around projects they were working on. One was looking at a YouTube video of Basketball, one of Rugby League, and one of Fortnite. As I looked, I wondered to myself; who am I to say that any of these three students are learning less than the others? How can I prioritise one of these videos or experiences above another? Who am I to deny these students these opportunities, if it is going to help them in their future? And who are we to say what will help them in their future? As we move into the exponential explosion of technology, can we safely predict what will or will not benefit students? There is so much rhetoric now, for teachers to teach; - National qualifications (NCEA in New Zealand) - Social emotional learning - 21st Century literacies - Key Competencies - Restorative Justice/Practices Where do we start? How do we navigate this cr...

We understand why the education system needs to change. As the Factory Model moves gradually out of our schools and we usher in a new era learning. As the knowledge curve extends upwards in our lives, the schooling system moves away from content transmission and moves towards using knowledge to create new knowledge. Developing skills of collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, problem solving... ...unless you're doing NCEA external exams. Exams are solely based on memorising information before you go into them, and regurgitating as much as you can onto the page, to be marked on how well you applied the knowledge you could remember to the problem given on the day. The exams create a need in schools for teachers to follow a syllabus. I lived with a high school science teacher for a while, and although she loved the idea of introducing modern learning principles into her classes, she struggled because of the amount of content she had to deliver to students to get them read...

As an outsider coming to Christchurch, I didn't know one area from another. You could say Bishopdale or Swanson, and it would mean absolutely nothing to me. But I'd heard of Aranui. The stigma of the East side of Christchurch travels far and wide, and is re-promoted continuously. Only at the weekend, an MC at a kapahaka event asked all the participating schools if they were here, and the schools would shout back that they were. When Haeata, the new school in Aranui shouted back that they were here, the MC responded "Oh good, then my car is still in the car park." The fact that this kind of stigma that people are working hard to remove is promoted by leaders in our community ensures that it is refreshed, reinvigorated and continued. This is not however, a single isolated event. It is a stigma that our students experience and have drilled into them over and over again every day. So are all the children in Aranui thieves and vagrants? No. Of course not. They are lovi...

Today this article came up on my facebook feed. https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/03/23/tossing-out-teaching-by-subject-as-part-of-a-modern-high-school-education/ Which is quite an old article, but talks about how Finnish schools are phasing out subjects, to value contextual learning, and learning through projects. When we examine the New Zealand Curriculum, we normally skip straight to the back, where individual subjects look like they dominate, and have major priority (indeed it was the first thing I was taught to look at.) But if we look at the front we see a very different story. We see quotes like this: While the learning areas are presented as distinct, this should not limit the ways in which schools structure the learning experiences offered to students. All learning should make use of the natural connections that exist between learning areas and that link learning areas to the values and key competencies.  -New Zealand Curriculum pp16  And this: School...

Much research around the terms 'modern' or '21st century' or 'future focused' learning have placed several values at it's centre. Learners having a choice in what they do, and teachers creating activities that are authentic to their students are two of these such values that we hear discussed in the education sector. I believe that educators need to explore deeper than these values. Giving students choice about which activities they complete is no longer enough. To ask them to complete a list of "must do's and can do's" or choose from a "learning menu" is not going to prepare learners for their future well enough for them to thrive in a technology-driven world. We need to grow their thinking by scaffolding them to actually own and drive their own learning, which means students need to be in control of their learning from the beginning of the planning process, to the outcome of the learning. As long as adults are planning lea...

Knowledge. What is it? The oxford dictionary states it as "The sum of what is known." School's job historically has been to impart knowledge to it's students. To continue to build on humanities' knowledge by understanding what has gone on before. Until around the 1900's, the sum of human knowledge was doubling every century.  After the first world war, knowledge was doubling every 25 years.  Now knowledge doubles every 18 months, and IBM predicts in the future to double every 12 hours. ref.  http://www.bostoncommons.net/knowledge-doubling/?doing_wp_cron=1479671423.9828670024871826171875 The curve is exponential, and shows no sign of slowing down. So now education stands at crisis point.   We have two options going forward. Either 1. We keep teaching the small portion of knowledge that we can in the 13 years we have students for, whilst letting them miss out on the huge array of knowledge that presides before them, or 2. We offer students...

Learning. Many educators see it as something we need to stuff into learners. As some information that the learner is a vessel to be filled with. Many look at teachers as the shovers of stuff into the vessel, or the crafters of learning to hit the most targets at once.  I don't.  I look at learning as something that students need to love. That students will love if just the right combination of environmental elements are met.  If the environmental elements are just right for learning to occur, then it will happen in a much more meaningful and fun way than if it is poured into someone.  Teachers are the creators of the environment. Their purpose in school is to create the traps of learning that students will fall into. Take an example we discussed today as a group. A toy baby is left lying around almost haphazardly in a junior classroom with a towel, and a bowl of water. Play will inevitably lead students towards a discussion of bathing a baby. This is t...

I've been reading Peter Gray's book Free to Learn recently, which has made me reflect widely on my last 6 years in the education profession. I have thought about the different schools that I have taught at, and the different experiences and challenges that have lead me to where I am now. Peter gray offers a fresh perspective on school. I'm going to start this blogpost with some quotes from his book.  "[One of the sins of education is] Judging students in ways that foster shame, hubris, cynicism, and cheating. It is not easy to force people to do what they do not want to do."   "We rely now primarily on a system of incessant testing, grading, and ranking of children to motivate them to do their schoolwork."  The system itself has fostered what it has been fighting so long to weed out. The system itself has created a culture of shaming students, ranking students, and making learning a chore. "By the time they are eleven or twelve year...

An author recently visited our school, he addressed the assembly of students and suggested to them that two words create a world of opportunity in writing. What if... I liked this concept, and decided to apply it to my thinking when looking at assessment of learning in the classroom.  My big focus lately has been on assessment in the classroom, and how can we create visible learning assessment that is more authentic for students, that is more student driven, and creates more onus on the student to drive their own and each other's assessment and feedback. So I did what I usually do when I come across a conundrum in teaching; I thought about the real world.  How do people get assessed in the real world? How do they get judged? How do they find out if their projects are working or not? There's obviously statistics that they gather, but I thought there had to be more than just that, more than just quantitative data.  I was driving at some point in the e...

There are five fundamental features of what is termed "modern learning". Students decide: What learning to work on Who to work with Where to work What platform to use to effectively complete their learning When to complete work.  Lots of teachers find this scary, for many reasons. Some of the most common are: How will students decide to learn the right things? They won't. The students deciding what learning to work on doesn't mean they decide by themselves and teachers have nothing to do with it. Teachers need to guide students into it by giving them options of mini cross curricular projects to choose from, by co-constructing deep cross curricular projects for students to complete, and by skilfully guiding them towards AO's and LO's. What if students decide to always work with the same people? This relies heavily on the classroom culture. The classroom needs to be set up to be an inclusive environment. Students choosing different people to work...

I wrote this blogpost last year but never actually posted it. At the start of this year we started doing flow inquiries with students. Flow inquiries are an inquiry into whatever they want to learn about. Many of the students at this point replied to our idea with "I dunno what I want to learn about." or "I dont really want to learn anything." or "I just won't do a flow inquiry and will just do what you tell me to do." Slowly over the year, these reluctant students watched others in the classroom become engaged in their flow inquiries and started to experiment with their own ideas. Now two of the most disengaged students that we had at the start of the year are making the most creative things in the classroom. They are having a resurgence of passion into their learning. A resurgence of creativity that has really come into it's own, and students are starting to take control of their own learning again. The traditional school system that they...

Engagement is a key word in todays pedagogical discussion around education. Engagement, or the lack of, is one of the key reasons that so many schools in New Zealand are now transitioning into "modern learning". It is not the spaces that define whether students are engaged in their learning or not, but the teaching. Malone and Tranter (2003) discuss authenticity of learning and it's role of engaging students inside the classroom. Learning must be connected to the physical world, and through the eye of authentic contexts. Students must have meaning in their learning - their learning must be geared towards an authentic purpose. In a classroom (and Mike Scaddon would say above year 4(ish) where students are starting to read to learn rather than learning to read) concepts should be a focus. The Glossary of Education Reform suggests that "...a well-planned curriculum built around authentic-learning experiences can cover all the academic subjects and concepts that stu...

This was written by a friend of mine - a science graduate. It is a very interesting blogpost about current school pedagogies and thoughts for the future. "Teenagers are coming out of high school with an extreme lack of scientific literacy." This was said by my flatmate, an experienced teacher, and experienced in modern learning pedagogy. I asked her why, and her response was "because teachers do not know how to teach it." I find this incredibly interesting as a student who fared very well in the traditional schooling system I grew up in. I want to explore this sentiment, and my own reflections on how it fits into today's scientific arena. In school, and to the most extent university, science is taught as a recipe, where each instruction in the recipe has a logical flow from the instruction before it. Each question has its own "right answer"; in NCEA physics, you can miss out on an Excellence grade if you do not put the right term in your answer. Te...

https://www.blendspace.com/ This is a very interesting little program. It's basically a course creator and manager for the classroom, which lets your students self direct their learning through a number of guided steps. There is a lot of scope for you as a teacher to design pretty cool learning programmes using readily available information on the internet and lets you curate it for your learners. Advantages:  - One advantage I see is organisation. Creating a lesson is really easy, and because it google searches for you it is simple to find things that relate to your chosen topic. - It is also very simple to use. Students can wade through content you have provided systematically. - It is a great way to scaffold learners. Learners can start really simply and gradually progress through your learning program to immerse themselves deeper in the content. Disadvantages: - If we are trying to promote digital citizenship and independence in our learners, I don't think it...

I spent time in a new entrant class recently. I gave them a photo of a head, and a blank piece of paper and told them to finish the picture. I told them to be creative, I wanted to see the most wacky, out there picture I'd ever seen. I wrote down some of their stories... This is a sheep in the city in Africa, and this thing is oxygen that is going into his body.  A bear got bitten by a lizard and now he is half bear, half lizard. Everyone thinks he's a monster but he's actually friendly. The bird ate a bug and grew some horns and squids legs.  This is a horse, and when it stands on grass it's body changes colour into a rainbow.  The bird eats a flower, then he found out it was poisonous. It came out his bum and went on a bee. The bee put it into a flower and it went up into the sky and the whole world became poisonous.  These young learners are so creative, and so full of ingenuity. What if we could somehow keep hold of this creativ...

Today I went into a classroom as a reliever and ran my own programme. It was with year 7 & 8 students and I set them up to do a one day project. I said to them that today was going to be a little different than their normal school day. They could pick one topic to research, and they could do it all day. Step 1: We completed a brainstorm on our topic answering three questions: What do you already know about your topic?  What would you like to know about your topic?  How is you, finding out this information going to help you, or someone else?  The students came up with some great topics, some decided to focus on helping elephants, some helping endangered turtles, some decided to improve their drawing skills, and others made a vortex air cannon. They were really keen to get stuck straight into finding out more about their topics as soon as they had brainstormed but I made them move on to step 2.  Step 2: Make a plan. We used this sheet, which is one tha...

Testing is a big part of a teachers job - it's how we keep track of student learning, it's how we report to parents on progress, it's how we report on national standards. My question is, how much testing is too much? And why do we test? The way I see it, there are two forms of testing: Testing for learning, and learning for testing.  Learning for testing  is where tests are completed in order to see what stage students are at so that we can report on it. This is where the ultimate goal for the student is to learn so they can get a better score on the test next time. This is where tests are running the students' school life and the idea of a successful student, is how well they do on tests. Testing for learning is where specific tests are completed in order to give the teacher a better view on what stage the student is at, and where the student needs to go next. I have seen teachers use PAT, STAR and Running records (to name a few) in this way. Cla...

There was once a boy named Ken. He was a coal miner. He started a new job, working in a coal mine in a very rural place, which was known for producing very low quality coal. The mine had just opened, and was doing things very differently. They had a very different way of digging which by all appearances produced much higher quality coal. Ken worked there for four years, getting to understand this new method of digging. He developed and learned new digging practices and refined them. Eventually the day came where Ken decided he needed to move to a bigger city. He needed to go somewhere that he could meet some more people, and have more to his life than just coal digging. He had heard of this coal mine in a big city on the other side of the world who was doing similar things to what the rural mine had been doing. It too was developing similar ways of mining coal and he thought he could go and contribute to what was being done there, maybe teach some things, maybe learn some new way...