Changing horses

Over the last couple of days, as a staff, we have been having professional learning about Careers/Pathways education, so that we can advise our hublings and help them to think about a wide range of possible futures. This has started me thinking about my own career, and those of others my age, who are in a world where things are changing in a way we are the least likely to understand. 

In the last year or so I have been morphing from an English teacher into a History and Classics one. It has been (and still is) a huge change for me as I feel that I just don't have the depth of subject knowledge that my colleagues in this school, or in those subject areas in other schools, have. As an experienced teacher, I feel quite challenged by not really knowing what I need to know, and realise that it will take me a long time to gain the depth to feel confident about facilitating my students into and through big stakes assessments.

At the same time, one of the facts that we learned at our professional learning is that typically, on average, millennials spend between nine and twelve months in a job. When employers are talking about longer retention, they are talking in terms of 18 months being good. (What?! I feel so old...)

How do I fit my concept of long-term learning and continuous development into a format that my hublings will ever be able to use? And how do I look at myself and what I do as not being completely out of sync with the way things are in the world.

I think there are some things that apply, whatever stage of ones career we might be at, and whatever generation we belong to:

• Be prepared for continuous change - in my case, it is very slow, over a long period of time. For my hublings, it will be a lot quicker. But for each of us, it needs to be at a pace that we can assimilate. The point is to acknowledge that it will happen, and therefore to make sure that for each of us, it will proceed in a way that is planned and advantageous to us - not just to wake up and find that change has happened and either we don't know what to do now, or we have been left behind.

• Be prepared that it might not work - my husband last year left the Armed Forces after a very long career; lots of different roles but the same organisation throughout. He moved into the commercial sphere. He knows that the move was the right thing, and the job that he has had since that point has been an excellent introduction to that outside world. But, it has been challenging, and stressful, and it may well not be the right place to stay. Looking at the stats that our Pathways Leader (Careers teacher) was telling us, maybe he should be moving on. Maybe he needs to take this experience and learn from it, and look for something not quite the same. Understanding that something is not quite right, is not the right fit, is not failure. If it doesn't work, it is a learning experience, and moving on without making it work is actually okay.

• Be happy - my job is stressful, and full-on, and I really am not making things easier for myself by taking on new roles and study in addition to my everyday teaching (which isn't everyday at the best of times anyway). But I love it. I want to learn more, I want to be involved more, I want what I do to make a real difference. I came back to teaching three years ago for financial reasons, and I really feel that if I had not found a niche where I can be excited about what I do, I would not still be here. And I also feel that if the excitement isn't there, then it is the wrong place to be, whatever your career, but especially in Education!

The saying goes "don't change horses mid-stream", which means once you have made a decision, you should stick to it. But I don't think this is true any longer. I think that the parameters that are in place at any given point of one's career are not fixed forever, and so as our priorities, our understanding, our interests, and our circumstances all change, so we should actually be prepared to make the leap from one horse to the other, even if it doesn't seem like the safest thing to do.

What do you think? What other ideas do you have that I can explain to my hublings at the same time as I assimilate it myself? Is the idea of a career a completely unrealistic, dead thing? Let me know...

#hpsschool  #continuouslearning  #careerforlife?  

I made a thing!

I've been wanting to get my hublings to do some serious thinking. And I would like at the same time to let other people know what is important to me. I've been wanting to do that for a while now.

I have several friends who are facebook activists, and they do a good job of putting lots of provoking articles into my feed - some of those I ignore, but a lot of them start me thinking about what is important to me, and why I feel that way.

The only problem is, for me, facebook is a place for keeping in touch with my friends, and being social - I don't feel comfortable with swamping my friends with things. Apart from photos of the Toads, of course.

So this morning, I was thinking. I have been using my hub's google classroom to put things in, but that's only good so far. They can read it but no-one else can. What might be a way I could spread things wider? I thought about starting another blog, but then I thought I'd try something different. Does a webpage go further than a blog? Who knows? Not me.

As a staff we were told about the 'new' google sites thing at the start of the year; that it was easier to use than the old one. I had had a play with the old one before, but my technological-challenged-ness didn't get very far with that. 

I tried the new one. I built a website! With two pages on it! And I think I can add more as I go ... hmm, I'll have to keep playing.

It was actually pretty easy, even for me. There are some things that don't quite work, like it doesn't have the ability to put a comments box in. But I have put my hub down as editors, so they at least should be able (theoretically) to put their thinking in. The rest of you will have to wait until google updates things. 

It does look cool. I hope you like it.

Tracey's Propaganda Pages

Hermann's and my brains

It's the first week back in classes (well, it was when I started this... ) and I am meeting my hublings as a group for the first time. Some of them know me well and some are new this year, so we all need to learn about each other at the same time as we learn about ourselves and our learning.

As a tool, I have used the Hobsonville Point modified version of Herrmann's Brain analysis which calls the four sectors strategising, organising, imagining and relating. Each of us used a set of cards to find out what sort of characteristics we have in our learning, me included, and made a pie chart showing the different aspects of our personalities.

As you can see, I am strong in organising, can do some strategising, and am not so great at relating and imagining. This is not a judgement about my character or anything, it is simply a screenshot of how my brain works at the moment, and it shows me where I have strengths, as well as the things that I can be working on.  I can also relate this to other things that I know about myself - like the fact that my desk is either beautifully tidy and colour-coordinated, or it is carnage; or that I know I am extremely introverted, so relating for me only happens easily on a small group or individual basis - and from there I can set some goals going forward.

At Hobsonville Point, we have modified the traditional Herrmann's Brain four quadrants to align with the learning that our students do in hub, so that our hub curriculum is structured like this:

The four quadrants reflect the original Herrmann's Brain model, but we have also added in the communicating idea as a central hub, and surrounded the whole lot with our Hobsonville Habits, which are the dispositions we need to make all of the other things happen.

My own goals for the year will be very much around the relating strand, both carrying on from my teaching inquiry from last year, as well as extending my practice in other ways. I feel I should also be doing something in the imagining direction, but there are so many truly creative types at our school that I feel a bit overawed, and I need to put the formal learning (which would be where my imagining strengths are) on hold while I sort out a few other important things. Maybe next year...

Anyway, my students have also been formulating goals based around what they have learned about themselves doing this exercise. They have used the hub learning objectives and built their own goal statements using the generic hub curriculum ones; so for example if they are not so good at evidencing their work in hub they might have chosen the last LO and modified it to read: to GENERATE by communicating my learning through my blog more. (I don't think anyone has actually done that one; as a group, my hub feel they do plenty of blogging, thank you very much). 

The whole point of this is that it is a tool, one of a range of many, and we are using it in combination with other tools to think about our learning. This meta-learning is really what this is all about - if we understand how we learn, and why certain kinds of learning work for us, we can make our learning more successful. At the same time, we can work out strategies to make the types of learning that we find challenging less so. After all, in life, things are not going to be presented in the way that we find easiest or best, whether that be in the workplace or elsewhere, and so we need to know tools that will help us make sense of what we are coming up against, so that we can make it work for us. 

If my hublings are learning that from this exercise, then they are learning a whole lot more than just how to answer questions. I am too.

Excellent questions

My students always astonish me.

When asked at the start of my latest term course "What is the one most important or interesting thing you want to learn?" my year 9 and 10 students came back to me with ideas like:

• I would like to learn more about extremists who perform terrorism, what psychologically makes them think that is okay.
• How did communism lose popularity among countries?
• I would like to learn a bit more about what makes a healthy and well-structured economy, also maybe the business aspect of that too.
• Which is more effective are economic isms or political isms in terms of benefit of the country?
• I want to look at terrorism, and what views they have on political, social and economics - why they feel they have to use extreme measures for patriotism.

They also want to know about fascism, capitalism, communism, racism, sexism, and feminism.  All this in 80 minutes a week for effectively six weeks!

A little context - the course is called 'All the isms', and as part of our school focus on How Things Work I was planning to how some political and economic systems work. What I found after this first set of questions was that I had to add in a whole other focus, and now we are looking at ideologies as well.

We started yesterday with some of the political stuff; after an introduction from John Green with Crash Course World History - Capitalism and Socialism and Nikkim with Adam Smith vs. Karl Marx we had a discussion about how all of those things work, the political spectrum, and the realities of politics as compared to the ideologies. Then I asked if there were any questions.

And then one student blew me away by asking "Where do authoritarianism and liberalism fit into all of that?"

What an excellent question! Not only is it asking something really thoughtful, it is also showing how that student had processed all of the information beforehand, and become so engaged that he was looking for deeper meaning.

I LIKE this kind of teaching; where we are talking about stuff which is real and meaningful to students; where the naughty boy is so engaged that he is leading the discussion; where the learning is driven by the questions students ask, we all explore them together, and then we realise that there are no right answers.

Notes for a new term

The end of the first semester has meant a bit of reflection about the successes and failures of the courses that have just finished, so that particularly the failures can make my this semester's courses better. In the spirit of so many blog posts and suchlike, I am going to do a top-5 list of things I can do better this time around.

1. Don't overcomplicate things. It is good to offer options to students and to give them freedom to choose or take their inquiries in the direction that appeals to them, however, in one of my modules I ended up assessing two different standards at two different levels, which meant four sets of marking and moderating. Not to mention the sheer logistics of differentiating my instructions to students! Madness. It is much better to do one thing really well, and have choice within that as necessary.

2. Keep the learning objectives in mind. No matter what you are teaching, you will have to report on it at some point. If you use your learning objectives to keep your teaching on track, it also will make the reporting both relevant and easier. (This doesn't mean 'teach to the test', that is something else again, because what a test is, is and should be completely different from learning objectives.) Learning objectives are what your students are supposed to be learning, so shouldn't that be what you (I) are teaching?

3. Mark as you go. I am a shocker for leaving everything till the big main assessment, and then having all of my classes with marking due in the same week. And marking is not my favourite part of this job.  Even though all of the work that students are doing throughout the course is relevant, and there are some good, assessable activities amongst them, which won't even take that long, I just somehow always seem to forget that, and end up at a point where if I were to mark everything that I originally intended, it would take me three weeks longer than I actually have. So, do lots of small bits of marking, and don't procrastinate, and even, plan small bits that you will mark within a larger class or activity and then, do just that bit. (I'm being aspirational here, I know, but it's a plan...)

4. It's okay to do teaching. A lot of what we do is inquiry based, and student choice and voice are really important. But to begin a new course or class, actually students do need some context, so that they can find out what they don't know, in order to find out 'the answer', or an answer. And sometimes, some information, via some sort of text, and then some questions about it, equals scaffolding! Seriously, this definition only just occurred to me right now. I am so pleased with myself. Because I like teaching, and making students think about stuff they never would have themselves, and I like to take their brains and make them hurt, just a bit, and this is because one of the things that is most important to me is doing the action of thinking. Students are not always going to know what questions to ask, but you can lead them towards those questions.

5. Do what you love. The best classes are the ones you are really involved in because it's what you are really passionate about or interested in. Students know that too. The teachers I remember are the ones who really loved their content, so that even if I hated it (Animal Farm and allegory in 7th form English, anyone?), I still responded to it. That's as true now the classes are called year whatever as it was when they were primers, standards and forms. So the stuff you geek out on as a person - and we all do - should be the stuff you teach, simple as that.

I have a plan now, and at nearly the end of week one, I am achieving it so far. We'll see how the rest of the term and semester go.

Just as an aside, isn't it funny how so many years of experience make you think there is nothing left to learn, but then you start to do things differently, and the learning starts all over? I much prefer the continually learning version, it's a lot more fun.

Something (else) completely new - the follow-up.

Last Tuesday, for the first time ever, I presented a professional learning workshop to a group of teachers. Not from my school, but from 3 other local high schools in a combined schools professional learning day, so to an unknown audience. As I described last week, beforehand, I was feeling quite daunted by the whole thing, because it is quite different presenting to your peers from a position of equality than it is teaching a class of students.

In the end, as everyone told me it would, it went really well. I tried not to include too much (and skipped the part where I had written in orange to skip if I was running short of time) and had a mix of theory/information and practical activities. I followed my plan, and the timings I included seemed to be pretty realistic ...

Until it got to the bit where I was demonstrating how we do things here. In the best possible way, the workshop got hijacked at that point, because there were so many interesting and interested questions. The last half hour completely disappeared. 

In the same way that a sidetrack in class can be the best teaching you do, because of the engagement and questioning involved, that last half hour was probably the most productive in making my 'students' think about their own practice and how it might be modified. They were really interested in the practicalities; having accepted that change needs to happen in their own contexts, they really wanted to know how. I feel that I was helpful, both in initiating some of the thinking, and with providing the beginnings of answers. I know that I gave them plenty to take back to their own schools.

I also got lots of requests for access to the information sources I shared and the ideas, so I put together a slideshow which included everything. In hindsight, I should have done it beforehand, and used that to run the workshop, but that is definitely part of the learning curve. Having done this once, I definitely want to do it again.

Here is the slideshow I put together:

I think the main thing that I was trying to convey, and the most important idea for me anyway, is that modern learning doesn't necessarily need beautiful high-tech surroundings to happen in. In many ways, having this available to new schools is a deterrent to schools and teachers who are in traditional surroundings, as they feel the practice is tied to the environment. Modern learning practice is simply another way of thinking about the role of education and teachers, in that the focus is on the learning of the students, not the teaching of the teachers. Looking at the NZ curriculum and understanding what it really wants us as practitioners to do, and then looking for ways to do that, can take anyone in any environment forward; all it needs is the will to make that cognitive change.

My Hero!

My hub's task this morning is to write about someone who is a hero to them, and explain why.

One of my heroes is my mum. Generally because she is such an awesome mum, and still the kind of person I want to be when I grow up, but particularly at the moment because she is dealing in an incredible way with cancer. 

Since February, Mum has been going through the cancer journey. Throughout the process - discovery, surgery, recovery, chemo - she has been amazingly positive and resilient. She has taken everything in her stride and seen all of the process as a way of becoming healthy again, rather than as being sick. Her physical and mental well-being has been something that she has always maintained, and this attitude has carried her through.

I think the way Mum lives her life, with positivity and proactiveness, has carried through into this episode of it, and it is this character which I admire in her. She is always looking to the future and making her present meaningful in building towards that future. At the same time she is very matter-of-fact in her way of dealing with stuff, there is no drama or self-pity, and I really admire this too.

She always has been my role model, and my hero. I don't think that will ever change.

Something (else) completely new.

Tomorrow I will be doing something completely new. It will be a steep learning curve for me, and I am feeling quite nervous right at the moment.

Last term, Claire floated the idea to us as a staff of being involved with a cross-school teacher only day, and that some of us might like to present a workshop. I am still not entirely sure how I put myself forward for this, it was one of those things that sounded like a good idea at the time...

So tomorrow I will be presenting a workshop on Modern Learning. I would like to quite clearly state that I am NOT an authority on this, but I think that is the point. The amount of learning that I have done in the last year and a half at HPSS, and that I am still doing, is huge. I came in as a complete novice with no background in anything except the traditional, but I was/am enthusiastic and excited by the idea of doing things differently. I guess I am now a not-quite-novice, but the feeling of being back in my first year teaching hasn't quite gone yet.

How I have learned to do things differently is basically what this workshop will be about, and how others can learn to do things differently too - kindof setting myself up as the test case or guinea-pig, and then showing others that it's not overwhelmingly difficult.

As you can see:

I have a plan. It is pretty detailed. All those tabs are parts of it. Everything is timed. And that's the second page, the first page has a section that says skip this section if running out of time. In orange. I am pretty confident I will.

For me, this is part of me being a teacher and a learner. This is part of my own Professional Learning. It is me being Adventurous and Resourceful.

What I think I will also need to do, somehow, is actually write the whole thing up and put that in here. We'll see how it goes first.

Being Reflective

I have been discussing with my hublings, as part of our focus on the Hobsonville Habit of being Reflective, the value of journalling. Each of them is starting up a journal, either online or in an old-school diary. We have looked at the reasons for keeping a completely private journal and what it means "looking back to look forward". We have also investigated apps and talked about our online presence, so that we are aware of the ramifications of putting our stuff online, and so looking for encryption and password protection as must-haves.

I already have a journal. I use it a lot. I have always done a certain amount of journalling, particularly as a teenager when I went on exchange, but a few years ago, after the Toads appeared, I got post-natal depression. One of the symptoms for me was the waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to sleep again because my mind was dealing with so many things all at the same time. This is when I started serious journalling.

Journalling is helpful for so many reasons. Simply the act of physically writing stuff down slows down your thinking, because your brain can only go as fast as your hand can write. In the middle of the night, thoughts chase themselves through your head so fast you hardly have time to catch onto them before they are gone again, which means they still aren't actually dealt with. Slowing down your thinking means that each thing that pops into your brain gets examined and dealt with before it is allowed to go away again. And the action of examining the thought will often, usually, either make it seem a lot less important or give you avenues of dealing with it.

Journalling also really helps with mindfulness. Mindfulness is, for me at least, being thoughtful and aware of what I am doing. Journalling helps with this because if I have written about something, I am more likely to keep it in mind over a period of time. Following the post-natal, one of the things that I need to be mindful of is my response to provocation. If I am stressed or tired, I am very likely to reflect behaviours of others in their interactions with me. And particularly if I am placed in what may be a very minor conflict situation, I am likely to get angry and aggressive far more quickly than the situation warrants. Journalling keeps me mindful of my state of mind, and allows me to plan my responses, which means I am not living in a constant fight or flight mentality.

The most important thing about journalling is that is a means to learn from mistakes. If you think about why whatever happened actually happened, it is less likely that the same thing will happen in the same way again. For me, this is still something that I need to deal with every now and then, because life is learning; but I think this is really valuable especially for my students. They are in the part of life where, as I explained to them, hormones are going to make them do dumb stuff. If they want to come out the other end of adolescence relatively unscathed, they need to think about the dumb stuff so that it doesn't go catastrophic. Journalling is a way of looking at that dumb stuff and processing it so that next time (and there will be a next time) it isn't so bad. Explaining this, especially to my year 10 boys, suddenly showed them the value of writing stuff down.

Being Reflective is a habit that has a lot of resonance for me. Hopefully, by sharing my own experiences, I can help others to see the value that Reflective practice can have in life. How are you Reflective? Why are you Reflective?

Goals Reflection

At this point of the term I am getting my students to review their goals, both academic and personal/dispositional, that they set at the start of the year. Given that one of my goals is to blog every time they do, it seems like a good time to look back on what I have achieved so far this year.

One of my goals, although I didn't get to the point of actually writing about this one, was to have a good work/life balance. I can quite categorically state that I haven't come anywhere near achieving this, but not in the way that you might think.  Life has crash tackled me this term, and I have had a lot of 'stuff' to deal with. I think that I am doing that quite well, but I am really hanging out for the end of this term when I know that several of those life things will either be sorted, or will come together after a long process. School/work has been my sanity place, but I don't feel that it has had its fair share of the balance.

Another of my goals (also not stated) was to be a good hub coach. This is something where I actually have no idea how I'm going, but I do have in my plan to do a google form* survey to see how I'm going, so at least I can say that I am being aspirational. I feel that I am building a good relationship with each of my students and we can talk about their academic and personal stuff openly and purposefully. 

One of my stated goals was to have a clear learning objective for every lesson and to have it shared with the class in some medium. If I am honestly reporting on myself, I would have to say that I have a solid 'Not Yet' for this one, or maybe using our new curriculum levels reporting scale, 'Developing'. The idea of getting this into my planbook hasn't happened and so it has been completely random as to whether something has reminded me that I actually need to do it for a particular class. I will have to do some proper retraining of myself in planbook use for next term, and I think I need some sort of visual reminder on my pin-board too.

My other stated goal is, I think, going well. That is, I feel I am making personal progress in developing a more compassionate attitude to students whom I find challenging. I haven't got anywhere with my teaching inquiry, or the formal aspects of this, but on the ground, in my classes, I am a lot more willing to listen, and to discuss non-productive behaviours or attitudes than I might have been previously. I know that this has made my classes more accessible and enjoyable for certain students, and it has for me too, as I don't have to pull out the grumpy teacher, get back on task thing, which both they and I hate.  Now I just have to work out how to frame my enquiry so that it encompasses the progress I am already making... And it occurs to me that my next inquiry might have to be into how I can make those more accessible, enjoyable classes also be more productive.

Reflecting generally, I think it is really positive to be getting my students to be blogging their goals and reflections, and it is for me also. If we do this, we keep thinking about it, and that means a much better chance that we will actually do what we say we are going to.

Please let me know what you think, and please look in the sidebar at my students' blogs and give them some feedback on their goals and reflections too.


* woohoo, I actually managed this! When I figure out how to set up Practicing Teacher Criteria sub-pages, and how to export results from google forms, I will put the results into the right place. Generally though, I am very happy with what my hublings have said.

Blog without deletions

Hub Task: Write a blog about a quote that you find relevant to you, without deleting AT ALL.

This is a reminder for me; today is not a day I feel like dancing, but I don't need to share that tiredness with everybody else. I can feel that I can still be an inspiration or a joy, or at least a small happy emoji for others.

Disillusionment

It's hard, when I love what I get to do here at HPSS, to hear of negative attitudes in other contexts.

The other weekend I caught up with some people from the university course I did a couple of years ago. One of them has in the interim trained as a teacher and did his first year teaching at a school which is trying to bring MLP into a traditional context. I was really excited at the thought that 'traditional' style schools are trying to bring MLP into their own contexts, so I asked him more about it.

What followed was so disappointing.

This second-year teacher had moved on from that school. He felt that although the SLT were really focussed on making the move to MLP work, the staff had not bought into it, and many of the staff who had been there a while were vociferous in their negative opinions. He seemed to have taken on those staff opinions rather than been inspired by what the SLT were trying to do.

In addition, he trotted out what I felt were excuses, rather than reasons, for the difficulties the school was having in moving forward, and for his having left. He said that the school clientele, being predominantly PI, didn't understand the new way of doing things, and their parents had cultural expectations that the mode of schooling would be traditional; that the parents, who were often working two or three jobs, would not have the time or inclination to come and learn more about what was happening in the school; that many of the teachers were 'burned out' by the amount of work that was expected of them anyway and so it would be impossible to ask them to do more with a new system; that staff turnover was too high to really train people into doing MLP well. What I saw was someone who had, in less than two years, gone from a trainee teacher with ideals to the old hand who has seen it all and doesn't like it.

I wish I were better at off the cuff replies. I couldn't say much at the time, because I always need to process stuff before I can answer to it. What I wish I had been able to convey ran along these lines: It is exactly those schools who are catering for students with low expectations, with parents working too many jobs just to get by, that need to be introducing MLP, and sticking with it when it doesn't work like a magic bullet in it's first outing. It is precisely because 'If you always do what you've always done, then you'll always get what you've always got'. 

Those students need someone to have faith that things can change for them, that they won't also end up working those same three jobs as their parents, that they can do things and be things that they can't even imagine yet.  And yes, maybe it easier to be cutting edge where HPSS is (as he informed me) and because it is new, but change is even more vital in those schools where student need for change is higher.  Grant Lichtman tells us that change is not difficult, it is simply uncomfortable.  It horrifies me to think that some teachers have become so comfortable that they don't see the needs of their students as their highest priority. 

When I left teaching, it was because I was becoming the kind of teacher that I had always said shouldn't be there any more, and I recognised that. I returned because I found somewhere where I could be passionate and feel empowered about changing things for my students, for the better.  My biggest regret at the moment is that I wasn't able to explain that to that second-year teacher.  My sadness is that I wish that school success, but if he is a reflection of the wider staff, I am not hopeful.

Being a Life-long Learner, this year.

A bit of context to start: having committed to writing a post every time I ask my hub students to, this morning we looked at SMART goals and set at least one academic and one dispositional or habits goal. My students then had to commit to their goals by enshrining them in their blogs. I showed them my list of possible blog topics, and let them choose what I should write about next; they decided that my own goals for the year, in my learning, would be best.

So, in short form, these are they:

- LOs on display

- empathy for difficult students

- being a full-time working mum

- being a social scientist and historian

- project learning

In a slightly longer form...

Part of being a good teacher is making sure that each lesson I teach is purposeful. I know that if I have a clear Learning Objective for each lesson, that is a pretty clear check that what I am doing is meeting a need or has a purpose in my students' learning. Last year, I was pretty bad at doing this, and especially in making it clear to students. I like to think what I did was purposeful anyway, but there is no way to tell really. 

My aim this year then, is to make sure I write an LO into my planbook for each lesson I plan, and that way I will be sure that not only do I know what I am meant to be doing, but I can tell my students too.

My next goal comes from the fact that one of my greatest difficulties is being tolerant or empathetic of difficult behaviour from students, and looking for understanding of its causes rather than simply reacting to the behaviour itself. I think I tend to judge people generally quite quickly, and I know I am quite black and white in my worldview - this is not necessarily a very productive way into student relationships.  (A caveat - I don't always do this, and have developed some excellent relationships with students which have been helpful for both of us. Just so I don't sound totally hard-hearted or down on myself...)  

I have decided that I need to aim for greater compassion with my students, by listening harder to those who don't necessarily want to talk to me. I feel this quite strongly as a weakness on my part, and so I have decided to make this the focus for my teaching inquiry. I will be relying on my colleagues Sally and Cindy a lot in this, both in helping me frame my inquiry, and because they are both really excellent role models in this area. (Actually, there are a lot of staff at HPSS who I think I will be calling on the expertise of.)  

It's funny, sortof, that empathy is something that actually is vital in a teacher of teenagers, but is not something that previously in my career has been shown to be necessary or valued. It's something that - like the dispositional curriculum that is taught at HPSS and not many other schools - is valued in staff here but not given any professional learning time anywhere else. I like also that what we teach the students is also valued and thus role-modelled by teachers; as in, I need to learn to do these things just as much as they do, and I am encouraged in my learning, not viewed as having a weakness.

Right, I will come back to my other goals next time, as this has already been in draft for a week, waiting for time to be finished. 

Walking the walk

Or: Doing what I tell my students to do.

On Friday Claire, one of our DPs and an awesome example of making blogging work for oneself, spoke to our community students about the purpose and scope of blogging. Not only did she inspire a lot of them, but she also inspired me - to the extent that I now have a list 12 items long** of things I really need to say. This is one of them...

After Claire's presentation, while Sally showed those students who didn't have a blog yet how to set one up, I went back to our hub with my students. Even after what Claire had said, there were a couple of them who still didn't get it, or were resistant to the idea of blogging about what they are learning. I was trying to encourage them, by explaining how writing about stuff is such a good way of thinking things through and coming to conclusions you might not otherwise get to, when I realised that I was talking the talk, but I hadn't actually done any of this myself, in my blog which was also already set up, for even longer than they had.  

So I resolved that for every blog I make them write, I will write one too. I will try and be an example of how useful blogging is, as a record of my thinking and my learning, and of how it doesn't have to be this earth-shattering momentous piece of writing every time, but can be just a note.

For me this serves as a reminder too, that I am a learner; that this forum is an excellent place to gather records of my learning*; and that I can't expect my students to do something that I am not prepared to do myself.  

All of which are very important things.

By the way, you might note that I have added my students' blogs to mine, so please read them too and comment:

*Seeing as I am in the process of renewing my practicing certificate, and the docs I did submit for this were pretty boring, this seems particularly apt.

**And dammit, while I was just now out running, I thought of two more, but one of them requires a playlist, so may be a while...

#hpsschool 

The difference between MLE and MLP

I was speaking with a researcher who came in to school today. She had been prompted by Ros MacEachern's blog about Critical Friendships to visit our school, and I was one of her interviewees.

Towards the end of the interview, she expressed the opinion that our school was an example in so many different ways, and then she asked a question that I have actually been considering myself: "Does the MLE make all the difference, or could you still do this in a traditionally set up school?"

This is the long version of my reply:

I think that what we do at Hobsonville Point Secondary School IS transferable, because our focus is our practice, and what we do to make learning outcomes better for our students; the environment is simply one of many tools that we have available to help us do this. 

I believe that a school needs only two things to be able to change to the type of practice and ethos that we have: a willingness to change the timetable, and complete staff buy-in.

The way I see it, changing the timetable might actually simplify it. What I imagine is that you divide the school time into eight equal parts. Whether that is over a week or a fortnight or a certain number of days is irrelevant. Then you structure it so that for example, all the year 9 English teachers are in one option line, all the year 9 Maths teachers are in the next option line, and so on across all the curriculum learning areas. There are seven of these in the NZ Curriculum; the eighth option line is for the hub/tutor/form class time, and the dispositional curriculum.  You do the same for year 10, year 11, etc, making sure that of course year 9 English is in a different line from year 10 English, so the teachers will teach across year levels. You might need to mix it up a little in the senior school as a wider variety of subjects comes in, so that students still have choice, as long as you keep any compulsory subjects in the same line.

Having set up your new timetable format, you then say to your English teachers, for example, as we have in our learning area - "In the course of this year you will need to cover the curriculum achievement objectives of purpose and audience, ideas, language features, and structure; and you need to include the processes and strategies for both making meaning (understanding texts) and creating meaning (creating texts)" - I'm using the actual objectives from the curriculum document here. Every learning area has different achievement objectives, and some are more prescriptive or content based than others, but in each, there are certain non-negotiables. What English doesn't say, is that you have to teach certain text types or specific parts of language.

So, having established what it is that the curriculum is actually telling your English teachers (or whichever learning area) to teach, you as leader can say, "Okay, set up a course that covers those things." Then your teachers, who are passionate about different things and actually do have a lot of skills, can imagine a course that they actually want to teach. And if they want to teach a course about coming-of-age drama in novel and film - to choose a random possible example -, they can. Or whatever. (I really want to tell you about my proto-feminist literature course from earlier in the year, but I won't ... yet. Maybe in another next post.)

And then, if one of your Arts teachers, for example, likes that idea, they could say, "I could co-teach that with you, o English teacher, because I would really love to look at the way coming-of-age is portrayed in various artistic media!"  Or your Human Bio teacher might want to link that to a study of the havoc hormones wreak in teenagers as they are coming-of-age.  And they both could set up a course that would be taught by each of them in the option line that they were teaching the level at - thus the separate option lines for learning areas...

This way, you have total curriculum coverage, choice for students and therefore more likely a higher level of engagement, and teachers teaching stuff they actually like with a higher level of engagement on their part too.

You would have to have a good timetabling program, because when students choose their courses, there might be a whole pile who want to do one course, and not so many who want to do another, but that is logistics and happens with senior subject choices anyway. And it's just software.

The hard part is the other aspect of the change - total staff buy-in. I suspect this is why schools are not even willing to look at MLP, because in every staff there are the people who 'have always done it this way', and unless you have some leaders who really want to drive the change forward, it is not going to take hold and be effective across the school organisation. HPSS is lucky in some ways; being a startup school, the teachers who are applying to work here have chosen to work with MLP and are open to the change in their own practice that will have to occur. Other schools don't have that luxury, and I know that in every school there will be some who are resistant, just to be resistant.

To introduce MLP in all schools nationwide, which I believe is the goal of the Ministry of Education, there must be something to show schools how it can be done, and maybe that it isn't such a hard thing.  This could be along the lines of the Core Education course that I am getting so much out of, or professional learning days put on by the ministry such as when NCEA was introduced. Maybe we just need every school in the country to come and visit HPSS (as so many already do!) and look at how we do what we do, and not just at the flash new toys we have. I have to admit that that part is beyond the scope of what I have been thinking.

But I feel, that if I, who has taught all my career until this year in exceptionally traditional schools, can open my way of thinking and become so enamoured of doing it differently that I have become an advocate for MLP, it's something that the right amount of will can make happen.

All schools and all teachers in the end really only want one thing; to make learner outcomes the best they can be. If our school really is such an example, as the outside researcher believes, how do we encourage other schools to follow it? How do we make it easier for them to initiate change? Could it be as simple as showing them a two-step process?

Or showing them that the difference between the Modern Learning Environment and Modern Learning Practice is that the first is buildings, but the second is methods? Buildings are irrelevant - I could teach all of the courses that I am doing now in any building or room or environment. Methods are key. How I teach is what makes my educational world shine.

Earth-shattering questions in the car.

Every day, the blue Toad and I share a 20 minute ride home in the car. And every day my brain is challenged.

I don't know if he saves them up during the day, or if the road home has particular inspirational value, or quite where his musings come from, but every day, I can expect at least three random questions about life, the universe and everything from the blue Toad.

These questions are the very opposite of yes/no questions. Not only are they open, but they require both an answer and either an explanation or a discussion.  The blue Toad does not take my answers for unequivocal truth either, but questions them, wanting verification, or more detail, or ... something.

I can tell when a question is coming.  There will be a deliberate silence from the back seat (in contrast to the more usual train-of-thought burblings). Then, "Mummy?" - quite long and drawn out. "Yes, Ben?" I answer, and wait...

Some days I am not able to answer them. "We might have to google that when we get home," I say.

One day last week, for example:

- "Mummy, have you ever seen a mirage?" Upon my answering that I hadn't, we had a discussion about where you might see mirages, and what you might see in them, and why you see them at all in the first place.

- "Mummy, is a linguist a whole lot of languages?" Well not quite, but then we wondered why being one might be a cool thing. I was reassured (being sortof a linguist myself) that he decided that it was.

- and "Mummy, what is the most often kind of car you see on the roads?" (the compulsory car question, as the blue Toad is obsessed). What do I know about cars? The blue Toad thought that it would be Toyotas, as he saw so many of them. "But they aren't the coolest, so I won't tell you every one I see." Thank goodness for that! 

Sometimes I have had a busy day and have become very outcome focussed, and sometimes I really have to concentrate on driving, but mostly I welcome his random questions. I like that he really wants to know stuff, and I like that it's not just ordinary stuff.  I like that his mind is totally non-linear, and that although he can't remember five minutes later what we were talking about, three months down the track he will pull out his understanding in some completely other context. I like that I am challenged by his questions, and that I don't know all the answers either, and that sometimes when we do google it, it's because I want to know too.  I like that he thinks I know so many answers, but I also like that he accepts that actually I don't know everything.

I hope the blue Toad never runs out of questions; I am pretty sure he won't. 

I just hope that I can keep up.

The kids just want to learn!

The Toads don't watch cartoons and kids' shows.  It's not so much that I haven't let them (although I freely admit to having philosophical issues with so much of it) as that they just aren't interested.  Once they got past Disney junior (a long-awaited day!) they moved straight into Mythbusters and Top Gear. Now they are starting to branch out, from info-tainment to real documentary stuff.

I know this because of a conversation I overheard: 

Toad 1: "No, I want to watch Living Channel ... O it's the Antiques Roadshow, I love this." 

Toad 2: "Okay, yeah, me too."

And because the blue Toad's latest addiction is National Geographic wildlife documentaries.  Or anything National Geographic.

Both Toads, in their different ways, want to learn stuff.  The blue one wants to know facts and details; the pink one likes to fit things together and know how things work, in a societal sort of context.  Their ways of thinking are very different, but both of them want to do it.

A lot of secondary school professional development for teachers seems to be based around engagement.  There is a belief that students don't want to learn any more once they reach high school.  That whatever they had when they were young has gone.

I don't think it is gone.  I think what they want to learn isn't being given to them.  

I admit that I am being strongly influenced in my thinking on this by the professional learning that I am doing this semester. I have begun a course called 'Modern Learning Practice', which is showing me the changes in thinking that have happened while I was at home producing Toads. 

One of the most important things to come out of the course so far for me has been this quote from Andreas Schleicher: 

"the world no longer rewards people for what they know - Google knows everything - but for what they can do with what they know." 

For me, this resonates so much because I have always felt that it is not the information which is important, but what you do with it; and I hate teaching something I loathe simply because 'we have to do a short story study now'.

Okay, this post has been slightly high-jacked by all the pedagogical stuff that is happening in my world at the moment.  I'll get back to my point.

One of our topics in the staffroom at lunch today was a student in a colleague and my combined PE and English class.  She is really interested in what we are doing; as a class the goal is to research, design and implement a fitness trail for the community around the school, while making a link between physical fitness and mental fitness.  A couple of weeks ago she had completed the research task we had set about the links between physical and mental health and wanted some extension.  I don't know a lot about PE, so I sicced her onto google scholar. We had a look at what a scholarly article looks like, how to read them a bit, how to search them, that sort of thing, so I didn't just throw her in the deep end.

This is what she came back with: kimmimindandbody.blogspot.co.nz/concluding-comparing-and-contrasting.html.

There are several awesome things about this that I would like to point out:

• Kim is a year 10 student, and she is voluntarily reading scholarly, tertiary-level articles, and understanding them!
• She is doing this because she wants to.
• She is learning in an authentic context; this is the sort of thing that could be a job in the real world, not just a school assignment.
• That one blog post is all the evidence you could ever want as a teacher/assessor for both research skills and reading comprehension.  What more could I ask?  A test?  Um, no.

In another of my classes, a combined Science and English one, several of my students have asked whether they can "just have some time to work on/finish my writing".  They want to do all that good stuff that previously I had to ram down students throats, like crafting, and drafting, and understanding the reason for the grammar bits, and having a theme, and ...  

The reason is that the context is right for them. They have chosen this course. These ones are 'off-task' and having private conversations while something is going on - about the research they are doing themselves, on scientists we haven't covered but who are in the same period as the ones we have.  And making links, and understanding context.  They are driving their learning in all sorts of directions where my co-teacher and I are just providing the framework.

Because they want to learn. Isn't that cool?

Last Friday, I was a Science teacher!

One of the really exciting things about teaching where I do is the blended learning.  What this means is that although I am an English teacher, each of our modules is constructed and taught with a co-teacher from completely another subject area.  Not only does this mean that I get to work alongside some very cool and clever people, it also means that I get to actually do things in that subject area too.

Last semester I learned more about the Treaty of Waitangi from my Social Science colleague than I have learned in the whole rest of my life combined, and I got to design and build stuff and make concrete (yay!) with two of my technology colleagues.  This semester I am working with a geographer, a phys-eder, and a chemist; we will be filming, making a fitness trail, and writing speculative fiction. None of this is stuff that I would even imagine doing in a traditional context!

But last Friday my science colleague was away.  We had a great lesson planned with some scientific history (my bit) and an experiment (his bit).  I could quite happily have made a class of mostly the English component, but my colleague asked me whether, if he got everything organised, I might be able to run the experiment.

Don't get me wrong, it is not that I am completely ungifted in this area; after all, I did pass 7th form Chemistry all those years ago.  By two marks, but that's still a pass.  However, doing anything with a practical component in the classroom is not something I feel at all confident in.

So of course, I said yes, I'll do it.

And I did.  I ran that science lesson, and that experiment, all by myself.  We didn't blow anything up, or melt anything (both of which were possibilities) and we even got some results! What's more, the results were the type of results we should have got.  Goodness, I must have done something right. I even had a student tell me that they enjoyed the class!

O, the relief!  But also the sense of achievement. I was totally outside my comfort zone and not at all confident that I could make it work.  

That's what I really like about my teaching (and my job) now; I am always doing new stuff, not just recycling the old, and that makes teaching exciting. Teaching should be exciting. If teaching is exciting, learning will be happening, both for me and the students.  

We certainly all learned stuff last Friday.

Time to practise what I preach.

As a secondary school teacher, and even when I was on 'extended maternity leave',  I have often been asked to recommend a 'good' school by friends and acquaintances, for their approaching-high-school-aged children.  My answer has always been to find the one that suits their child best, that the child likes the atmosphere of, and not to worry about reputation, exam results or decile ratings.  

(Naturally now, where I am teaching at a school that I love, I always say there.  But this isn't usually very helpful or constructive, as the school, being new, has a closed zone, and neither I, nor most of the people I know, live in that zone.)

No matter which school you talk about, there will always be people who love it and people who hate it; you have to find what is right for you, as a family.  A child will only do learning if they want to be there, not because it is a 'good' school.

The school the Toads are at is an excellent school.  I really like it, I think the teachers are excellent, it's convenient, and so on.  However, in the last year or so, the blue Toad has become less and less engaged with what he has been doing at school.  He has been very successful in some areas, and in others he has remained static or started heading backwards.  

This in no way reflects on his teachers, all of whom I have really liked; they have been organised, interested, open to ideas, and supportive of the blue Toad.  But when he came home, all he could remember of his day was what happened at lunch-time.  He had no idea what he was doing, why he was doing it or what he was getting out of it.

It's taken a while, but I started to realise that it might just be that his personality doesn't fit with how things are done at that school.  He likes to be in control of what he is doing, to make his own decisions, to have ownership.  He likes to try stuff and take risks.  He is very loud.  He wasn't doing any of those things.  And he was coming home and exploding with the need to do them.

The lucky thing for us as a family is that, teaching where I do, the Toads automatically become in-zone students.  And for the associated primary school as well... You can see where this is going.

So, we asked the blue Toad if he thought going to a new school that worked differently might be okay.  Apart from the caveat that his friends wouldn't be there, he was all for it, no hesitation at all.  In the course of a week we have been to an open day, had a full day visiting, and enrolled him.  

He starts Monday.

After his last day at the old school, as we were cleaning out his desk, his teacher mentioned, amongst other things, how she had never seen him as chatty as he had been all day, describing what he was doing.  That comment made very clear to me how right this move is for him, because that chatty, exuberant blue Toad is the real one, not the quiet, well-behaved, slightly withdrawn one that was being described by his teachers.   

I have always said that you should find a school that fits the child.  This is why the pink Toad is adamantly not moving schools.  She loves where she is, it suits her, she is engaged, and doing all of that stuff that shows she is in the right place.  She is pleased for her brother, and thinks it will be an excellent place for him to be, but is quite clear that it is not even an option for her.

It is a big step, and I feel a bit fragile about the whole thing.  Not least because after quite a long period of thinking, the process itself has been so quick.

As I am learning, it is a much harder process to do stuff than to say it.  But it is time to practise what I preach, because it is right.  


Have you ever had to do something hard because your convictions told you to?  How did it go?