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.

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.

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.

I have so much to learn!

A new job always means new skills, new ways of doing things, new ways of thinking even.  My new job means all of those things to a degree that I half expected, but couldn't understand the reality of until I began.

My return to teaching after nearly nine years of maternity leave and study was always going to be a challenge.  I was happy during that time not to be in the classroom, because I had become the teacher that I had always said should no longer be there.  The one who wasn't passionate and interested in their students or material any more.  I was a student again, of motherhood, Italian, and Renaissance History.  And I loved it.

This year I am no longer a student.  That is, not formally.  I am a teacher again, but as much as I will be imparting knowledge and skills to teenagers, I will also be learning to be a teacher all over again.  

Things that I will be learning:

• A new curriculum.  They snuck that in there while I was away and suddenly the 'new curriculum' that was current all those years ago has disappeared and this new document exists.  I must read it.
• A new way of teaching.  Co-teaching.  With teachers from different subjects to my own.  Actually this bit is really exciting and the planning that I have been doing with my co-teachers is lending me that inspiration that was lacking for so long.
• A new system.  Well, lots of them really.  Everything is device-based and I need to get my head around both the way of doing things and the tools of the online environment to enable me to do them.
• A new pedagogy.  Haha, pedagogy at all.  I am not a terribly theoretical person, and have been lucky enough to have the skills to get in there and just teach without worrying about the reasons why.  But now I am surrounded by a new type of teaching and learning, as well as some incredible colleagues who are both inspirational and knowledgeable, and I feel I should actually know a bit more about why I do things how I do them.
• A new set of acronyms.  And jargon.  I thought the military husband pulled them out just to make me feel ignorant, but now I have more than him.  I just need to know what they actually mean.
• And, to blog.  This is my first ever, and so far it seems to be working for me...

And do you know what?  That inspiration and excitement is coming alive again.  I am also learning to be the teacher that I should and can be, inside myself.  That, I think, is one of the most important lessons of all.

What lessons will life be teaching you in the next while?

Any comments or questions?

Learn lots,

Trace.