#imagineNPS and Learner Agency

For my PRT goal this term, I’ve been looking at using digital technology to enhance student achievement. It started out as a broad inquiry but quickly became clear that what I was most interested in was using devices to promote learner agency.

Earlier in the term I was at a local PD session focused on learner agency when Ngatea Primary School came up. One of the schools that had staff in attendance had visited and were blown away by the quality of learning happening. Fortunately, my boss was sitting right beside me; it wasn’t hard to convince her to let me visit!

What I saw was mind blowing.

Using Google Docs to Save Time

Teachers used google docs to allow students to plan their days. They book into conferences they feel they need and then organise the rest of their time in accordance with what they need to achieve. Google docs were also used to evidence achievement against the key competencies and a couple of skills the school had prioritised as being important – students updated these and let teachers know when they felt they had achieved them.

Flipping the Learning

Where possible, teachers create digital content to support student learning so that students have what they need when they need it. Students can access the video from home or while at school

Trust

Students are issues with what is called a ‘go card’. This card shows them where they are allowed and not allowed (based on whether or not they have behaved sensibly there in the past). My colleague and I looked long and hard, but we couldn’t find anyone that had lost trust in any areas – I think they’re on to something good with this one.

Skype PD

This was quite a cool one – the location of the school means that it is quite challenging to access quality PD cheaply. The problem is solved with 30 or so minute skype sessions; very few experts say no to these, and many will do them for free.

Other Awesome Things (that didn’t fit within my observation focus)

1. The whole school works on the idea that learning is “under construction”
2. They know how crowded the curriculum gets, so they deliberately plan to do less
3. Students are involved in all change processes
4. If a student feels like a pro at something, they can offer to run a workshop on it

What Now?

More than anything, this visit confirmed that the flipped learning pathway is the way to go; it promotes so much student ownership and independence. I’ll be looking at implementing it next term, most likely in Maths.

Visiting @NZMindLab – A Pedagogy of Play

On Monday I had the awesome opportunity to take my class to visit The Mind Lab in Newmarket. My students had a ball creating their own stop motion animations and playing with Makey Makey to make game controllers, but I was most interested in watching how the educators taught my students to interact with these new digital tools.

The idea of ‘play’ in education seems to be popping up more and more in recent days. I was at #EduCampAKL earlier in the term, where one of the breakouts was on play-based learning. I didn’t go – I thought it’d be something for teachers of younger students – but I am now regretting my choice. What I saw at The Mind Lab fitted with this idea in the sense that the steps were:

1. give them the absolute basics – the stuff that they wouldn’t stand a chance of working out by themselves (for the Makey Makey, it was the earth plate and that it needed to be connected to something)
2. let them play/tinker/experiment (and answer/direct them to them to the information that will answer any questions they have as a result)

This approach worked because the rules articulated to the students at the start of the trip were, essentially, failure is completely okay so long as you try again, and help each other out.

The whole experience made me think of the Sugata Mitra ‘Hole in the Wall‘ experiment. The students had more background knowledge than the students in the experiment, but the fundamentals were the same – give them the basics (in that case, the computer), then leave them to it and see what they come up with.

It got me thinking about how I introduce new tools to my students – I spend way too much time explaining how to use tools, when, really, I should be deciding what information is absolutely key (they will not get anywhere without knowing this basic step), explaining that, and then letting them tutu with it until they get it.

I’ll be keeping this in mind the next time I introduce something new.

Metacognition: Part 2

Before I say anything else, I want to say thank you. It was only last week that I walked into my Principal’s office to ask if I could ditch my Professional Learning Journal, instead documenting evidence of my meeting the RTC PTC on this blog. I’d been a wuss when it came to sharing, and I knew it was time to change that. Boy, am I glad I did! It turns out I have been looking in the wrong places for literature on metacognition – thank you to @DanceWellNZ @vanschaijik and @diana_prince_ww for your awesome suggestions – my OneTab is growing rapidly!

Firstly, an update on how things have gone thus far:

• I had my students watch the Khan Academy ad and reflect on what they had learnt to date – it took most groups 5 min to fill a big A2 bit of paper with what they’d learned, and most were well aware of how far they’d come.
• The class was in awe of the videos on the brain and neuroplasticity (I’ll definitely be putting those in the Pond). What really resonated was the idea of pathways in the brain needing to be developed; a number of them made the connection with learning new maths strategies that eventually end up replacing the old ones.
• One upsetting moment was when a student felt he couldn’t do the 3-2-1 reflection at the end of the session – I had him watch the video one more time and he did it perfectly! We’ll definitely be doing some more work on having a growth mindset (Carol Dweck’s book in en-route).

After the awesome suggestions that came in, I am a little bit closer to solving the mystery that is the metacognitive toolkit. @DanceWellNZ suggested looking into Guy Claxton’s work. I read ‘What’s the Point of School’ close to two years ago now and I’m yet to find a book that does a better job of encompassing my thoughts on education. I’ve had a look at Building Learning Power before, but I thought it was time to revisit it.

It turns out my theory of parallels between the strategies used for self-monitoring for reading and self-monitoring for learning is quite accurate – if you look at Claxton’s Learning-Power muscles, particularly the ones related to resourcefulness and reflectiveness, there are many similarities. This started to make me think about whether or not I need to change the way I teach reading, but that’s a brand-new inquiry in itself; I’ll be parking that one for later…

One concept that has kept popping up in any reading I do is something that @diana_prince_ww shared with me via a blog post – wrappers. Metacognitive strategies, like pretty much anything else you learn, are grounded in context – you can’t teach them by themselves, they need to be paired with opportunities for students to actually use them. So, wrappers literally ‘wrap’ the lesson; you start with a conversation about the strategy you want students to learn, model that strategy so that they can see what it looks like, go through with the actual lesson, and then reflect on how students went with the metacognitive strategy at the end. I’m thinking that my next step is to choose some of the learning-power muscles to focus on, and to incorporate lesson wrappers into my planning where I feel those strategies would be most suitable.

The last, but certainly not the least, came from@vanschaijik. I have watched (via twitter) in awe of the fantastic use of SOLO Taxonomy going on in classrooms and always thought that this was something I’d like to do. My school is currently taking part in Visible Learning PD, so I need some more time to investigate how the two will marry together (and I suspect SOLO will be an almost cultural shift in my classroom, and I’m not quite ready to give my Y8’s a total U-turn three-quarters of the way through their second to last term with us), so it is certainly something I will be doing more reading on. I had it earmarked for the summer but, after what I’ve read already, I’m not sure I can wait that long!

On my reading travels, one interesting thing that popped up (interesting in the sense that it was not what I was expecting) came from an article, “The Boss of My Brain”. The article mentioned many of the things I have already mentioned here, but it had one absolute curveball – in order to teach students to be metacognitive thinkers, we need to teach them mindfulness. I have dabbled in Yoga etc (it’s one of the many things I would do more of if I had a time-turner) and can completely understand the benefits of encouraging relaxation and control over the mind, but I certainly hadn’t thought of it as something to worry about teaching students. It made me think about a Health unit we teach in the first term, ‘Managing Our Emotions’; I hate this unit with a passion and am thinking long and hard about how I can revamp it so that it is current and relevant for my students. The movie Inside Out gave me a lot of hope but I think there is also a place for weaving mindfulness through the unit, while still staying true to the achievement/learning objectives. Not something for this iteration, but definitely something I’ll be keeping as a next step.

So, in summary, I find myself with lots of next steps, but the most urgent one is developing my wrapper lessons to start building that ‘toolkit’ so that my students know what they can draw from when they get stuck.

As an aside, if you want to have a look at what my lessons are shaping up to look like you can find my plan here. Be warned, it’s very much a living document…

Metacognition (Or, As I Like to Call It, Thinking-ception)

I’m in my last two terms of my time as a baby teacher (fingers crossed!) and I’m starting to get into the really nitty-gritty goals that I set aside while I got the basics down pat. Now that I’m happy with my Reading, Writing, Maths etc practice, I’ve ended up with a goal that terrifies me; teaching – or rather, training – my students to think more about their learning and what they can do to get better.

I am surprised by the lack of literature on developing metacognition with students; for something emphasised to be so key – Hattie has metacognitive strategies listed as 14th most effective influence on learning – there isn’t much written about it. It’s times like this I miss my university library login… What I did find was this article from Edutopia, and it got me thinking about what these steps could look like in my classroom.

I know from previous experiences that my starting point should be talking about how our brains are wired for learning and getting students to think about how far they’ve actually come, so I was unsurprised to see this as step one on Edutopia’s list. Few of my memories from Teacher’s College are vivid, but I do remember the first Maths lectures, where we started to break down the learning progressions from NE to Year 8, and I sat there in awe of what I had managed to learn during my time in school (I’d never really thought about it before). I quite like the following video for getting my students to see this:

In terms of developing students’ understanding of how the brain works, I’ll definitely be including these two videos:

I have had many brief growth mindset discussions with my students, but it’s an area that I haven’t gone into too much depth with, mostly because I want a little more time to engage with the literature before I teach it. This will be great for solidifying what I’ve already discussed with them.

Another thing the article suggests is giving students opportunities to practice recognising when they stop understanding. My school’s reading teaching practice in grounded in Sheena Cameron’s Teaching Reading Comprehension Strategies, and one of these strategies is Self-Monitoring. I find it really interesting to watch how students respond to learning and developing their skills in this strategy; it’s often where you find out which students are really comfortable in their learning and which ones like to try to hide what they don’t know. I think we’ll be having a conversation on Monday about what it looks like/sounds like/feels like to not understand something.

One thing I’m still puzzling with is the element of developing specific metacognitive strategies. In order to be successful with this goal, I know that my learners need a toolkit of a variety of strategies that they can pick and choose from in order to go from stuck to getting it. I suspect there will be parallels between this toolkit and the “Fix-Up Strategies” that accompany our reading programme, so I’ll be having a good look into over the course of this week.

On my travels through YouTube I stumbled upon this. I think it is sort of perfect, as my students have been known to come out with phrases such as “Miss, you’re so smart!” on a number of occasions, and no amount of reminding them how much more school I have done seems to stick. Obviously, I’m no Michael-Jordan-of-learning but I really like the metaphor.