Signing off at Parkvale School

I'm leaving Parkvale to teach at Taikura School which will be a world apart from my current teaching context. I think I will be learning a whole new range of skills that will add a new depth to my teaching that have been lacking. I don't know if I will be gracing mainstream classes again but if I am honest I don't think I have finished with decile 1 schools and I think the experience I am about to have at Taikura could work beautifully in lower decile schools.
I want to share my my take aways from this year at Parkvale because I don't want to forget my key learnings and because I want to ensure I have learnt from this experience and can take some positives away with me.

1. Make sure you have a shared understanding and approach, if you are teaching in a shared collaborative space. Get together before term starts and talk about what you want, what you goals are, what underpins your teaching, your values, the things that are really important to you.
2. Control the use of devices. Make sure that kids treat them with respect and use them correctly. Clear consistent consequences for misuse.
3. If a child cannot write legibly, then they should not type their writing until their handwriting has improved.
4. There should be times when kids are not allowed to use devices.
5. Have a clear, visible procedure for kids to see that shows what will happen when they push it. Make sure you stick to it and make sure its manageable.
6. Don't have certificates or start creating a rewards based classroom culture.
7. Talk quietly and slowly.
8. Always share everything and anything that will help teachers help their kids better that day.
9. As a leader, lead and inspire. Be on top of planning and admin. Inspire some confidence. Show best practice.
10. Help your colleagues to be better at what they do.
11. Streamline admin.
12. Be consistent with the way you run your routines, your boundaries, your expectations. Kids will need this consistency and ritual to give them security and to help hold them in class.

3/4 through the year. What I've learnt about teaching in an open space.

I have realised that having thought that teaching in an open space to be daunting, it is even more so to many kids to do their learning in such a space.
Being told to choose to work independently on a choice of set tasks seems to inevitably result in nothing being chosen and no work taking place. I've learnt that as appealing as options are, they need to be offered up in a contained, achievable package. Work needs to be closely monitored with clearly communicated expectations and great feedback. Teachers need to be touching base with kids regularly, pushing, challenging and supporting them. Meeting them individually and in smaller groups. Making sure that they are being made accountable and expected to do their best (a levelled criteria can help here).
I've learnt that large classes need teachers to be on the same page and be totally supportive of each other. There needs to be open, honest dialogue and in an ideal context, a relationship, a friendship, and a sense of humour goes without saying.
I've learnt that information about kids needs to be shared, no matter how inane. Eg. Knowing that someone's cat died last night can help hugely.
I've learnt that planning needs to be shared and owned by all teachers.
I've learnt that not everyone likes rugby, not everyone likes coding. There needs to be differentiation across the curriculum, but kids should be expected to try everything, but it might need different packaging ;)
There needs to be leadership. Not the dominating, fear of God kind of leader but someone who motivates and supports the teachers, who leads and guides a space, someone who can be depended on and trusted. Someone who the kids love, but don't fear. Someone who brings the space together.
Like any classroom, there needs to be clear expectations with clear consequences that are adhered to by all teachers at all times.
There also needs to be an atmosphere of kindness, understanding and aroha that permeates everything.

The test that was term 1

It's a surprisingly big step moving from a single cell class to a 3 teacher, 84 kid set up, especially one where the kids and the school culture are both new to you. Consequently, I found the past term a big challenge but one that was sprinkled with some successes.

The challenges 
Making use of the space
The teaching space is an old library with lots of corners, walls, few windows, little rooms. It does not make an ideal space for teaching such a large number of children. There are lots of places to hide and place yourself out of the view of a teacher. The make up of the physical space makes noise an issue as well. Although systems have been put in place in term 2 to help manage this issue it is still a daily challenge and the simplest tasks, the simple transitions take much longer and become bigger issues than they should.
Being part of a team
There is a real need for teachers working collaboratively to be on the same page, with similar priorities and values. Their approach can be different but the underlying beliefs need to be closely aligned. Also, any grumblings or concerns need to be shared and discussed. I think, on the whole, my team is in the same book, not necessarily on the same page. Systems that are introduced are not challenged or there is at least a feeling that "she'll be right". This is partly my fault as I don't want to be the one who rocks the boat, partly because I am the the teacher newest to the school. My personal goal here is to be more open to initiating those difficult conversations.
Knowing the kids
It hard to get to know so many children and especially hard when you've learnt that relationships are key to success at school. I felt I got to know the younger kids who were a constant with me in class but I felt I didn't know many of the older kids as well as I should which has been both frustrating and disappointing.      
Establishing routines and systems
Disruptions caused by teacher sickness and 3 class camps made it very difficult to set up and maintain routines and systems.What had been carefully set up one week was undone the next as kids returned to class having being away for a week, or relief teachers took centre stage in the classroom.

The Successes
Taking ownership & creating expectations
With the more established teachers out of the classroom for 2 and 4 weeks respectively I felt I was the only adult constant in the class. It was up to me to become the rock for the class and manage all apsects of the day to day. With the help of some great relief teachers I felt we achieved this, in spite of the challenges. The biggest of which was the simple fact that the kids didn't know me well. I was the new teacher from Auckland who was new to the school and didn't know how things happened here. The senior teacher with over 10 years experience here and the PRT who'd been a face at the school for 2 years were not in the picture. It was time for boundaries to be pushed. But boundaries and expectations were set and a degree of normalcy was created.
Connections
In spite of the challenges I feel I have started to connect with a chunk of the kids Not to the extent that I think I could have in a smaller class but enough to enable a positive rapport. Most of these relationships are with the younger kids who I accompanied on camp.

Signing off at PES

What an amazing 2 years I have had at PES. I feel I have developed in ways and in directions I never thought I would go in 2 years ago. Surrounded by friends and experts I have learnt so much that has helped me become the teacher I am today. Yes, I have become a digital teacher, I have learned all about the affordances of digital technology in the classroom but the overall big learning for me these years has been the value of whanaungatanga. Relationships are key if you really want to see learning take place in the classroom and for many children it is the relationships that they need. Getting to know parents, know the names of brothers and sisters, knowing that they had a big rugby game in the weekend - all of this can add value to school in the eyes of the kids and their whanau. I have spent 2 years in one of the most digitally advanced schools in the country and I hope to take what I have learned and add to it. I hope to continue working with Google Sites and get to know how to use Chromebooks well. I hope to continue to create activities that push kids and get them to learn, create and share. I really want to make sure I continue to develop my practice and become the best I can be.

Wednesday Afternoon Was Beach Day

As a reward for reaching the top of our Ladder of Kindness, Room 14 went down to Pt.England beach for the afternoon. 

The plan was simple: We'll take a couple of balls and let the kids have free play (with some adult supervision).

The result was a fantastic success. The rugby ball and football were pretty much ignored and instead the kids built sandcastles with classmates they didn't usually play with, collected shells for each other, buried friends in the sand, hunted for crabs, collected clay, investigated rock pools, tried to catch fish, looked under rocks. It was wonderful to watch.

I saw lots of real work on Key Competencies. The kids were placed in a very stimulating environment, away from the familiar playground and familiar routines and they were let loose into this new playground and had a very valuable experience. For me, it was very interesting to see how the children interacted with each other differently and made decisions about how they would spend their time on the beach.

Needless to say we're doing this again.

Gem Sharing

We were asked to share a gem, a lightbulb moment, a highlight, a moment of rapture in our inquiry over the year to date. My gem was simple. But come to think of it, it was more of a flash of realisation than a gem.

Having followed a very structured writing programme that has scaffolded the writing process for the children in my class, I have come to realise that there is a small minority on my class who would rather not follow the "recipe" they are given and would rather write to the beat of their own drum. It is these beat poets I need to consider more next year.

How can I offer them the support they need as well as provide the scaffold that the majority of the class need?

Our chat also got me thinking a lot about an area for improvement in my teaching, and that is how I use and promote the kids' blogs in class. If the blogs are meant to act as the showcase for the kids then they need to be promoted much more in class than I currently do. Perhaps if the kids really feel ownership of their blogs, then the quality of the work in it will be higher?

Things to consider:

• Blog of the week (celebrated)
• 2 weekly rotations to give FB on work (half of the class a week)  
• (could also be in writing books with the kids given time to read their feedback and and then take this feedback into their next writing as its fresh in the mind)
• Give kids time to read their own blog
• Google Docs - Comments

Inquiry Update: End of Term 3

Inquiry Update

The writing programme is cruising along. We've hit a few bumps but we're trying to find a way up the mountain.  Some very helpful feedback from Juanita Garden (AP) revealed that I had shifted the focus of my writing towards vocabulary and had removed some of the successful scaffolds that I had been using in the past.  I have since reintroduced these scaffolds and they are providing a useful framework for the children to hold onto.

It's also become clear that writing can be a tricky area to hook the children's interest in. She's a fickle mistress. One of my boys started one writing task off very slowly to the extent that I thought I would get very little from him. The following day he went for it and did his best writing to date! The praise I gave him seemed to motivate him greatly and consequently he seemed more engaged in other tasks the following day.

My learning to date would be as follows:

• make sure kids are as settled as possible before starting with clear expectations
• talk through the task before hand and input in as much awesome vocab/grammar as possible
• try to engage the children as much as possible
• scaffold the task and have that scaffold available to the kids
• monitor/help/praise/manage

I want to really try to engage the kids more to the tasks. I did a little piece of mime to motivate them to write about the 100m sprint which went down well.

Inquiry: The end of term 2

Inquiry aside, I have learned a lot about young year 3 kids and the writing process. Apart from the contexts that each child brings to the classroom on any given day that can impact on their writing on that day, I have realised that there are a multitude of teaching decisions that can affect the quality and quantity of writing that might be produced.

Some of my kids are very easily distracted which is hard to manage in a room full of 27 children. These kids benefit from a quieter learning environment. I have tried a lot to create this by thinking carefully about where the children sit but this only creates surface changes, what is needed is a "culture of quiet" (I would settle for "quieter"). I plan to get this going next term with the teacher as The Volume.

For some reason, I have shifted the focus of my writing scaffold away from helping kids produce longer texts to concentrating on the input of vocab. I need to shift back again - but keep the vocab focus there. Perhaps this will provide the framework some of my weaker writers need - not the vocab.

So going into term 3 there is going to be a big shift in the way writing is taught - primarily in the classroom noise level and the structure provided that will support my writers.

Inquiry: Week 7

Observations

Generally I am seeing an increase in confidence with the writing of some of the children. My more able writers are also producing some of the best work I've seen all year. My lower writers are not producing good work. Reasons for this are, I think, mainly behavioural and I'm trying to find a way to address these. They are given lots of scaffolding and support, but I'm seeing them surrounded by distracting children which results in no work.

My instinct tells me that I need to reconfigure the way the children sit as I have all the lower literacy kids sitting together so that I can help them. But what I am seeing is about 6 kids who aren't able to manage themselves sitting together, annoying each other and stopping each other from writing.

TBC

Inquiry: Term 2 update

The State of Affairs

So term 2 has begun and I have identified the children who need that extra help with their writing. These are the children who have more difficulty than the others in getting their ideas down onto paper. I have a list of 12 children. I am going to whittle this down to 5 in order to really see some progress. 

My feeling at the moment is that I definitely want to focus on the ESOL learner (Arthur), I also have a very able silver level reader (Ben), a very quiet one (Chris), one who seems consistently unable to complete class activities (Doreen), and another who is a total conundrum at the moment (Ed). A nut that is I think will be harder to crack than the others. I think that's enough to be going on with.

Arthur: Freezes when unable to spell a word correctly (cultural?), developing a sense of grammar.

Ben: Clever boy, a little nerdy, could be motivated more by the appeal of seeing writing on his blog.

Chris: lacks confidence, is starting to write more, responds well to PBL.

Doreen: a bit of a wild child, often ignore scaffolds and wants to write her own piece, needs assistance in crafting these though.

Ed: responds well to quiet and communication with whanau.

What's my goal with these kids?

I'd like to see them producing pieces of writing independently by the end of the term. By independently I mean without my presence over their shoulder. They may be using other scaffolds to assist them but I am hoping that they will be able to complete their expected work, essentially, by themselves.

End of Term 1, 2016 Inquiry: Getting reluctant readers to write

I reached a career changing conclusion this term.  One that, I guess, every teacher must reach at some point. One that is better reacher sooner rather than later: Kids learn differently. I realised that the 12 reluctant writers in my class have 12 different reasons (and some) why they do not freely put pen to paper. Each and every one of them have their own backgrounds, stories, learning needs that have determined how they approach writing. There isn't a magical broom I can use to sweep aside all these complications. There isn't 1 amazing writing lesson I can plan and teach that will blow their minds and motivate them to write beautiful sentences. Each of these 12 children has their own, unique to them, reasons why they find writing a challenge and are reluctant writers.

I have started to discover what some of these reasons are and have begun to implement strategies to try to help these kids succeed in their writing. For example the lower literacy learners are given very scaffolded templates to help them to complete the tasks, the ESOL learner is gifted quite a lot of vocab and closely monitored, the child with behavioural problems is carefully managed.


Term 2 will see me digging deeper in an attempt to help some of those 12 who I feel are still under my radar and still in need of help.

Incredible Years

I am 2 sessions into the Incredible Years programme and, without a doubt, there has been a shift in my teaching practice. I am feeling more comfortable with the way I am teaching and with the environment in my classroom. I think I am making progress with the kids who are often the most challenging and I feel I am making some closer connection with whanau.

Trying to bring large doses of positive energy into the classroom has been a challenge.  Not because I am not a positive person, just that I don't gush positivity. I have expectations that, I believe, should be met and the praise pops out when people go beyond those expectations. This has had to change. I am making efforts to praise kids for meeting those expectations, hoping that this behaviour can become viral. I am trying to catch my interesting kids being good and am choosing to ignore that which can be ignored.

I would love to know if the kids have noticed a change ... 

Inquiry 2016: How can I increase student independence in writing (lowest group)?

Writing and reading are passions of mine in the classroom. I enjoy teaching both of them. In my current class I have some very able readers and the average reading age is much higher than that of my last yr 3 class. However, I do have some very reluctant writers and others who i can confidently say find writing immensely difficult. I am determined to improve the writing of the children in this class. To do this, I will need my lower writers to become more able to write independently of the teacher and be able to meet my expectations without looking over their shoulder all the time as I want to make myself more available to the other children to help push them in their writing and provide feedback whilst they are writing, not when they have "finished".

I have started observing the writing that is produced and taking note of how I am teaching and how the children are responding.

It is early days.

2016: Term 1: Week 1

The week went way better than last year. I felt more confident in what i was doing and felt like i had some strategies and method. I struggled a bit with the new timetable. Creatures of habit us teachers apparently. But we must adapt or die. I need to really consider the time allowances that the new timetable provides more carefully. My reading activities were too difficult. Next week I am going to use the same template for my EE activities for all groups and introduce new templates to the whole class and then eventually pick and choose templates according to need and appropriacy. The class has some good writers but I am going to treat them like an ESOL class as of next week to push their sentence structure and grammar. Next week I will continue enforcing expectations and introduce the class rule-system (thinking space first time, out the class, the second). Still have to think about how i am best to distribute ipads and I need to make sure the kids feel accountable for the work they produce. Lovely kids. I'm looking forward to our journey together!

Term 4 Final Inquiry Presentation

Looking back, the year in Rm14 started with an overload of reward based management systems. We had The Throne, Teams, The Marble Jar, Brian the Bear. I found that these tools were successful to an extent: Children came to the mat quickly, they tidied their desks quickly, lined up well - but they were making my life too complicated with tallying points, making sure the same team didn't win week after week, nominating people to take Brian the Bear home etc The reward based system also wasn't something I was 100% sold with. I want to see intrinsically motivated children and I don't think constant chocolates is encouraging this. I also could see that many of the kids who i was really trying to target with these rewards were often indifferent to them. My lack of total buy-in also may have been evident to the kids. I also had too many systems running at the same time and for too long a timeframe. The kids possibly also lost interest I can appreciate the usefulness of an extrinsic reward as it DOES work, to an EXTENT. I think it could be useful to have 1 form of simply run reward system for the first term to help entrench routines and expectations. But it would have to be extremely simple and very easily managed. 

 I also had an incredibly useful piece of feedback from Helen King, one of my mentors at PES, who noticed that although I had expectations of classroom behaviour, I was not insisting upon them being met in the classroom. Specifically, I wanted the kids to sit quietly on the mat while I introduced the next stage of the day's learning. Some children were quiet while others were not meeting this expectation. So keen was I to carry on with the lesson, I would talk over them rather than insist on their quiet. This was a major learning for me and guided my classroom management for the rest of the year. This is also the key learning I will take into Term 1 Day 1 next year. 

Through my term 1 inquiry group chats with Russell Burt and Rob Wiseman, I came to see the role that an engaging activity can have in managing behaviour. Consequently I have spent lots of time working on creating engaging and challenging Explain Everything Activities to follow on group reading sessions. My first activities were too complex and not scaffolded enough and didn't encourage learner autonomy. They have come on since then with recorded audio instructions, making full use of digital affordances, repeated slide templates etc.  

What I need to do more of next year is provide more constructive feedback on the finished EE, share good EEs on blogs more and direct the children to them. My data was interesting. kids made more of a shift in the 2nd half of the year better readers made bigger shifts than average readers So what? get routines and expectations down quickly so learning can happen take regular running records of children and act on what i discover record the data beautifully and work with it use EE templates regularly and change up as we shift to a new term.

And finally ... I tried hard to create positive relationships with every child in room 14. Shaking their hand every morning and high fiving them on their way home. For me this felt like the right way to go about forging a classroom environment from which to build good behaviour, engagement and a love of school, and some learning.

Off to the museum: Managing at the museum

Room 14 went to Auckland museum last week. Our timetable was pretty full on, which meant we had 2hrs of self-guided museum time. This was a lot of time. Our team had put together an awesome scavenger hunt booklet which helped engage and guide the children during this time. The class was split into groups of 5/6 and allocated an adult. I took 2 of the most interesting boys who were tired but engaged throughout. I found the best way to help my group was to make the tour as structured as possible with them lining up, boys at the front, in between each stage of our visit and being very aware of their need for a rest or food. I also tried to take a genuine interest in what they were telling me about their experience at the museum and that I was enjoying being with them.

A "Yay Moment"

Ever since watching the Jim Henson's TV series "The Storyteller" as a nerdy 10 year old, I have loved stories and have been wanting to really tell a story to my class since day 1. I read to them everyday after lunch from a picture book and this engages the vast majority but until today I hadn't told them a good, old fashioned story.

I had read the fairy tale "Beauty and the Beast" to my 7 year old son the night before from a book and he really enjoyed it. So I thought why not give it a go with room 14?

I localised it to make it a bit more relevant to the kids (eg. the prince was a successful rugby league player) and it really worked. The whole class was totally engaged, some of the boys had never been so engaged in a story; to the point where the one boy who is rarely capable of sitting still long enough to follow a story was crying out "You see girls, that's what will happen to you!". Eyes were wide, faces looked worried and shocked in the right places. The transformation of prince into beast was greeted with a round of applause.

A few girls recognised the story as "Beauty and the Beast" but this didn't seem to stop them from enjoying it again.

Now, what to read next?

What can I do with the one slow reader in my guided reading groups?

In as couple of my guided reading groups, I have readers who are processing the texts much more slowly than the other readers in the group. Consequently, they are reading much more slowly and finishing texts much later than the others in their group. This is creating a problem in my management of the guided session. Do I cut them off before they have finished? Do we all wait patiently? 

Suggested remedies included:

putting them down a group

• child wont be challenged by the text and therefore may make less progress.

reading the same text before class

• child may see this as a punishment. The child also often arrives late.

having the child become aware of their reading speed 

• could be quite easily achieved as a post reading activity. Would she hear her "slowness"?

encourage a buddy reading time

• easily do-able. Paired with a more fluent reader could enable her quickly to compare speeds. 

End of Term 3 Inquiry

Before entering the classroom on day 1 of being a BT, I had these lofty dreams of creating autonomous, self-regulating children.  3 terms on, I realise that these were indeed lofty dreams that need scaffolding and support strategies and routines to help their realisation.

I have started to implement techniques and tools to try to ensure that the children are able to work successfully, independently from the teacher. These include having audio of instructions embedded in Explain Everything slides, going through follow up activities as a group before-hand, keeping follow-up activities straightforward and replicable and creating expectation where children realise that they need to work independently of the teacher.

I fear that I may have been responsible for encouraging a degree of dependency on the teacher but I have been made aware of this; of how some children will attempt to monopolise their time with me. I feel I am making positive steps away from this and i think that the children are benefitting.
Looking to term 4, i will persist with the strategies I have implemented and more than anything try to discuss "independence" and "autonomy" with the kids so that hopefully they can see where I am coming from and what i want to achieve which is, ultimately, children taking charge of and responsibility for their learning.