DFI #6 Connected to a Powerful Network!

We are delivering education in very different times at the moment - not really planned for however actually maybe we could say well planned for. 

A couple of weeks ago I remember reporting to our community that ...

"The last few weeks have certainly been fast and furious but I am so proud of our school's response to Distance Learning. It is like we have been gearing up for this as the shift has been relatively seamless".

The shift for us has actually been quite seamless and I think this is because of the powerful connections within and across our Manaiakalani Outreach Schools.

The kaupapa for last week's DFI session was the pedagogy around Connected. I like the phrase - Connected Learners Share.

Our learners have many opportunities to share - the main one being on their blogs. However my focus today is on our teachers.

Our teachers have had to pivot many times in the last 6 weeks. Support from our Manaiakalani whānau has been vital. A shout out to the awesome support we get from Mark Maddren and Sharon Spragg for the way they have provided support to our staff during this time. 


Pre- Rāhui

Before the Rāhui - we were working on making Teaching and Learning more visible using Sites - I am sure some teachers could not always understand the why, or see the worth but we were working towards this anyway. We had our Education Programme Leaders onsite one day a week supporting each Hub to get the sites going as well as many other things.

Rāhui - Pivot

Now delivering Teaching and Learning by Distance, all of a sudden those teachers who were not using sites as much could see the value. We had two days to provide onsite support and then it was all go. Support form our large connected network has been helpful at this stage as well

Alert Level 3 - Pivot

We have left all our teachers at home delivering Distance Learning and two members of our SLT are managing the bubbles at school. We wanted to have the least number of people onsite as possible but also give more time for our teachers to deliver Distance Learning, to refine systems and to provide the best Distance Learning we could.

The SLT have had to pivot to now working onsite with our bubbles. 

Our teaching staff pivot is that they are now being asked to review what they are delivering using the criteria from last week's session; Visual Appeal and User Experience as well as feedback that we have received. We want to ensure that what is being delivered is high quality; providing stretch for some and the right supports for others. 

Some things we are considering:

- Is there too much text on the Learn, Create, Share instructions?
- Is the pathway clear?
- Is there opportunity for students to show stretch?
- What workshops (google meets) can we add that will support the programme?
- How will we gather student voice on Distance Learning?
- How will we gather Whānau voice?
- How are our learners managing student agency?
- What has been the best of what we are offering?
- What new areas of the curriculum can we offer now that the Core subjects are well embedded?
- How can we use our support staff to provide more support for those who need it?

The next pivot point will be when we are asked to go to Level 2 and when all teachers come back on site. There will be another set of questions to focus on then for sure.

Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano (@langwitches) in her blogpost Let’s Not Go Back, Let’s Go Forward! asks these questions:

"What will we keep? What will we throw out? What will we upgrade?"

"How can we prepare to not “bungee chord” back to the way teaching and learning “was done” or was accepted as the norm before the COVID-19 crisis? What skills and literacies are suddenly relevant? What will we learn from the disruption? How will we adapt, evolve and improve education?"



These are great questions  - we are going to need the power of our connected network as we collaborate and find answers to these over the coming weeks. 

Being part of this connected network affords us so many opportunities - and our teachers are now more aware than ever of the advantages. 

We have been lurking, taking advantage of the professional development on offer and improving our practice. We have learned so much during this time and I believe we have an obligation to share this learning and play our part in finding the answers to these questions. - Connected Learners Share! 

DFI #5 Collaborate - Visible Teaching and Learning

Ever since our school opened in 2016 we have been striving towards the kaupapa of Visible Learning. As a leadership team we had spent some time looking at Hatties research that breaks down what provides the most success in learning.

Hattie defines Visible Learners as students who can:

• Articulate what they are learning
• Explain the next steps in their learning
• Set learning goals
• See errors as opportunities for further learning
• Know what to do when they are stuck

Our expectations have always been that teachers would share learning intentions and co-construct success criteria, provide feedback for students,  and work with students to set their own goals.

What has changed since we joined the Manaiakalani whānau is the introduction of the Learn, Create, Share pedagogy. This structure has taken a couple of years to embed at St Francis but finally we are seeing consistency across our school about what Learn, Create, Share looks like.

Teacher planning is created within a Learn, Create, Share framework that is now used across the school. 

Visible teaching and learning places the students at the centre and when this becomes the default it guides decision making in a school.

How will the students make their learning visible? Blogger is the platform that was chosen for this. The students share their learning to a global audience.

How do the teachers share their planning? Each Hub has a google site where all planning is uploaded and accessible not only to the students but to whānau as well. It is accessible, available and there in advance! 

It is also very worthy of note that it is available to any other teacher as well and not just those at our school. Any teacher can access, make a copy and adjust for their learners. This has expanded our professional learning network immensely.

Making teaching visible makes so much sense - we are not trying to keep what the students are meant to be learning a secret from them, they need to know what they are striving to learn otherwise how will they know when they get there? We need to remove the barriers in every way we can and making teaching and learning visible is a huge part of this.

This Week's New Learning

One of the ways that teachers can make learning visible is the use of Google Sites. I have dabbled with sites before but it was fabulous to get a deep dive into this tool. Thanks to Vicki  Archer and Dorothy Burt for the sessions on this. 

I loved this session - so much so that I finished my site over the weekend and was able to give it to our Year 7/8 team to use this week. I aimed to motivate the learners to engage with the curriculum, and provide multimodal opportunities to engage with the learning - I will be interested in the feedback from the teachers and the students in due course!




                                                                                     Click here to enter the site.     

Distance Learning @stfrancischch

Today - Wednesday 15 April 2020

Today was the first day of Term 2 for all our teachers and learners at St Francis in quite different circumstances than we possibly could have imagined a few months earlier.

Covid-19 - A pandemic, Alert Level 4, School site closed.

We have had to reimagine how school would look in a very short timeframe. Or did we?

Today we launched our Distance Learning Programmes. Today at 9am we had 230+ Year 3 - 8 students on google meets with their teachers. By lunchtime we had also held google meets for our Kākano Hub (Year 1/2) with a really high percentage of attendance as well.

The high percentage of "attendance" was really heartening. We learned very quickly that our learners wanted the connection with their teachers - and their peers.

2 Weeks Earlier

Prior to school closing - we were aware of what was coming and had like most schools a couple of days to work as a team and prepare for how we would manage the school closure. We are fortunate to have great team who lead Digital Technologies in our school.  When we sat down to start to plan for this we realised that actually we had been planning for this over the last couple of years.

We already had:

- Year 5-8 students that were navigating and using sites independently

- A commitment to the Learn, Create, Share pedagogy

- At least six of our staff had already completed a Digital Fluency Intensives (DFI) and two doing this currently (myself included)

- Education Programme Leader who had been working alongside teachers in our school over the last two years 

- Education Programme Leaders who have facilitated Professional Learning for our staff

- an increasing percentage of parents purchasing Chromebooks for their children each year

- a clear vision to be innovative in our practice 

We were well set up and in a really good position to move forward, and move forward quickly. We spent the two days before Alert Level 4 collaborating and planning together onsite and the next two weeks by distance.

We knew if we kept a lot of the same formats it would be easy enough for the students to keep accessing their learning from home. Our Year 3/4 students were using all the same tools and although not 1-1 with Chromebooks yet - they were becoming familiar with using docs and drive. These students were not blogging yet but we had a plan to get this moving quickly as well. The Student Blog Hop (a topic for another post) was introduced in the new holiday time and this meant that those children who were blogging over the holiday time became very familiar with blogging. We had over 150 children register for this. This was a great lead in to online learning for these students.

Distance Learning @stfrancischch

Some Learnings

One of the things we have tried hard to do is "Limit the LInks" on advice from our Manaiakalani whānau. We created a slideshow that held all the information and embedded it on our website on the Distance Learning Link. All four Hub sites link off the same page. 

We have also opted for exactly the same layout in the Hub google sites, therefore simplifying navigation for students and also parents who have children in multiple hubs.

All planning is visible and uses the same format of Learn, Create, Share. We were using this format in some areas of the school however we have now got consistency across the school with the planning format created by one of our teachers.

We have learned that the systems we use are very important and need to be thought through from all perspectives. Every decision we made led to another question - but taking the time to talk about what was best for the learners, made the decisions easier.

We have also learned that the capacity of our staff is so much greater when we work together with a  common purpose.

"The strength of the teach is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team." (Phil Jackson, author)

Today

So what did today bring?

Today we launched our Distance Learning Programmes.

Today we had 230+ students online with their teachers without a glitch.

Today we saw motivated students who wanted to connect with their teachers and peers.

Today we saw the fruits of our labour over the last couple of years, with independent students managing their own learning, totally familiar with the google suite of tools that they needed to manage their learning

Today our teachers excelled themselves and our parent community celebrated this. 


Click here to read today's article on facebook #leadingtheway

How did Distance Learning play out in your school today?

DFI #4 Share to Learn

It was great to have time to delve deeper into the Share component of Learn, Create, Share and to think of the "share" as share to learn. When we share our learning and then get feedback on our learning it puts us back into the spiral of Learn, Create, Share. As I said in my last post - this is not a linear process. 


 One of the important things about Share is to be able to share to an authentic audience. What does that look like for our learners?

In the past this has meant sharing with another person in the class, sharing with the teacher, the principal and sometimes event reaching out to parents and others in the community. In the digital age we can now share so much more widely - authentically. 

We encourage our students to blog using the blogger platform, sharing their work publicly. This means there is the opportunity for our students work to be read globally. In our school we have seen great examples of when a learner is responded to by an author or an expert and this has made them think more deeply about what it is they have shared.

This is one of the reasons we want to establish authentic audiences for students, so that real people can view and interact with their learning. 

We want to take student work out of an exercise book (or a hidden digital folder) and place it in the real world. When we do this learners can see a purpose for their work.

Having an authentic audience changes the focus of learning so that, rather than completing work for the sole benefit of the teacher, learners can share with others who share an interest or others who are invested in their learning. This way the learner can focus on a wider audience not just an audience of one - a teacher with a red pen. 

Blogging is a great example of how we can share to learn. I find blogging is my chance to reflect and think more deeply about what we do and why we do it.When I blog it helps me clarify my thinking and I am better able to articulate the why. 

I often can find it hard to articulate (in an impromptu situation) the importance of what we do and why we do it however when I blog it clarifies my thinking and makes it easier to articulate in these situations. And it's even better if someone comments and questions my thinking. This is my authentic audience. (Working on growing this by pushing my posts out via Twitter.)

I loved the definition used at this workshop when we were learning more about the 'Share' element - an authentic audience is one that can choose to listen to you. 

If anyone goes to my blog - they are choosing to listen to me, choosing to read, choosing to leave a comment. This comment made me reflect on how many blog posts I read in any given week that I don't leave comments on. I am going to try to change my practice so that I am contributing more when other are sharing to learn.

Other #4 DFI Workshop Learnings

- great shortcuts to use on sheets (lots of learning here that will be helpful when dealing with data at school - especially filters)

- google maps

- google forms (something I use a lot - but always some more learning to be done)

DFI #3 Media - It's All About the Hook

This workshop was so timely - we are all working through a really challenging time at the moment trying to continue our relationships with our learners by distance and to provide learning opportunities for them that are creative and follow the Learn, Create, Share pedagogy.

We are going online to provide Distance Learning programmes because of the nationwide rāhui in place at the moment. It was great to have the google meet workshop already under our belts so that we knew we had this amazing tool to help connect with our learners. It has worried me that teachers may revert back to chalk and talk using this tool though - just get all their learners connected and then try to deliver content online.

Distance Learning calls for a different approach in some ways but there are things that we need to hold fast to:

- differentiated learning (no whole class teaching)

- Learn, Create, Share pedagogy

- no worksheets

- we want our students to be creators not consumers

So this was a really timely workshop to have access to. Huge shout out to the team that delivered the first DFI Online - a great success.

It was a wonderful example of how google meet can be used to start with a big group, then move into smaller groups for learning. The day flowed well - and I know many hours were put into making this work. I was not only thankful for the content but for the systems used that we can now share with our teams. A simple google doc with lots of links prepared earlier. A wonderful example of how teachers can group students for differentiated learning.

Create - It's All About the Hook

There has been a tidal wave of resources being pushed out through many different social media platforms since the onset of COVID-19, when we all started to realise that this was going to effect us all and schools were going to close.

It was and probably for some still is tempting to grab at everything and push it out to parents so that they would have something to do with their children at home - no wonder some of them are overwhelmed.

At St Francis we want to hold fast to the Learn, Create, Share pedagogy. We have tremendous support through our Education Programme facilitators Mark and Sharon and the whole Manaiakalani Team. In some ways we have been preparing for this for the last two years.

We are encouraging our teachers not to revert back to what has been comfortable in the past - whole class teaching. We have been given a bit of time and a challenge and that is just when people become creative and we are seeing our teachers create their own resources - ones that align with our localised curriculum - the way we do things at St Francis.

We are encouraging teachers to evaluate the resources that are being pushed at them rather than just take everything. We are continuing our Learn, Create, Share approach.

So what does create look like? It was good for me to have time to reflect on this at this workshop.

The idea that create is all about the hook has settled with me. The time that our students spend creating is time they are spending reflecting and solidifying their understanding  - they are creating to learn. It is not a linear process.

The students create Digital Learning Objects (DLO's) to share their learning - these can be created digitally but don't have to be. (If they are not created digitally, more often than not are at least photographed to share digitally).

We are working on ensuring that the create part of our pedagogy is not just an electronic form of what could be done on paper - substitution. We use the SAMR model as a guide and we are trying to get over the line with the create tasks. We are not always successful with this but we are aware of this and working on it.

Media - 

The topic of today's session was Media and there were several workshops within the session which were differentiated.

- Google draw

- Google slides

- deep dive into Youtube live streaming

- youtube channel and playlists

We had time to learn and time to create using some tools that I know I will be using more and more.