Collaborative Teaching and Learning in Flexible Learning Spaces

This afternoon we attended a seminar held by Neill O'Reilly at Waitakiri school. The topic - Collaborative teaching and Learning in Flexible Learning Spaces.

It was great for the whole Leadership team to attend together and I look forward to hearing what resonated with the others in our team; what challenged their thinking; what were the takeaways that they will trial with their teams...

I liked the style of the workshop - I liked the way it caused me to reflect on my practice and where we are headed at St Francis of Assisi School. And reflect I did and continue to do hours after the seminar has finished.

Does co-teaching improve learning outcomes, hauora and self regulation?  

My initial reaction was Yes! Of course this is the case. However I can see that if teachers don't believe this, if we don't have buy in, if they don't have a positive approach, a growth mindset, a learning disposition, if they don't know how to use the flexible spaces - then the answer to this question will be no.

What does this mean for us?

- Professional Development - building teacher capability is important - but it is a shared responsibility. Gone are the days where professional development happened to you at staff meetings. It is our personal responsibility to seek out the professional development we need, or activate our own PLD as Neill put it in the seminar. 

- It is our job, a teacher's job to cause learning - I love this statement - I do see this as our core business.

Does our teaching team have  a clear understanding of what effective pedagogy looks, sounds and feels like at our school? in our flexible learning spaces?

Do we have a shared understanding of what "students at the centre" means?

These questions really made me think - we haven't spent time on these questions as a staff - I can articulate my understanding of effective pedagogy and "students at the centre" but we really need to visit these topics as a staff. We need to move forward with a shared understanding. 

I found that I needed to remind myself that we have only been together as a staff for 10 weeks - small steps ... things take time. We need to stop and celebrate how far we have come in such a short time.

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Other things that resonated with me... to be revisited at some point

- Private honesty - public unity

- Homework (Year 1-6) If you are sending more than reading and some basic facts home - you are ignoring the research.

- worksheets - don't cause learning

- planning needs to be shared with all in the team - when will we make this non negotiable at St Francis?

- be prepared to take risks, trial the different co-teaching collaborative strategies, talk about how it is going with team, modify, try again

- read the research, do we actually believe the research that says that teacher collaboration will make a significant difference to children's learning or are we waiting for someone to prove this to us? And if we do believe it - is that reflected in our practice?

Gathering Research - Project Based Learning

Project Based Learning 

Problem Based LearningGenius Hour20% TimeInquiry Based Learning

As part of an assignment for Mindlab - Post Grad Paper on Applied Practice - Digital and Collaborative Learning we are currently gathering and reading research on Project Based Learning. We are still working on formulating a research question - finding that there is a lot of reading and talking to do as we close in on one question to focus the inquiry. One of our hunches is that Project Based Learning is a great context or vehicle to teach 21st Century skills to our students.

21st Century skills are becoming more and more important for our students to acquire and it is our job, our core business to provide the students the contexts in which to acquire and practice these skills and to cause learning (love this term that I heard at Neill O'Reilly's seminar at Waitakiri School this afternoon) - It is our job to cause learning!

21st Century Skills

Self regulation
Creativity
Communication
Collaboration
Critical thinking
Problem Solving

The Envision blog lists several more for us to consider.

What is Project Based Learning? This definition is from the Buck Institute for Education (BIE) site

Themes from the Research
There are some themes emerging as we read more widely around the topic:

- engagement and motivation
- student agency
- student centred vs teacher directed
- barriers to implementation
- the use of technology in implementation of PBL

More about this after we have read more and talked more...


Other questions for me to ponder while gathering the research...

How does Project based learning differ from Genius Hour, 20% time, Inquiry based learning? Does it differ from Genius Hour, 20% time, Inquiry based learning?

Making a Difference

At the beginning of the year one special student started at our school and he has taken me on a learning journey that I could not have predicted at all.

Back Story

This child had struggled at pre-school to make connections with other students and also struggled to conform to the boundaries that were in place and at one point had to start at a new preschool because of this.

His transition to school was going to be tricky to manage however we had managed students like this before and I felt confident that the skill level of staff was such that the transition would be successful.

Our Story

Advice from the psychologist was to have strict boundaries and stick to them. I had done this before and to be honest it suited my style of behaviour management. Our SENCO had reservations about the advice we were getting, RTLB's had differing opinions also - we all met - we talked and we took bits of advice from all sides - we were eager to succeed.

We only planned to have this child at school for two hours a day at most as this was all the child could manage. Sometimes these two hours were so fraught we were all exhausted mentally and physically when the child went home.

I was still trying to stay firm as per the advice given to me so there were times that we had to restrain the  child as he was hurting his teacher, and times when just being removed from class was so physical that it triggered a major escalation.

Along the way we talked, tried different things like low demand, high demand activities; reward systems (which would work one day and have no effect the next); bribes; and all the while the SENCO did a lot of reading and forwarded articles to me that would challenge my thinking and others around me about what we were doing.

What if everything you knew about disciplining children was wrong?

The above article, a discussion with a supervisor of a Preschool about how they would manage this child's behaviour and a lot of reading and refocusing myself with questions about best practice in regard of managing volatile behaviour challenged my thinking around our practice and affirmed what I was now thinking - if we kept on trying to do the same thing expecting a different response... we were foolish. We needed to rethink or re-imagine "school" for this child.

Rather than making this child fit into our current ways - we needed to rethink our current ways to fit with him. This child was clearly not ready for school and we needed to accept that - and move forward with our thinking.

Enter - Play Based Learning

The more I read and the more I interact and build my relationship with this child I know that this is the answer for him. He has missed out on this at kindergarten and he is not ready for school.

This article Play- based Learning: Producing critical, creative and innovative thinkers

written by Stephanie Menzies challenges us to bring back play-based learning.

"Give yourself permission to roam around the room observing the children at play, listen to their conversations, take photos for picture stories, sit down alongside them and engage in conversation, identify ‘teachable moments’ and run with them. You will soon work out the right time and place to intervene. Use your intuition, experience, knowledge, expertise and common sense to judge when the time is right."

I know any teacher at my current school would laugh if they heard me say bring back play based learning. I have been loud in my criticism of "free time" and "choosing time". For good reasons I thought as I saw it as time that the teachers were using to catch up on paper work while the children did whatever they wanted - I made assumptions that may have been unfounded.

However from what I have seen I think this could unlock the curriculum for this student and hopefully we will be able to progress from there.

In her article Stephanie Menzies gives educators 10 ways to bring back play, have fun and promote learning ... I am keen to see how introducing more play based learning will make a difference for this student and the many others in our school who will benefit also.

How can we further engage whanau in their children's learning?

 Success Indicator: Provide parents with opportunities to learn alongside their children and be part of the ‘shift’ in thinking about digital learning

This is a question we have been grappling with - we believe we inform parents very well at OLA  but we struggle to get a level of parent engagement that we are happy with.

Current Forms of Communication
- website
- emails
- newsletters
- texts
- facebook
- classroom blogs

This year we thought one of the benefits of the Chromebook trial (Yr 5-8) would be increased parent engagement. I started a blog Good, Great, Innovate to document our journey and keep our parents informed about the learning that is taking place. We send these posts out via facebook, twitter and email.

After the Spirals of Inquiry workshop I was encouraged to refocus on this question - and also to articulate why I thought parents were hesitant to engage and give feedback.

Hunches

1. Parents are hesitant to post comments on blogs as they are worried about what others think?
2. Parents are unsure how to post a comment (technical issues ie do they have to have a google account)
3. Parents are too busy to read the blogs?

Possible Solutions
- workshop on how to post comments, what makes a good comment
OR
- crete a resource that shows parents how to post a comment -? flipped resource - short video clip on how to...

We will continue to work on this - in the meantime I wrote a post about how we all need feedback and this did get a response. We used padlet and embedded it in the post and parents were able to post anonymously. This produced three responses. 

The Importance of Feedback

What do you think?

More to think about...

- Anne Keneally (CORE Ed) suggested that we get the children doing the blogging and parents will follow - thinking of maybe trying a student guest post each week on the Good... Great... Innovate Blog.

- Patrick has managed to get some engagement on his classroom blog by getting the students to do the blogging and by using labels... definitely going to try this.