Big Thoughts

March 18, 2015

What if…

Just some wonderings…. What if questions – some for students some for teachers – many for both!

What if we looked at our syndicate as 4 teachers and 108 students with 4 classrooms to use?
What if there was no zero?
What if you could direct your learning?
What if my job wasn’t to teach but to coach? Or to inspire? Or to design learning?
What if we could personalise learning for every student?
What if you could study anything at all?
What if we taught wellbeing at school?
What if drama was a core subject like maths and English?
What if languages were compulsory?
What if we focused on the journey instead of the end results?
What if learning was a game?
What if you could redesign learning?
What if trees had feelings?
What if war was illegal?
What if peace was illegal?
What if dance was a core subject?
What if Te Reo Maori was the main language spoken in schools?
What if we got jobs based on our IQ?
February 20, 2015

Building Learning Power

At my school we practice building learning power, Guy Claxton’s innovative approach to learning to learn. Personally I think it’s brilliant. It builds students’ dispositional thinking to enable them to experience success in their learning. It gives them strategies that they can use to negotiate difficult situations in their learning and elsewhere in life too. It builds on the key competencies, adding a richness and depth that I find really engaging. Plus it has given our school a common language to work with as we learn, grow and explore.
I’ve been practising building learning power for the last 3+ years now, and I can really see the positive benefits it has had with my students. However I wonder whether I have taken it deep enough. Yes, I use the language, but have I really allowed it to change my teaching practice, to filter down into ALL of my conversations in ALL learning areas ALL of the time? Probably not. That’s a big ask. But I can look at my progress, and I can hold this as an ideal to work towards. (Yes, that’s me, forever the optimist!). I love the phrase that teachers at HPSS use – ‘warm and demanding’, by which they mean being kind, compassionate and approachable, but also having high expectations of students, staff and selves, and finding ways to raise them up so that everyone achieves their potential.
So how am I being warm yet demanding?
Firstly by not shying away from tough questions. My students this year, seem to be taking a bit to wrap their heads around the type of questions I’m asking – not so much of the what, where, who or when, but rather why and how might we? I also believe in reciprocity – if I’m going to ask my students tough questions that challenge them to actually think about their ideas, rather than just remember information, then I need to take their questions seriously too.
I need to have high expectations of my students and myself. I need to communicate these clearly but gently, and make every effort to help my students reach these expectations. My expectations need to be a realistic stretch for my students and they need to be differentiated so that they can all experience success.
I need to be kind, compassionate and considerate and gentle with my students, other teachers and myself. I need to place value, and spend time helping my students to tend to their Hauora, their wellbeing, and of course I need to be approachable. I need to ensure that my busy-ness doesn’t get in the way of spending time getting to know my students, particularly in the mornings, which is so easy to do!
I need to ensure I create rich programmes that are engaging, require critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, innovation, while giving students scope for some self direction. And this brings me full circle back to Building Learning Power. By moving beyond a traditional knowledge dissemination model of education, we allow students more freedom to develop their dispositional thinking, to learn how to be learners, what works for them and what doesn’t. To fail and grow from it. To wonder. To question. To try. To succeed.
October 27, 2014

School as Creative Space

Creativity

I’m a dancer, well more specifically I’m a dance teacher. And therein lies a fundamental difference. As a dancer I spent years training my body to follow patterns of movement and find both beauty and function in form. But as a dance teacher, I spend my time choreographing – creating. And it’s been here that I have found meaning in dance.

Marketers: It’s time to reinvent creativity

The performing arts are regarded as creative endeavors, but what we don’t always realise is that creativity is not inherent in any of these art forms – it’s a mindset and something that must be given space to develop. If a dance only ever learns what they are taught and never get’s a chance to choreograph – how much creativity are they really practising? Similarly, a musician exposed to the best of classical and modern music is not necessarily creative if they can only play but never compose. What creativity needs in order to thrive is opportunity, and it has not traditionally been then case that students are given time deliberately set aside to be creative.

Ken Robinson on creativity

But I believe schools can and should be creative spaces (see Sir Ken Robinson‘s talks for more detailed, eloquent and well researched reasons than I could give) because creativity is important. It’s not only what brightens our lives, and makes for great performances, it’s what keeps us trying new things, it’s what leads to innovative solutions, and new ways of doing things. And most importantly it feed our inner selves. In Kaupapa Maori, they talk about the mana atua, the divine spark that resides in all of us. Opportunities for creativity feed that spark.

You can’t use up creativity; the more you use, the more you have - Maya Angelou @QuoteResearch

So we now we know creativity needs opportunity to thrive, but we also need to recognise the breadth of areas that it’s possible to be creative in. I have seen students excel in creativity on the soccer pitch, seen brilliant creative reasoning in mathematics, and watched students argue the most intricate details in amazingly creative ways. If we believe that creativity is possible in any field, then we are starting to understand creativity as a mindset. As a mindset, or indeed a disposition, creativity grows in response to practice. Just like years of dance training strengthened my body, years of choreography have developed my creativity too. Practice comes in the form of activities designed to help students think beyond the mundane and into the novel. It’s a question asked by the teacher, but left answered or the thought that starts “I wonder if…” The final thing creativity really needs in order to thrive is constraint. An enabling constraint to be precise. Something which provides a limitation to work around – the creative challenge if you will. Sometimes simply a context, at other times a more explicit requirement.

Creativity vs. Art.

Just to recap. Creativity needs:

  • Opportunity
  • Recognition
  • Practice
  • Constraint

Creativity Poster - Andrea

So what does school as a creative place look like to me? It’s a space where student’s ask questions, solve problems and explore ideas. It’s multi-modal and highly interactive. It engages students in creative development. It’s supported by discussion and exemplification of the creative process by students, teachers and industry professionals. It acknowledges that creativity exists everywhere. It’s supported by structures that enable understanding – the SOLO taxonomy, systems thinking – and see everything as part of a whole. It’s developed and practiced through processes that foster ideation and iteration – design thinking, future problem solving. It’s a space where students can learn through doing and trying and failing upwards and failing forwards and starting over and turning the whole thing upside down. It’s acknowledging that there is never going to be one right way.

October 27, 2014

Evolving the Curriculum: Focus on Values

There is so much dialogue about the need for education to evolve. From TED talks, to twitter chats, youtube videos to HuffPost articles -it’s literally everywhere; in popular literature, academic literature, on the news, in the media, in politics and of course in schools. But for all we talk about it, the question has to be asked – are we actually evolving education? And if we’re not, why not? If we are, are we doing enough?

 

This year I realised I’d done enough thinking, and I really needed to start doing. So I did (don’t worry it wasn’t thoughtless change – I kept thinking too). And the place I started was with our own New Zealand Curriculum. This document is amazing. It has already laid out a map for our learning evolution, now we just have to be brave enough to follow it.

In the front of the curriculum (page 7 to be exact) is this diagram entitled ‘directions for learning’ (see I told you – map!). What I love about this image is the way it organises learning. At teachers’ college I was taught to always start with the achievement objectives, but if you look here, you’ll see that they form only a very small part of a whole. Through this diagram, the New Zealand Curriculum advocates a a three-way approach – values, key competencies and learning areas. These are guided by the curriculum’s vision and underpinned by the curriculum’s values. All these parts together make up the whole of education.

 

Of course all of these bits are equally important, but I want to focus today on the values.

 

This term the teachers in our syndicate have been working with groups of students on wicked problems, using design thinking to tackle these. As our students work on these they have been noticing and commenting on the learning dispositions (key competencies) they have been using as part of the process. These dispositions will then help them in creating CVs, portfolios and learning paths later in the term as part of our Future Selves topic. But the really interesting bit (today at least), is the way they students are using the values of the curriculum as a focusing lens for their ideation and investigation.

 

The NZC explores seven principles, and has an eighth overarching idea, which are explained like so:

“Students will be encouraged to value:

  • Excellence, by aiming high and by persevering in the face of difficulties;
  • Innovation, inquiry and curiosity, by thinking critically, creatively, and reflectively;
  • Diversity, as found in our different cultures, languages, and heritages;
  • Equity, through fairness and social justices;
  • Community and participation for the common good;
  • Ecological Sustainability, which includes care for the environment;
  • Integrity, which involves being honest, responsible, and accountable and acting ethically;

and respect of themselves, others, and human rights.”

(New Zealand Curriculum, 2007, p. 12)

The curriculum further goes on to explain that the values should then be interpreted by the school in consultation with it’s community. Our school values look like this:
“At [our school] we want our students to be constantly
pursuing excellence in everything they do. They will value:
  • Integrity
  • Personal responsibility
  • Diversity
  • Lifelong learning
  • Creative and innovative thinking
  • Positive relationships
  • Collective achievement
This is underpinned by Tūrangawaewae – a sense of one’s place in our changing world”
As you can see, there are many similarities, but also naturally some differences. I particularly love the last line in our school’s values statement about Tūrangawaewae and the sense of place in a changing world.
But stating the values isn’t enough – and talking about them isn’t either. Not if we’re going to evolve education; so lately I’ve been starting to explore and unpack these with students. In the wicked problem context described above, I asked students to choose two key values to explore their wicked problem – human rights and the media. I created a values frame that looked like this:
Untitled 2
After a brief discussion of what the different values meant, it was interesting to see which ones the students chose to focus on, because of course this will change they way they approach things. Unsurprisingly, a lot chose diversity and community (two of the more understandable ideas and most relevant to the context) but I was interested and pleased at the number of students who chose to focus on ethics.
We’re only a little way into this process but already I can see that my students are starting to think critically about values and the actions that stem from them. By giving them the language to use, and the concepts, they are becoming increasingly aware that values give rise to opinions and opinions to perspectives and, often in the case of wicked problems, perspectives to conflict. So as they continue to explore the context and settle on their own particular smaller problem to apply the design process to, I plan to provide my students with lots of opportunities to discuss differing opinions and how values might frame these.
“Ahh, but what does this actually look like in the classroom?” you ask. Well it will start with these discussion questions:
  • How might humanitarian organisations use social media in innovative ways?
  • How could social media be used to develop a culture of excellence in human rights reporting?
  • How might personal ethics be supported through social media?
  • How might improving our ecological sustainability (environmental practices) reduce breaches of human rights?
  • How might it benefit refugees if we apply the principle of equity, rather than equality?
  • How can social media bring communities together to support human rights?
  • How does diversity impact on human rights?

And then we’ll go from there – where exactly we’re still figuring out.

See the thing I realised last term, is that it isn’t ever going to happen if you wait until you the end destination to set out. You actually just have to start and trust that the road will guide you, a sentiment Tolkien captured perfectly.

“The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say.”

Tolkien

So wither I’ll end up? I do not know, but the journey so far, though just begun, has been most marvelous indeed.

October 19, 2014

Dispositional Thinking, Changing the Game

 

Lately I have been thinking a lot about the importance of developing students’ ability to think beyond themselves and beyond knowledge as the be all and end all. In fact I’ve been thinking about it so much I signed myself up to give an EduIgnite talk on it at the Emerging Leader EduIgnite Evening in Wellington at the end of the month.

It’s about developing dispositional thinking, and in researching and reading about dispositional thinking as I write my presentation, I’ve realised something important. Dispositional thinking is a game changer, and for me to might just be the game changer.

Dispositional thinking is about changing the focus from learning being something you are good or bad at, to something that is learnable and changeable, something that you can practice and improve; moving from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. It’s about developing the skills that support learning and are, at the same time, invaluable in 21st century workplaces.

It means that as a teacher my practice no longer centres around increasing students’ knowledge. Instead I focus on skills, strategies and concepts. If they can Google it in 5 seconds flat, is it really something I need to spend a whole lesson teaching? So, we deal with the contextual, the ungoogleable – and through those contexts we uncover learning, together. Sometimes we miss things, so we loop back and take a second look, sometimes we screw things up, so we talk about where we went wrong. But mostly we ask a lot of questions – questions that aren’t so easy to answer.

In the process of exploring these contexts and asking questions, my students are developing skills through learning in action. It is practical, but at the same time theoretical and those two develop naturally, interwoven sometimes, and deliberately made separate at others. The ideas don’t come before the practice, they come alongside, with and through the practice.

Our learning is becoming increasingly holistic, allowing more opportunities for creativity, problem solving, and collaboration. And I can see the effect that this focus on teaching to develop learning dispositions is having on my students’ confidence. My learners are more articulate than they were at the start of the year, they are more resilient, they are more creative, and they are far more open minded. And yet I wonder is it enough? How can we achieve greater depth, allow for more creativity? Increase collaboration? Develop a sense of wonder and a need to adventure in their learning in our students?

Reflecting on the development of my students’ learning dispositions has solidified my belief in the importance of dispositional curricula, thinking and learning in the classroom, and luckily for me the New Zealand Curriculum agrees mandating a three-way focus on values, learning areas and key competencies (dispositions). But I know I’m only at the beginning of this journey, with so very many things yet to explore, to refine, to uncover, discuss and reflect on. I don’t yet have the answers but I do have the questions. So many questions.

 

August 23, 2014

Communities, Tribes and the Learning Renaissance

“What is a community?”

That’s the question we’ve been asking as a class and as a school this term. My class are looking at this from a few of perspectives:

  1. As a community of learners, working together to develop our learning muscles.
  2. As a community of hackers, building, hacking and creating our learning space to work most effectively for us.
  3. As part of our Community Perspectives module, looking at the way events affect communities and how we hold differing perspectives depending on the communities we are part of.
  4. As part of our Vital Stats module, looking at the way individuals within sports communities use statistics to make decisions.

As part of our discussions in the Community Perspectives Module, my students came up with 10 principles which they felt were important parts of what it takes to be a successful community:

  • People
  • Communication
  • Time
  • Respect
  • Common point
  • Ownership
  • Commitment
  • Environment
  • Collaboration
  • Trust

Firstly, I’m super impressed with the language these 11, 12 and 13 year olds came up with. Secondly, I think they’ve hit the nail on the head. And finally I think the way the came up with these was totally in keeping with our communities theme. Individually they came up with 5 or 6 each, but together they’ve got everything covered.

So naturally, all this talk of communities has found its way into my thinking. What does it mean to be part of a community of educators? For me it means:

  • working together with others to achieve better outcomes for students
  • feeling like I have ownership and am part of a something important to me
  • being challenged, extended and made a better teacher through collaboration and the support of others within my community.
  • working alongside my colleagues to achieve something bigger than myself

I’m lucky, I’m part of multiple communities as an educator, I’m part of a global and national community of connected educators – we connect, engage, support and challenge each other and most of the time we do this online, through Twitter. I’m also part of my school, team and of course class communities, but it’s the first and last communities I want to talk about today.

Recently I watched Seth Godin’s TED talk about The Tribes We Lead. In this talk he speaks about the way we can affect change through connection. According to Godin, our world is organised into tribes and has been since long before recorded human history began. Tribes enable us to connect with others and feel that we belong. A tribe is a group of people aligned around an idea, connected to a leader and to each other. In  many ways this reflects the definitions my students created of communities. When we unpacked the word together in class we identified two root words that make up the word ‘community’, ‘common’ and ‘unity’. In a community we should be working together (unity) for a shared (common) purpose.

So what does all this have to do with education, aside from being an interesting discussion in a class? Well, I think it can all be defined in one simple hashtag. #edchatNZ – the little hashtag that could. There is no doubt in my mind that #edchatNZ has changed me, as an individual, in my philosophy of teaching, and most noticeably in my teaching practice. And I know it has done so for many people. Not only has it become my community – my tribe – it’s inspired me to take the awesome things I’m learning back to my school, and back to my tribe of learners. With all these new ideas and challenging concepts, not only am I questioning everything I’m doing, I’m teaching my students to do the same. It may be time consuming and hard work and drive other teachers in my school up the wall, but I can see the benefit in my students. They don’t accept status quo just because it’s also been status quo, they’re not sucked in by media and they don’t cave under peer pressure (well as much as is possible for 11 – 13 year olds). They desperately want and need to understand why we do things the way we do, and if they can see the logic or the rationale behind something and agree with it, then they are behind it 100% and boy do they give it their all.

Last week a came across a retweet on twitter talking about a learning renaissance rather than a revolution.

2

For me, the students I have this year and the way they approach their learning is this renaissance in action. In his talk, Godin speaks about the way we create change, and he asks 3 questions:

  • Who are you upsetting? (Because if you’re not upsetting someone or something you’re not challenging the status quo)
  • Who are you connecting with?
  • Who are leading?

The first question serves as evidence of change or lack thereof, but the last two is where the change really happens. When we connect with others we are bringing together a multitude of ideas, talents, creativity, and capable hands that can work together to affect change. But what about leadership? How does that fit into the picture?

The #edchatNZ community began with a lone nut – the wonderful Danielle Myburgh. As she started to share her passion a community started to form around her, it grew and began to connect in multiple and diverse ways becoming a tribe, and now with increasing momentum, it’s affecting real change in education communities and schools around the country. But at the same time, it’s also empowered each of us edutweeps (twitter educators – education + twitter + peeps) to return to our own schools and classrooms and lead change there.

So how do we do this? How do we lead change and build a learning renaissance? (I love that phrase so much more than ‘revolution’).

We live in age now where it’s no longer good enough or even effective to try and sell an idea, instead we need to tell a story. Godin describes an ongoing cycle:

Source

This cycle appeals to me and I think it is a good way to reflect on what we are doing to be agents of change within our own learning communities. I know that I am really good at making changes for my own learners, and I’m certainly getting better at connecting with my tribe but do I tell the story of what I’m doing?

I have no doubt there is the beginning of a learning renaissance happening in for my students, but I’m not yet telling that story effectively and if I want to help lead a movement and create a culture of inquiry and innovation within my school I need to be.

So how I can do this?

This is the part I’m still figuring out, but here’s what I’ve got so far:

  • Talk about with my students and build their language of learning so they can talk about it with other students and teachers
  • Invite others into my class to hang out and get a sense of the way we’re mixing it up in room 3
  • Blog more often
  • Blog more deeply – less of the surface stuff more of the challenging and questioning stuff (like this post)
  • Share my blogging, I communicate well through words, it’s always been my natural medium, so I need to use this and I need to be willing to put it out there – especially with colleagues at school
  • Keep tweeting, cause magic happens on twitter

So to finish, I’m going to leave you with a question:

How are you telling the story of the education renaissance?