L@S 2009

We start with a challenge: "Schools need to change to meet children's needs instead of being out of date. Too many children are leaving school without qualifications and not being prepared for their future. It's time for bravery and a new way of thinking and teaching and learning. E-Learning has a powerful part to play in making learning interesting, meaningful and personalised for our students." Andy Hargreaves, talking about the Fourth Way (of Leadership i.e. inspiration, innovation and sustainability) of Educational Change that we need to move into the future. He reminds us that any piece of ICT, however flash, will NOT positively improve student outcomes unless backed up by good teaching pedagogy. First Way - innovation, flexibility, autonomy but not shared, spread or cohesive. Second Way - standardisation of curriculum, testing, competition, targets, parent choice. Third Way - improvement by sharing good practice, combination of pressure to perform and support for change but still dictated by targets in narrow areas. Era of public-private sector partnerships. Andy makes an interesting point about moving leadership and positions within organisations so that a perosn's loyalty is not to self or position, but the organisation as a whole - perhaps there's a message there for schools, maybe it's time to not be a maths teacher or a new entrant teacher for ever. He's talking about Finland and it's example - high quality teachers, drawn by the mission of teaching, lots of co-construction of curriculum, schools full of trust, co-operation, responsibility and a sense of collaboration and big picture vision. I think we've picked up on some of these themes and also the message of community - schools working together in an area for the betterment of each other and all children. We should not compete by pitting school against school and be happy or relieved if another school fails. Strong School? - Then Help the Weak! What about a diverse, or poor community - can it work there? Tower Hamlets, a high Bengali population area in London shows "Yes it can". Target setting was collaborative (not imposed top down), goals were established over time - "Poverty is not an excuse". Aim high. They knew their people, targets weren't being set by people from the Ministry who didn't know the communities. Another key was having quality teachers with commitment to the community - this commitment was visible and different stakeholders in the community agreed to initiatives like ensuring that kids were at school. And, giving schools lots of support so teachers get to concentrate on teaching and learning - everyone liked this, although I do like doing my own presentations - not sure I could let that go! An inspiring session - with challenge but also reassurance that we are heading the right way in NZ, perhaps more devotion to the mission of teaching, more social responsibility and more of students as change partners - how do we achieve this in primary schools?

Cluster Inquiry Model Celebration Day

Six schools presented their inquiry journey and while the models were different, there were definite commonalities St Mary’s – D Day, link with gospel values and community aspirations St Joseph’s – Opoutere model Foxton Primary – other STRIVE! Opiki – strands on the bridge – reducing number of these through reflection Poroutawhao – inquiry intersection Oroua Downs – organise, discover, share Common Themes • Passion and enthusiasm for the benefits and advantages of inquiry • Reflection – schools have been brave, dived in, got started and been to reflect on what worked well and what didn’t and then forging onwards and upwards. Some models have already changed somewhat, even in a short time span • Importance of relevance and ownership for students • Diversity and creativity of most models from within the cluster • Importance of school-wide practice/language/display • Need to develop higher order thinkers and questioners • Information processing skills – being able to do this seamlessly with information gathering • Importance of social action and making a difference for student engagement – the so what of inquiry • Importance of collegiality/support/sharing/planned dialogue for building teacher capacity in inquiry based learning • Recording/planning of inquiry - modelling books. Perhaps we need to look at range of planning approaches from cluster schools – got to be prepared for changing direction - can’t plan a whole unit 7 weeks in advance! • Idea of a blog or wiki to document inquiry process as a class/teacher/group/individual student • Kids have really stepped up, taken leadership and got fully engaged, taken on roles willingly • Evidence of kids working powerfully together, group work with a purpose and students of different ages working together • Expecting ICT component of inquiry sharing • What about depth and coverage? Needs to be considered • Assessment – skills, rubrics, student ownership • The power of clustering, learning from other schools • The power of just in time learning for teachers and principals • Inquiry has a great tie in with the introduction of the NZ Curriculum 2007 and the empowerment of schools to design a curriculum that meets the needs of their community • Some schools have used SOLO taxonomy and made use of Bloom’s, Michael Pohl, Tony Ryan, Art Costa work -perhaps need to do some more work and thinking around this

Inquiry Celebration

Wow, we've reached the end of our first shared inquiry - What Would Make a Great a NZ Holiday? Today, the school is broken into three groups to share their learning with 3-4 other classes from across the levels of the school. Room 17 ( Year 1) had a great time camping at Papamoa (it's a place quite close to Miss Hepburn's office!) - they "slept" in a tent and played on the beach and went swimming! Room 13 (Year 3-4) shared lots of information about their journey through the STRIVE model and what they were doing at each stage. They learned a lot about various NZ places and the great activities you can do there. Mr Shekleton is playing his role as entertainer in between items! Room 14 (Year 5-6) have shared their findings in a Keynote presentation. They talked about their questions and the discussions they had as a class to choose the direction their inquiry took. They have created brochures to advertise the places they would choose to visit in Christchurch and also present the itinerary. Room 11 (Year 3-4) also shared what they did at each stage of the model. They have focused particularly on sharing their brochures and posters which are part of the Voice stage of the model. They used Pages as the software to create the brochures and established some shared success criteria to evaluate their work by. Room 1 (Year 1) have chosen to focus on our local area of the Horowhenua. They shared their discussions through the STRIVE model e.g. what is a holiday? Mr Baker has interviewed children about their various opinions and answers on the inquiry questions - e.g. what would you take on your outing or where in Horowhenua would you go? They have also shared their art work arising from the places they would visit. It's great to see the way that all classes have done things differently, going far and wide (and not so far) on their "holidays" but everyone has engaged children in using the new STRIVE Levin North inquiry learning model.

Charting our progress

It is exciting to be sitting with a group who are sharing their journey of where they are at. One room is ready to start their journey, another group is tent camping...how exciting!

Great hear a new entrant room using utube to support their investigation. The idea of turning their room into a TENT.....WOW!

Another group is going to have their children visiting different places  around the Horowhenua.

Another group has spent a lot of time looking at what makes good brochure.

Making up an itinerary has been a key focus for another group.

I am looking forward to seeing all this work coming to fruition.

We then got onto  ideas for Voice - these included - postcards, posters, bochures, itinerary, oral presentation, drama , role play,  podcasts, radio commercial, big huge labs, flickr, dumpr (online graphics), real life presentation, iweb,  parent involvement etc

Tracking Our Unit

As I wander around the rooms I see lots of evidence of Inquiry in Action....I wanted to make sure that this is a focus in our foyer ( a very small space)....so yes I have finally done this. We need to make sure that evidence of our model can be seen throughout the school....as I often say  - so that we are all on the same page. 

The Curriculum Day we had with Mary chamberlain and Lester Flockton gave us much to reflect on...particularly in terms of authentic learning.

The other thing that touched was the need to be finding ways to involve parents in what we are doing. This can be said also of Inquiry. As Principal I need to make sure that I continue to find ways to share our Inquiry journey with our parents. I think our sharing that we have planned is going to be very important....we need to get this right...we need to take the time; give ourselves the time to truly celebrate and reflect on this wee journey that we have undertaken this term. Yes this is something that I need to provide the leadership in....as I have said before ....watch this space!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

Spark and Task

On the first day back we had our Spark  -which consisted of a 25 minute assembly. We the staff had fun in the process. The play "Are We there Yet?" had the children responding...after all how often do you see the staff acting out a scene that they could identify with ?!!!!!!!!!!

All the staff dressed up as if they were going on a summer holiday and yes sang "We're all going on a Summer holiday" Darryl put together a clever slide show that had the children wondering....

One day on we are having our staff meeting on Spark and Task. Such a wide range of strategies have been employed by the staff. Sharing is an integral part to ensuring that we all get the most out of the process.

We did a PMI to reflect on the Spark - this will really help us when it comes time to planning our next unit. One thing that bothered me was that we left the support staff out. Letters were sent to our key relievers last term inviting them to the Spark launch. It was fortunate that we realised our mistake and we were able to invite them to be part of this. I believe if our Strive model is to be successful then we need to work hard to bring everyone on board.

We did an activity to develop questioning skills . Staff were introduced to fat and skinny questions.

We recognise the need to upskill our questioning skills and in turn our teaching strategies to enhance questioning skills.

Watch this space!!!!!!!!!

uLearn 2008

Some of the workshops have provided some great websites that may help you with your Inquiry:

• circave.com and dipity.com for timelines
• bubblecomment.com...this is an interesting one where you can actualy put a bubble (your face and you speaking!!!) on the student's working...quite an effective way of comunicating with your students
• You may like to check some of these otheres out glogster.com    wix.com     voicethread.com     weebly.com    slide.com    bliptv    teachertube.com     clustrmap    boomp3.com   daftdoggy.com    vocaroo.com - yes theree is a heap there but some great tools there

I have also gone on to some other great websites - 

Bucklands Beach has done some great work on eportfolios

eisforlearning.wikispaces.com  

fendalton openair school

Tony ryan website - has all his thinking keys there....lots of free downloads

Yes so much....you may like to browse!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So much to take in

ulearn08

Will Richardson and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach - spoke about Building a community of practice - the best ones  are the ones that are co=owned  -it is about sharing....we need to move away from imposed norms...co-creative... isn't that we are aspiring for? We have started with a model and what we want now is for people to be taking ownership. There are four distinct stages

1. Sharing ...

2 .cooperate

3. collaborate

4. act collectively for change

I can see strong parallels to what we are trying to achieve at North. At each stage we need to build heaps of opportunities for sharing.

Our timeline allows for this. We have linked the timeline to our staff meeting overview ... I believe this is where I can show strong leadership and perhaps keep us all sane!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Inquiry Learning Launch

We've spent time with our staff at another staff meeting sharing an "Inquiry Learning Support Booklet", perhaps a first draft of our bible of inquiry learning! It sets out what is to happen at each stage of the S.T.R.I.V.E. model. This document was well received and should give teachers plenty of ideas, which of course will be built on with their own experiences and inspirations. Next we brainstormed how to launch our Term 4 Inquiry - Are We There Yet? The challenge to staff for our launch event is to have fun and participate with enthusiasm in the initial SPARK assembly! I suspect this challenge will be easy for some and more.... well, challenging for others! I'm not allowed to give away too much though. We've also shared our staff meeting presentation with the Board of Trustees on Monday night and it went down a treat - the board members were genuinely excited by the opportunities presented by the introduction of an inquiry learning approach.

Michael Pohl

Michael challenged us to think about what we are doing and to in a sense be able to justify what we are doing! So why teach thinking.....yes that was an excellent springboard as we discussed what we do at North and more importantly need to be doing at North. 

Neil touches on this in his reflections. For me it is about getting us all paddling the same waka  -so we need to be "talking the same talk!". We have chosen the Hats as a major thinking tool for our school...but then he challenged us re our level of expertise and very quickly it became apparent that our expertise is some what lacking...so this will need to be a strong focus for us as we implement "Strive!