Reflect Growth

One of our most basic human needs is belonging. It's not the most basic - that would be wi-fi these days - but it's right up there. Belonging to someone or something bigger than ourselves is a constant driver for (most) people. It's why we check Facebook umpteen times a day, it's why we join book clubs and it's why we buy cats! Cats aside, or maybe not, it's really about a need for community.

This year I've found myself part of a new online community. I know that there are hordes of people out there (assuredly not reading this blog) who claim that social networks and online communities are Bad. Yes, capital B Bad.  You know what I think?  I think they were wrong about video killing the radio star and they're wrong about this too.



I even did a little research on the topic and found that I'm not alone. In fact:

"Despite the opinion of some, real community and sense of belonging can be found and nurtured online through participation, collaboration, storytelling and exchange of information." 

May 16, 2015, Do Re Media

This year, I've found myself part of a new and exciting online community of educators called Reflect Growth.  We are are an online community of educators working together to share professional practices and co-create a piece of software.  I'll get to the software in a moment, because it's a bit exciting, but for me the delight has been in finding a community of (mostly local) teachers who share my goal of active professional growth and reflection. Meeting these educators, in person and online, has been refreshing and inspiring.  It's met some of my need for belonging to a community.

And a community it is. We share, amongst other things like coffee and cake,  inspirations, frustrations and goals. We challenge each other's thinking and explore ideas. We've been taking apart the AITSL Professional Standards for Teachers to work out what they really mean, and have hypothesised whether the introduction of them is the precursor of Ofsted style inspections like in the UK. We've talked about the TfEL framework and how it links with our understanding of effective teaching and learning. Pedagogy, padagogy, Blooms, Gardner... You name it, and we've been there. Even if only briefly.

It's been a very busy little community. Much more so than any I've been in before, which begs the question of why?  I have an inkling.  A couple actually.

1. Strong and active foundational members
2. A driving purpose

The couple who launched the Reflect Growth community are originally from the UK, but moved to Australia - presumably for the weather - a few years back. Since arriving, Selena has taken the education world of South Australia by storm and is well known as a mover and shaker. When she speaks, people listen. Her voice demands to be heard (which is actually doubly true when you consider her operatic training) and she put the call out for teachers to get involved with driving their own professional development.  The other half of this (actually very quietly spoken) duo is Matt. Full of ideas and technological know how he is a man with a mission.  Together these two are a force to be reckoned with! They hold us together as a community and, it seems, genuinely care.

I'll come back to the software I mentioned earlier. Still in the early stages of development the app is being designed to support teachers in driving their own professional development. It will help identify areas for growth and collect evidence to support it. Today, I've been privileged to spend some time playing with the prototype. I can't speak highly enough of it!

Next up for the community looks to be teacher challenges that will see us share our practice in an open setting. A version of a virtual classroom visit, sort of, with the opportunity for/expectation of feedback from other community members. Eeek! New ideas and feedback!  Can you see why I enjoy this community so much?

Come join our community at www.reflectgrowth.com! The more the merrier.

(Incidentally, you can check it out on Facebook during your umpteen checks here. Or Twitter here.)

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...

Standard 6 Engage in professional learning

Standard 7 Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community

Ticking Words in My Sleep

I spent less than 5 minutes in my classroom today. For most of the day I was within ten metres of our main door but I didn't go in.  No fancy new 'hands off' teaching technique: just an assessment day. Today I ran Fountas & Pinnell Benchmark Assessments on my kiddos.  Most of them anyway.

Prior to today I had run precisely two F&M assessments on my own, and observed two others. Today I did seventeen - many of which included two or three levelled texts. To say that my head is spinning right now is an understatement.  I think I'll be ticking words and writing SC in my sleep...  As I dream of, tomorrow, assessing the four kiddos who weren't at school today. 

These are the last assessments I have to do to complete the battery our staff agreed to perform as our baseline data for the year. As with most schools, we benchmark our reading levels a couple of times a year. Our school will, over the course of this year, be moving from using PM Benchmarking to F&P. Our literacy committee and leadership team decided that F&P was a more appropriate assessment tool for our school as it assesses right through to a reading age beyond primary school age.  (Check out the correlation between colour banded levels and F&P here.)

I was pleasantly surprised by the comprehension section of F&P.  There are no question, just a range of prompts and some some suggested key understandings.  Beyond the broader age range, this is, in my opinion, the key advantage of F&P.  Through these 'comprehension' discussions I was able to hear the reading strategies my kiddos are using - or not. One student told me that he'd made a text-to-self connection with one part of the story which helped him clarify an unfamiliar word. I nearly wept at hearing this: we've been focussing on clarifying in our reading block for the last week and a half. Another student told me that she'd used her prior knowledge to infer the feelings of a character. Still another predicted that cacophony had something to do with sounds because she knows the morpheme phone.  

Then there were the kiddos who came across an unfamiliar word and just skipped it.  And the ones who couldn't explain how the author had achieved a particular effect.  And those who couldn't retell the story. As each kiddo left me, I placed their name into the boxes on the small strategy group sheet my deputy principal had suggested I used.  It's an A4 page with 20 squares. Each has a strategy or small group focus at the top. It sounds like such a simple idea but it works brilliantly! (I'd previously used something much less formalised so I felt like a bit of dill for not thinking of it myself. (I'd scribbled areas of growth as I discovered them and added names as I went.) I've come away today with a plan.  Hooray!

I don't love spending time away from my classroom, but today the benefits far outweighed any other problems that arose. (And arose they did...  The kiddos were mostly self-regulated but not in the same way they usually are.  They were pretty engaged but not like normal.) I did love being able to spend some one-on-one time with each kiddo talking about their reading; and I loved learning about them. I can't quite say I love having a range of data on which to base my planning but I do appreciate it.

I feel the need to link this to my recent post about assessment. My take home message from that post was that my kiddos don't mind assessment if they understand its purpose. Today I made sure to explain to each of my kiddos that this assessment was for ME to learn about their reading strategies so that I could better meet THEIR needs. A couple really took this to heart and pointed out things that they don't feel confident doing: "I need help with inferring, make sure you write that down".  Now that's what I call students taking advantage of an opportunity!

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1 Know the students and how they learn
Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning
Standard 5 Assess, provide feedback and report on student learning
Standard 6 Engage in professional learning

Learning about Learning Science

A learning space at ASMS

Another one of the opportunities I've taken this year has been a 5 day course about teaching science in the upper primary years. The course was co-run by the amazing Australian Science and Mathematics School (ASMS) and the Department of Education and Child Development. The ASMS is a senior high school based at Flinders University of South Australia  (my alma mater - woot woot) and which, clearly from its name, focusses on Science and Maths ed. The school is right on the FUSA campus and has amazing learning spaces. Everytime we went there I came away just buzzing with ideas for our learning spaces.

Anyway… I digress.  (Something new? Not.)    The course was open (through application) to teachers of year 6 and/or 7. Preference was given to applicants who applied in tandem or groups of teachers from one school. I applied with two of the other teachers from my unit and we were all successful. The course was taught by staff from the ASMS and focussed on the Australian Curriculum strand of Science as a Human Endeavour  and developing participants' skills in teaching from an inquiry position. Much of our time was spent learning through activity: plenty of 'take home' hands-on learning experiences.  You can imagine how the little groups of teachers from different schools all buzzed with ideas building on each activity. I've no idea how the trainers managed to get through everything on their agenda - we were a rather rowdy class!

The structure that the trainers were keen to impress upon us as best practice is one that I remember well from uni: the 5Es Teaching and Learning Model.  Have you ever used it?  It's a strong scaffold around which to build a learning progression.

• Engage: capture students' interest and activate prior knowledge.
• Explore: hands on activities that are student directed and force them to collaboratively wrestle with a new problem or set of ideas. 
• Explain: teacher provides conceptual clarification for ideas developed during the exploration. Important that this happens after the exploration, but it's ok to cycle back and forth between the two.
• Elaborate: collaborative application of new knowledge.
• Evaluate: review; evidence of learning.

It's important to remember too that each stage in this progression can, indeed should, have assessment built in - either for, of or as learning.  Hearing a broad range of assessment methods was thought provoking. And a little affirming. Our team all uses a really broad range of assessment strategies across for, of and as learning. My commitment to action from that session: get students to self and authentically peer assess much more often than I currently do.

The next part of the course involved developing an inquiry unit of teaching and learning to deliver to our classes. We then came back together to discuss our progress. Now, I'm going to let you in on a little secret that I'm sure my colleagues won't mind me sharing… We came up with the draft of our unit in about an hour.

A big part of our hour was spent formatting this pro forma. Shhhh!

And then finished putting together the unit in another hour AND then taught the majority of it in two days. (They were full days - dedicated to science.) It's not ideal but you know what? We learnt a lot about how we need NOT to plan in future and the four classes in our unit  learnt a LOT about electrical circuits. It might have seemed like it was a rush job to put together and teach but I think a more accurate description is that we pulled together as a team and worked incredibly well and incredibly collaboratively.

The five day course was an interesting process for me. Occasionally I felt a little frustrated because the 5E model was presented almost like a new concept and it's not. (Certainly not to anyone who's finished uni in the past 5 years.)  However, looking around the room I remembered that most of the people there finished before then although most of them had worked with the model before anyway. I guess it was my expectation that I'd learn more NEW models? That being said it was a good chance to review the model.

I enjoyed looking at science (as a subject) through the lens of the Science as a Human Endeavour strand. I don't think many of us do it very well yet. I certainly don't. It comes across in various aspects of my programme but rarely as part of my science programme. I need to work on that.  

Stay tuned for a wrap up of our unit of teaching and learning about electrical circuits.

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1 Know students and how they learn
Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning
Standard 5 Assess, provide feedback and report on student learning
Standard 6 Engage in professional learning

Standard 7 Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community

(Is there someway I can pull a standard 4 out of this and go for a full house?)

SMART Part I

One of the exciting opportunities I've taken this year has been to train as a SMART Practice Trainer through a programme auspices by the Department of Education and Child Development. Have you heard of SMART Practice before?

SMART stands for Strategies for Managing Abuse Related Trauma. It's not a programme, or an extra thing to do. It's a way of thinking and acting. It's a way of creating environments and relationships that support our students who have experienced abused related trauma.
PRACTICE is an acronym  of the characteristics of relationships and behaviours that fit within the strategy.

• Predictable (children who have experienced trauma thrive on predictable routines, and often see any change as a threat)
• Responsive (whilst behaviours can be challenging and overwhelming, the responses to that behaviour need to come from a place of understanding the trauma-based origins of it)
• Attuned (children who have experienced trauma often have little or no way of understanding themselves or their responses and need someone else who is attuned to them to help them learnt to better understand their own reactions) 
• Connecting (children who have experienced trauma need help reconnecting to their own feelings, responses and strengths)
• Translating (integrating experience through building stories of understanding often requires someone to help translate those experiences into manageable stories)
• Involving (children who have experienced trauma often struggle  building peer relationships)
• Calming (children who have experienced trauma often live in a high state of arousal and benefit from consistent and repetitive experiences of calm environments)
• Engaging (children who have experienced trauma have little experience of supportive adult-child relationships)

We spent the first day of the training looking at trauma and brain development, the second day at training techniques and the final day (quite some time later) reviewing our initial live training experiences and building further knowledge bases and training strategies.

The main purpose of this course was to build a phalanx of SMART Champions who can deliver a 'taster' (of a longer course) to other teachers. It's a sound premise: getting those of us in the classroom talking to other teachers about some strategies they can use the very next day AND whetting their appetite for more in depth training.  The reality for me, though, was so much more.

Side note: Before I go any further I want to explain trauma. The trauma we're focussing on here is complex relational trauma. This trauma happens within relationships (often significant relationships), is often ongoing and carries a stigma of shame and isolation. This is distinct from so-called simple trauma such as a car accident, bushfire, death of a parent.  It's a tough call to make because the research often shows that simple trauma will often bring to light or even cause complex relational  trauma BUT in and of itself simple trauma tends to be more 'socially acceptable' and there are typically open support mechanisms around to help.  I am NOT saying that simple trauma is SIMPLE. I think it's poor nomenclature but I'm working with what I've got so… I'm sorry.

Trauma has a HUGE impact on the human brain.
These brain scans are of three year old children.
Already the difference is huge.

I'll admit that I've not done the longer course. In fact I hadn't even done the online mini-course (available here if you'd like to do it) until after dinner the night before I started this course. I've done a little neuro-development through some of my undergrad subjects which meant not too much of the content of this course was new BUT presented in tandem with the impact of trauma as sustained during or at that developmental period was both confronting and exhilerating. It's something that makes perfect sense but I'd not explicitly considered before. For example: a child who experienced trauma in utero, while his brain stem was still developing, will always have a rapid heart beat, and trouble self-soothing.  Or the child who experienced trauma during the first couple of years of life while her
cerebellum was developing and who now at 12  still has trouble with motor function: she's clumsy and struggles to hold a pencil to write. Or any child who has ever experienced trauma and can't remember where they put their homework because the door slamming shut was a trigger for their amygdala to switch on, their cortex to go offline and all access to episodic memory is immediately gone.  Phew! The connections were vast and so easy to apply.

Better than the intellectual lightbulbs that were pinging all over the place, was the message that there are simple strategies that through attuned and responsive relationships can be put in place to help these children.  That there is HOPE.  And that I, and many of my colleagues, already use these many of these strategies without realising it. Or explicitly realising the deeper impact of our actions.

One of the other 'take home' messages for me was that time doesn't heal everything. As a society we hear it all the time… I, personally, have been told it many times in the last couple of months since Dad's passing: 'you'll get over it, time heals all'. Um no. Actually I won't. He's still dead. Time doesn't fix that. So why would we ever think that the passage of time will heal the injuries sustained by a child who has experienced trauma? What will help is processing and reintegrating the experiences. I know from this simple trauma I've recently experience that talking about it and making sense of it has helped me find peace. I still have moments - like hearing his voice on voicemail (how's that for a trigger!) - when it's hard to breathe but I'm explicitly learning strategies to deal with it. So we need to remember this for children whose trauma is complex and relational.

Which brings me to my last point - for now, anyway  - that we need to remember that the site of the injury MUST be the site of the healing. If the trauma happened in a relationship, it needs to be healed in a relationship. The relationships we build with all of our students help each and every one of them but especially those who have experienced trauma. As teachers we have a tremendous opportunity (and responsibility) to provide these children with a site to heal. We are NOT therapists, but we do get more time with these children than anyone else.

Stay tuned for SMART Part II about how we went preparing for and delivering our first training session and what impacts I've seen in my classroom and the school.

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1 Know students and how they learn
Standard 4 Create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments
Standard 6 Engage in professional learning
Standard 7 Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community

I'd like the menu please...

Some lessons just work well don't they?  A few weeks back I had one such lesson that I came home and raved about to my husband.  His response? "Don't tell me! Blog about it." Yes well, I didn't do it that night and I really wish I had.

Since then there've been a mountain of other great lessons but that particular one still stands strong in my memory because I truly felt like I was meeting the individual needs of every student in the room. Actually, I wasn't. They were all meeting their own needs.

At that point we had been working on our topic for a couple of weeks, and the usual broad range of abilities had emerged.  That's no end of fun  when you have a couple of students for whom the very concept of a fraction eludes them and others who can manipulate fractions inside out and upside down. So what's a girl to do?  I set up a learning menu of eight different learning activities that required no or very little teacher lead instruction - either because I'd already introduced it or the instructions were provided. [Side note: Until recently I'd never known that this particular method of teaching had a specific name…I thought it was just something that teachers 'did', you know?]

I started our lesson by referring back to the capacity matrix (if you're new to Langford'a capacity matrices, here's a quick explanation with examples) that we had developed against the ACARA Achievement Standards earlier in the unit. I outlined the available learning activities and matched them to the various capacities and capacity breakdowns and then handed it over to them. They each had a copy of the capacity matrix and hurried off to work on the areas they individually needed to work on.

No surface is off limits in our room!

As I moved around the room it was such a kick to hear students discussing and struggling with fractions. Yes, struggling! We celebrate the struggle: it means taking a risk and really learning something. We encourage each other to get uncomfortable and even have our own name for the feeling (the itchy tag feeling). The other exciting part for me was that the discussion was all about concepts rather than process. I'm a big believer that there's no point in teaching math processes if the conceptual understanding is missing. With fractions the processes are actually fairly mundane once the concept is grasped.

The lesson sped by so quickly that by unanimous vote we extended our time. I was able to spend time with each of the student either individually or in small groups: observing, prompting and coaching. What I noticed was that every single student was learning something different. They had each picked the area they needed to develop and that's where they were putting their efforts.  Even those working together had slightly different learning goals. LOVE IT!

Our end of lesson reflection was another learning opportunity. Different students had discovered different things whilst doing the same thing but upon reflection learnt from each other. How powerful is that?

This was designed by Krissy Venosdale.
CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
You can cheek out her other posters on flicker
Or buy it (like I have) here.

Of course, if you'd walked into our room during this time it would have looked like absolute bedlam! But you know what? I don't care… Everyone was learning and at the end of the day that's what is MEANT to happen in classrooms right?

I have so much more to say about fractions but won't overload this post with it all. In the meantime: I hope everyone's enjoying the change in season!

Oh, and if you'd like a copy of my capacity matrix drop me a line. We think it's pretty impressive.











This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1 Know students and how they learn
Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning

What's the time Mr. Wolf?

Our current unit of learning in maths requires my young people to work with time. Our pre-assessment showed that many of them have somehow missed a lot of the skills involved in reading analogue clocks so I've paused our official unit to redress this. 

I started with a review of my understanding of the sequential development of reading time. Recognising that the reading of digital time is significantly easier, I started with a recap on the parts of an analogue clock face and their roles. I went right back to basics and we made interactive clock faces inspired by this pin. 

My research highlighted that at this age confusion about the hour and minute hands is often still prevalent, and this has been the case for many of my young people. Another point of confusion in our class is about hand movement.  We've worked hard to remove this confusion and today we had quite a few a-ha moments. You know the ones:

"So it takes an hour for the big hand to go all the way around, but the little hand only moves  between two numbers in one hour?"

Tic Tocs! 

"There are five minutes between two numbers but also an hour!"

Yes indeed!

Next I pulled out the big guns: a packet of Tic Tocs!  (For readers outside of Australia: Tic Tocs are a round iced vanilla biscuit (cookie), with clock faces embossed on the underside, made by Arnotts.)

Our white boards.

I pulled out the first couple and read the time. Using the clocks that we made the other day the class had to show me the time on their clocks. Moving on pretty quickly I started drawing the time (on an analogue clock) on my white board and asking the class to write the digital time on their show-me boards. Still moving pretty quickly I started giving a ranged of elapsed times - forward and back. Is back also called elapsed? Prolapsed? Hmmm.
The clocks were essentially cast aside by some children as understanding developed. Other children continued to use their clocks to self-check.   The high flyers worked in 24hour time, challenging themselves to make word problems to match my elapsed times.  (Yes, I did scribble them down for future use!)

You may be able to see here that each number on the clock
has a flap. Underneath has :05 or :35 etc.

Our very last step in today's lesson was by far the best hardest ... Eating the Tic Tocs! Tomorrow we'll use this new understanding with our 'official' unit on timetables.

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1 Know students and how they learn
Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning
Standard 5 Assess, provide feedback and report on student learning

Describe it to me?

We've been delving in descriptive writing over the last little while. We've looked at poems - even written a couple; but have focussed on creating rich descriptive writing of our own.  We've described all manner of things, but the most challenging has been colour.  Yep, describing colour.  Does that qualify me for that top rank of sadistic teachers who set horribly difficult learning tasks?  Well, maybe not but it sure does push me pretty close to the top. Especially when you consider that we've dipped into this particular pot of fun TWICE! Both times with paint chips - such a variety of colours!

As a side note: how awesome are paint chips? I mean, seriously! What's not to love? *sigh*

The first set of paint chips were those 3 shade of one colour kind. My young people had to write similes  involving the colour of their paint chip. They were peer reviewed by at least two other people using 'two stars and a wish' and then conferred with me.  The results were impressive. Some examples:

Not the world's best photo but gives the general gist!

This pink is as warm as a hug from my grandma. 

Yellow is as bright as a sunshiny morning. 

Grey rolls like grey ocean waves under storm clouds.

Not bad hey? These ones are pinned up on our classroom door. They look great!

Our second foray into describing colour was a little harder. The paint chips were larger but all one solid colour and had to be described using a variety of techniques.  The same peer review and conferring process was used,  and we left a couple of days between writing and reviewing. Lots of changes were made, which highlighted for the class the place of time in the writing process.   The results here ranged from 'um, oooohkay' to 'woooooooow!'

My favourite descriptive writing activities are still underway. I'm hoping to share some of those with you once they're done, but I'll leave you with idea that the first couple of days of spring arrived and we all went outside into the yard. The kidlets spread out around the school, soaked in some vitamin D and described (in detail) one thing they saw. We did this twice, and I gave detailed feedback. One piece is being chosen by each child and reworked ready for publication on their student blogs.



This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...

Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it

Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning

Standard 5 Assess, provide feedback and report on student learning

Gaming

So... I'm sitting in a @DanHaesler workshop working with my colleagues from #hackhameastps to accrue points in a gamified mission to explore the concepts we've been discussing today. (The topic focussing on engaging our students TODAY because their future is only as far away as tomorrow.)  The game has been presented as a series of levelled missions and we've been invited to choose the level that best matches with our learning point. Each task allowed us to accrue a number of points for achieving particular goals in using web 2.0 tools that encourage connection between and within learning communities.
Anyway...
Are we engaged? Yes.
Will we win? Hopefully.
Is our desire to win based on a deep desire to learn. Possibly not.
I'm not saying we don't want to learn but we definitely want to win! Win! So... By way of a super quick reflection on gamification: I'm keen to look deeper but I'm a bit wary of the motivation behind it.

UPDATE: We won in such a big way that just MY score was higher than the next team. We may possibly have taken the scoring just a wee bit more seriously than anyone else… :)

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers…
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning

Standard 6 Engage in professional learning.

Standard 7 Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community.

Tweet tweet!

Follow me at @markeetarp
Or my class at @the67vrps

Do you tweet? I, personally, tweet and so does my class . I can't say I'm the world's most proficient user of twitter, and my class are still REALLY new to it BUT...

And this is a really big BUT...

It's fantastic! Get on it!!!

Just a sampling of reasons. (I'm sure there are a myriad that I'm not mentioning.)

• I've connected with a whole range of amazing educators I wouldn't otherwise 'know' or be able to learn from/with.  I am building my own PLN.
• Hashtags rock. No. Seriously. I could go on for quite some time about them but here are two great examples: 


• #hackhameastps: This is my school's hashtag. Primarily used by staff (and classes) this hashtag serves as a filter for things that we want each other to see. It might be our literacy coach @MelissaThiele1 passing on a great resource, or one of the other 6/7 classes (@MsLipczyksclass) sharing their latest media studies learning.
• #mathphotoaday: Every day for the month of June, my class will be tweeting a photo of a particular Maths concept.  We've used a google doc to arrange who will do what, and when. So far, admittedly it's only June 4th, it's been great. Our very first photo (about division) was 'favourited' very quickly by a Grade 3/4 class in Canberra. As you can see from the photo above, the very next day the same class tweeted back with the fact family for this particular division fact.  Amazing huh?

• There are literally hundreds of twitterchats each week. Free, fun, fast, friendly professional development on a topic of my choice? Um, yes please. I've been tuning to one in particular: #teacherwellbeingchat (Sunday at 8:30pm Adelaide time which is GMT +13.5) A teacher here in Adelaide facilitates a chat each week about a range of topics that all relate to teacher wellbeing. It's a great chance to check inand start the work week all zen. :) It meanders from sensible to silly and everywhere between. There are an absolute plethora of chats to try... I have a long list.  This blogpost talks about the importance of twitterchats. 
• Global connections - you know the kind that we all talk about being so important for the kids in this day and age? -  are very easy to make over Twitter. My class has now interacted with a handful of classes around the world; some close to home and others across the globe.  The content has been somewhat superficial to start with, but it's a start and the kids are excited.  Next we're planning to use twitter to get involved in a mystery skype session (ten minutes of asking another class questions to work out where they are located).

Lakewood is in Canada.
Woodend is just down the road.
(Mr Lamshed used to teach at our school.)

My last reason for loving twitter is that the last two days I've been able to follow the general gist of  Edutech 2014 without being there. Gotta love a hashtag that makes it possible to follow the back channel of a conference! 

Amusing sidenote: a few weeks ago I had a rather heated discussion with my principal (@bobthiele13) because he's uber keen for our whole staff to get on Twitter and use #hackhameastps as a way of supporting ongoing professional development etc. while I was trying to make the point that not everyone likes or feels safe in the very open environment of Twitter so we can't force them to do it. Well. Haven't I shot myself in the foot of that particular argument? Since that discussion I've jumped up and down with excitement over things my class is doing on Twitter (yes, physically jumped) IN FRONT OF HIM. And now I've blogged about my Twitter-love. Oh dear. There goes my credibility with that point. Maybe he won't read this... 

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1 Know students and how they learn.
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning.
Standard 4 Create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments.
Standard 6 Engage in professional learning.
Standard 7 Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community.

Student Voice

My school is part of a pilot project aligned with the South Australian Teaching for Effective Learning  (TfEL) Framework. We're looking at ways we can (do and should) use student voice and engagement to design learning programmes, and ultimately education systems, that intellectually stretch students and create powerful expert learners.

One part of the project involves seeking direct feedback from the kids about their learning. How do they feel about the learning activities they're doing? How do they learn best? What would they like to change about the way we 'do' learning in our class? Doesn't sound overly challenging or out of the norm except that we have to do it explicitly everyday and keep a record of it.  Other than an end of week written reflection (that is in students' diaries and goes home to show parents) most of these conversations are usually quite spontaneous and informal in my classroom. Whilst I act on what I learn from the conversations I don't keep particular records of them. Well, I didn't. I do now of course!

One way that I've found to keep a good record of the kids' feedback is through Socrative.  Socrative is a 'student response system' that is available on whatever device you want to use, either through the website or apps. I set a 'quiz', open it to the kids, they submit their responses, and Socrative emails me a report of their responses. I set questions like "I am still wondering about..." and "I learnt best when I..." and "The lesson would have been better if...". I have also started to include a silly multiple choice question that relates to something we're doing the next day. The kids LOVE it.  It's quick, simple and instant.  I put the teacher screen up on the board while they're doing it; it shows how many kids have logged into the 'quiz' and how many have submitted. It can also show the names of kids and a live coverage of how many questions they've finished.  

The report is a simple table that lists all the answers. (If you've set multiple choice questions (and listed a correct answer) the table marks those questions for you.) In terms of the way I'm using it: I have a daily record of this feedback. I'm able to scan all the answers to a question to spot trends and anomalies. I can quickly see what needs to happen more or less. Patterns emerge easily.

This isn't the only way I collect feedback and data but wow! It's certainly one way I'm particularly enjoying.

How do you collect this sort of feedback? How do you respond?

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1 Know students and how they learn.
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning.
Standard 4 Create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments.
Standard 6 Engage in professional learning.
Standard 7 Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community.

Pumpkin Pie Adventure

We don't celebrate Thanksgiving here in Australia. It's not our celebration. We do however tend to jump on any ol' bandwagon that's passing and appears to have tasty food.As it turns out... Pumpkin pie is one tasty dish. One of my  spec. ed. students asked me about pumpkin pie sometime last week and being a bit busy at the time (and not really knowing the answer to his question anyway) I suggested he do some research. Long story short: the research turned into a proposal that resulted in me agreeing to cooking pumpkin pie with the class today.

Which I promptly forgot. (I teach this class Wednesday - Friday and so I didn't have the benefit of constant reminders earlier in the week.) Thank goodness that we're nearing Christmas and our Christian Pastoral Support Worker was baking spice cookies with another class yesterday which jolted me into remembering. Phew! 

The research my student did included a (very simple to follow) recipe which I modified a little to suit the fact that there just wasn't going to be enough time to make pastry as well as the filling and bake big pies. I originally thought to buy a couple of big unfilled pie shells but decided, in the end, to go with mini ones. What. A. Good. Move. For a whole bunch of reasons;  not the least of which was a MUCH reduced cooking time and no need to cut anything.

So I cooked up the pumpkin last night and gathered my spices. In this house we're big 'from scratch' food/cooking fans and so we have a nice collection of spices, both whole and ground. I packed everything I could possibly need to make a pumpkin pie. Except a mixing bowl. Or mixing spoon. Ooops. Lucky our canteen manager is an angel and was willing to lend them to me.

I started our session by talking about all the various things we needed. We handed around the whole and ground spices to compare the smell, look and feel. It was delightful to hear the associations many of the smells held for the children. We also talked a little about the various uses for the spices. The idea of 'shoving' a whole clove into an infected tooth made them all a little more friendlier toward their dentists I think!

Everyone had a turn of measuring, mixing, pouring etc. We're a small class (12 on the roll but usually only 8 or 9 students) which meant everyone was involved all the way through. Right up until the bell for recess went when I was left holding the baby filling the shells. Ha! 

The pies came back to our classroom to cool. Oh. My. Goodness. Not a clever idea. They smelt amazing. The temptation to 'check on them' was too great for a few of us so it was with sweet relief that lunchtime arrived and I invited the children to taste their handiwork.

Resounding success. Not only did they all love eating the pies, but they were so proud that they wanted to share the leftovers with the principal and their buddy class teachers. It was such a delight to see them scurry off to spread the love. 

As you would expect from me, I did manage to squeeze some literacy into the activity also. We co-constructed a procedural text on 'how to make pumpkin pie'. It made me realise how I long to teach a class  fulltime (and not at the end of the year) so that I can build whole units of work that incorporate activities like this. Ooooh... Integrating cooking, life skills and art with a procedural text unit in a spec. ed. class! Oooh! Ooops. Sorry. I digress. Only a couple of the children managed to get much down on paper but it was a valuable exercise in recall, recounting our process, and talking about the features of a procedural text. Tomorrow they'll write recounts of the activity, right through to the eating! I love helping each child at their point in ability and development to achieve writing success. Whether it's a scaffolded format with sentence starters, or a proforma that requires minimal writing (there's at least one child for whom the physical act of writing is a challenge at the moment) or even allowing them to speak their text... I LOVE seeing the sense of accomplishment on their faces.  Again, I digress. 

So there you have my pumpkin pie adventure. I realised last night, while at the store buying pumpkin, that Thanksgiving is this week in the US so it's all rather fortuitously timed. I have a load of the filling left and think I might make a big one for the family tomorrow. Happy Thanksgiving to all my US friends. (And a belated greeting to my Canadian friends for a few weeks ago.)

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1.5 Differentiate teaching to meet the specific learning needs of students across the full range of abilities.

Standard 1.6 Strategies to support full participation of students with disability

Standard 2.5 Literacy and numeracy strategies
Standard 3.2 Plan, structure and sequence learning programmes
Standard 3.3 Use teaching strategies 

Standard 4.1 Support student participation
Standard 4.4 Maintain student safety 

Classroom visitors

This was taken just a few minutes
after we realised that they'd hatched.

The clutch of eggs on which our duck was sitting recently hatched and our family of 8 people, 2 cats, 1 dog, 1 frog, 2 guinea pigs, 4 chickens, 2 ducks and more fish than, frankly, I care to count just became all of that and seven six ducklings. (One of the live hatchlings perished after a couple of days. Let's not talk about it. It was a bit distressing.) Imagine the excitement of our six children... (although to be completely honest, I think my husband was the most exuberant) and then imagine the excitement of the 31 children in my class. Yep, we took seven 2 day old ducklings into my classroom.

Shortly before they arrived I polled the students on their predictions for the duckling (and mother duck) weights. Well, that was just about the most eye opening formative assessment I've ever done. (All tied in rather fortitiously with the measurement unit I was starting that day!) I didn't expect them to be overly accurate but I did kinda think they'd be close-ish. These predictions weren't even on the same planet let alone the general vicinity. These predictions (let's be honest and call them what they really were) guesses ranged between 600 grams and 5 kilograms. Reality? The ducklings ranged between 39g and 42g, while the mother weighed 1.2kg. Ha!

After very careful instructions about how to hold the ducklings, every child had the opportunity to do so. It was just delightful to see the tough boys flinch at the wiggling feet before melting. The girls are, on the whole, a rather pragmatic bunch and took it all in their stride. A few children needed my support to hold the ducklings without crushing them because of motor control issues, so I'm super grateful that my husband stayed to help out.

One of our bunch, new to the cohort, tends towards to the more excitable end of the spectrum and his reaction to the ducklings will stay with me for a long time. He's a tough little man who confronts the world face (and often fists) first, with a strength that he neither recognises nor believes. Seeing the ducklings, his eyes light up like fireworks, and his whole body softened. He proceeded to bounce around the room in excitement but responded exceptionally well to the reminder that all babies are very delicate and the ducklings needed him to keep 'safe hands and safe feet'. (I don't think I've ever seen him sit down so quickly.) Immediately on being handed a duckling he kissed the beak and cradled it to his chest like it was the most precious little creature in the world. I'll admit that even now, just writing about it, I get a wee bit misty. (I'm prone to getting dust in my eyes at the oddest of times... Seems to happen a lot during sad movies, and long distance telecom TV commercials. Odd hey?)

Anyhow... Back  to the ducks. They tied in wonderfully with the life cycles unit my co-teacher has going; were a great start to my measurement unit and provided a fantastic opportunity for the kids to all have a shared experience about which to write a procedural text of their own as a formative pre-assessment. (They wrote instructions on 'how to hold a duckling'.) Pretty happy with that hat trick of tie-ins. I love finding opportunities like this to bring disparate parts of our curriculum together, even if with only a tenuous link like my ducklings hatching!

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 2.5 Literacy and numeracy strategies
Standard 3.2 Plan, structure and sequence learning programmes
Standard 3.4 Select and use resources  
Standard 4.1 Support student participation
Standard 4.3 Manage challenging behaviour

Taking Shape

A few days ago I blogged about composite classes (here). I really enjoy the challenges associated with composite classes but I don't always get it right. *Sigh* My year 3/4 class has recently finished off a short unit of work on shape.   To be more accurate: we did a short unit of work about 3D shapes (including making 3D models) and composite shapes. To be even more accurate: we did a short unit on 3D shapes. What should it have been about? Well, if we're going by the ACARA maths document you'll need to go back a couple of sentences and then add in something about comparing the area of regular and irregular shapes by informal means. (To be completely honest though, I never had any plan to include area in this unit of work so it's not like I missed it out... I just didn't plan to teach it, when I really should have.)

Having said all of that, we had fun and nearly everyone met nearly all (if not all) of the intended learning outcomes. Phew!

I let them pull the shape
from the bag when they
were ready to draw it.

The feely bags were student
'run' after the initial modelling,
which allowed me to float
and observe everyone.

I introduced the unit with feely bags. I modelled reaching in, finding a solid polyhedron and then describing it using the mathematical language I  was  looking to see the children use by the end of the unit. I also asked the children to record their shape(s) in their maths workbooks using a drawing and labels. It was a great pre-assessment task as it gave me the chance to see (and hear), very quickly, where everyone sat on the learning spectrum.

We continued to explore the properties and features of 3D shape both as mathematical concepts but also as building blocks in our environment. It helped everyone to see that EVERYTHING is 'made up of shapes', both 2D and 3D. When we looked more carefully we were able to identify that 3D shapes can be described, in part, by the 2D shapes that make them. This lead to more conversation about composite shapes.

The activity you can see in this photo was offered with a range of entry points.  Ultimately, at every level, the students were asked to engage with the identification and nomenclature of 3D features and their possible nets. Solid polyhedron were available to help visualise how the nets might fold up to create the shapes. When I took this photo the student was manipulating the cube whilst talking about which part of the cube the net would next cover. The learning process was actually VISIBLE!

I never even knew about the Lego programme!
It's AWESOME

In the lead up to our assessment task I offered the students the opportunity to show me they could build/draw a 3D model on the computer. I left the task as open as that - they could use whatever programme, app or web2.0 tool they liked and create whatever model they wanted so long as they were able to explain their understanding to me either on the screen or verbally. (The Australian Curriculum for Maths is pretty specific about giving children the opportunity to learn and demonstrate their learning with and without technology, and as I've already shared with you here and here I am seeking to integrate technology into my maths programme more.)

I provided a puzzle page with 36 boxes; in each box was either a 3D shape, a net, or a number (most of which were the corresponding number of faces, edges or vertices with a few red herrings thrown in to sort the wheat from the chaff so to speak). The children needed to match the shape with its corresponding net and work out what the numbers represented and present this information visually. They found it a lot more challenging than I expected but then again, they also enjoyed it a lot more than I expected. I asked early finishers to create a 'Who am I?' riddle for a 3D shape of their choice. Some of these were a hoot to read and showed great awareness of 3D shapes in the environment.

I love the creativity
in their presentations!

Some of the riddles.
Simple lift-the flap presentation.

The end assessment task was to use any material they could find in the classroom to create and label a model of an identifiable 3D shape. I'm not in love with this task, and there's plenty of room for improvement but it served its purpose this time. Here are a few of the results at various stages of completion.

Simple and to the point...

I love this!

This one is NEVER going to fall apart.

So,  you can see that the unit was pretty skewed towards 3D shapes and didn't really do composite shapes very well at all. I'm pretty disappointed that I didn't manage that too well, but know that I'll do better next time. More focus on composite shapes was required... I wonder whether this needed to be addressed in parallel?

Tell me about your well intentioned but not completely successful plans... (Please tell me I'm not alone!)

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1.5 Differentiate teaching to meet the specific learning needs of students across the full range of abilities
Standard 2.1 Content and teaching strategies of the teaching area 
Standard 2.2 Content selection and organisation
Standard 2.3 Curriculum, assessment and reporting
Standard 2.5 Literacy and numeracy strategies
Standard 2.6 Information and communication technologies (ICT)
Standard 3.2 Plan, structure and sequence learning programmes
Standard 3.3 Use teaching strategies  
Standard 3.6 Evaluate and improve teaching programmes
Standard 5.1 Assess student learning
(You'll note that I've said that this relates to these standards, which isn't to say that in this instance I was outstandingly successful in each of these standards... Clearly!)