Assessment

I was privileged to attend the National Assessment Conference 2021 and the Gifted NEX Online Symposium to start the holidays. Below are my key takeaways and provocations for my practice moving forward. 

I shared this with staff during term three at a leadership meeting.

If I have an apprehension in New Zealand at the moment, it's not because we're not smart enough. It's because we're not courageous enough. - Pat Sneeden 2017

This quote is an excellent thought to hold onto as I look into the assessment of ākonga. Changing our students, whanau, and community thinking on assessment will require courage.

Over and over again, we hear that the knowledge of the learner is most critical. Do we know our students at a deep level? How do they learn, what stops them from learning, what frustrates them? Who do they think are the champions that support them and want to help them?

Any assessment needs to build the mana and connectedness of students and be a partnership between the student and teachers.

Webber and Macfarlane 2018 unpack what mana is for gifted Maori students.

• Mana Tangatarua: being confident and open to appreciating differences. 
• Mana Tū: being persistent and determined
• Mana Motuhake: having a positive self-concept concerning learning and success.
• Mana Ūkaipo: understanding they belong and have connections to places and spaces.
• Mana Whānau: are connected to whānau and aware of collective agency.

Can these also be utilised with all students to support their learning? How does assessment look if we are considering mana enhancement?

Suppose we are talking about the learner's knowledge. Could a learner profile support both the learner and their supports to deepen the understanding of the individual? 

• Could this learner profile help them realise they have things to teach others and have something they can learn from them?
• Understand they are connected, and their culture is valued.
• Support who they are and from where they come.
• Identify positive role models that they can aspire to mirror.
• Show that many people from their cultural group have achieved success.
• Identify what they are good at and help them know what areas they need to develop.
• Support them to understand their family, peers, teachers, and members of the wider school community care about them.
• Support them to know what their gifts, academic strengths and interests are.

We must always keep asking the questions of why are we testing? What is the purpose? Do our assessments ensure the realisation of the Learning Support Action Plan vision?

A vision for an inclusive education system where every child feels a sense of belonging, is present, makes progress, where their wellbeing is safeguarded and promoted, where learning is a lifelong journey, and where children and young people with learning support needs get the right support at the right time.

This Learning Support Action Plan vision caters for the students on the edges however if we plan and prepare to those edges we get benefits for all students.

Wellbeing Won't Cut It Alone!

I thought by reflecting on my journey during this opportunity; I might clarify my thinking and support others. For myself, I believe that it is not wellbeing alone that made this challenge so manageable. It has been the combination of wellbeing, success and engagement, which has enabled me to come through this period refreshed and excited.

In my head, this has never been a crisis, I have seen it as a challenge or opportunity. I have been fortunate like most educators, I have continued to receive my full income. I am in no doubt if my wife or myself lost our incomes, then this would have become a possible crisis.

Do not get me wrong as I have had many moments of self-doubt, stress and anxiety; however, I have managed to work through these. I have come out the other side fresh and reinvigorated in my purpose and role supporting schools.

How have I done this? Let me take you through my reflections focussing on my wellbeing, success and engagement. At the time, I was not aware I was doing things that supported all three aspects.

I remember a colleague once telling a school staff meeting to ensure student success we needed to look at three parts of an equilateral triangle. These parts were student wellbeing, student engagement and student achievement. Missing one would impact on the others as they were all interconnected.

 Since the earthquakes in Christchurch, there has been a real push for wellbeing. As a result, I think we have forgotten about the importance of success and engagement for improving wellbeing.

The image above is my attempt to understand what these three things looked like for me. 

When I started, I was not sure how to define each, so I went to good ole Google. Here are what I have used to describe Wellbeing, Engagement and Success.

Wellbeing - I focussed on the Five Ways to Wellbeing from the Mental Health Foundation NZ.

Success - I used ERO's Valued Student Outcomes and Wellbeing for Success.

Engagement - I used a combination of resources from TKI Student Engagement Teaching as Inquiry, Universal Design for Learning from Inclusive Education and Ka Hikitia Accelerating Success. 

I am going to relate them to my own experiences and why I am feeling so positive and refreshed.

Wellbeing

• Take Notice - One of the simple things that give me joy is having a spa with the family which continued over lockdown.
• Keep Learning - I signed up to two challenges during the lockdown, one around nutrition and the other the 25 days push up challenge. I learnt many new things which I implemented into my daily routine and enjoyed. I did so much professional knowledge building as I am sure many educators did as I worked through what learning from home required to be successful.
• Be Active - I maintained my regular exercise program and even added extra with regular walks with my wife.
• Give - with a colleague; I explored new ways to present content to teachers, learners and whānau online, created resources and shared these with our communities. I connected with friends online, played games with my bubble, supported my wife and children in working and learning from home. However, my wife did most of the learning support for our children while I had online meetings.
• Connect - I connected teachers and leaders I supported either face to face online or through blogging, email and online support and found this very rewarding and enjoyable. I met daily with our national team for a quick update and participated in Friday online drinks. We connected with other family members outside our bubble. We gave our children access to messenger apps that allowed them to communicate with their friends and cousins.

Success

• I participated and contributed confidently in a range of contexts to support teachers, leaders, students, whānau, family, friends and new acquaintances. For example, we created a site to support educators teaching from home and I joined a Whatsapp group to support each other in a nutrition challenge. I was involved in numerous video conferences, messages, emails, and phone calls to connect with others personally and professionally.
• I was a successful lifelong learner completing a nutrition challenge which I gained much new knowledge to support my training and future sporting events. I blogged as I worked through my thinking about the new learnings in lockdown. My children and I learnt lots about how we all work as we came up with strategies to support our learning from home. Once again, I blogged about this to support others who may have had similar issues.
• I have good relationship skills, are self-confident and can bounce back from setbacks. I can lead while being able to self manage and make responsible decisions to ensure my practices are sustainable. One of the things I did that was successful during this time was creating a routine early on and sharing this with all the educators I supported.
• I have self-belief due to the knowledge I am involved with numerous individuals and organisations that know what they are doing. I also know how to navigate the online world when I do not know something to access content, knowledge and skills to support myself. I think this self-belief supports me to be confident in my identity, language and culture as a citizen of New Zealand. This confidence extends to fixing a motor on a washing machine, supporting my son through the meltdown of online learning, or changing the way I look at traditional knowledge of food and education.

Engagement

• Cognitive - I learnt late in my life that I learn best by either doing, watching or talking with others to develop my knowledge and skills.  However, I am also able to draw on other modes of accessing information like text and audio if the situation warrants it. I am lucky the leaders I work with understand learning and therefore provide access to materials in numerous ways. I have been trying to utilise the principles of Universal Design for Learning in my work when supporting others. We had supported our children by looking at the content provided for their learning. When it was not available through the class learning, we found the information in different formats online. 
• Cultural  - this has been an exciting experience seeing how families and organisations, including my own, have created environments online to promote a sense of belonging. The addition of grid view in a Google Meet helped develop a sense of belonging along with the use of secondary smaller online bubbles for more intimate group work. When learning online, there is a real need to show the organisation's culture and values, what makes your audience think "that is my classroom". Acknowledging culture is an area I am developing and often is left till last as I think about how learners will access the content. However, reflecting on this as I write this, what use is equitable access if the learner can not see their culture or values in the content and choose not to engage?
• Behavioural - My children certainly had enjoyed the choice they were given and the freedom of choosing when and how they completed their learning. We did have meltdowns when there were no scaffolds as to how to complete the work or support for the students' workflow. I have been allowed the space to work in a high trust model. I had choice and opportunities for how I interact with material and how I want to show that material in my context. I was able to think about what I could manage in my context and then plan my workload accordingly. I had support and guidance from leadership about how to proceed in our daily meetings. The big enabler was I realised with support from colleagues and reading others experiences what was manageable and sustainable. I think some educators who felt their wellbeing had been impacted by Learning at Home did not modify their behaviours. They proceeded to interact with learners the same way they did face to face.
• Emotional - going into this experience, my colleagues have known me and built relationships with me for seven years. They understand how I work and what support I might need. I think with the work I have done with educators in our online meets has developed stronger relationships. For some, working at home offered an environment with fewer distractions so they could focus on what mattered and changed as needed. It was so awesome seeing my son connect with one of his teachers and the commonalities he found he had with the teacher. Caution needs to be applied, especially in a secondary context as it would be impossible to connect with all your students individually online. I would imagine where educators tried to do this; they may well be exhausted now as we head back to schools.

My personal opinion is that if we solely focus on wellbeing at the expense of the other two, we will end up in a worse position. 

As leaders,

• Can we empower individuals and groups to manage their own lives by focussing on the five ways to wellbeing?
• Could we support them to enable themselves to be successful in life?
• Might we encourage them to engage by considering how we interact with them through material and expectations of evidence? 

Maybe by focussing on all three aspects, we may help to create a  state of being for all that is comfortable, healthy, and happy for the majority of the time.

Equity: is it the Device or Teacher?

There has been an increasing focus on equitable access to education throughout the Covid19 event as it has highlighted the issues with access to education. The event has been challenging my thinking, along with being challenged by my colleague Sharon Spragg to deliver our Cybersmart curriculum differently.

Cybersmart Lesson Tahi - Exploring Blogs

I have a strong drive for equitable access and visibility for education hence why I continue to be involved in education.

Sharon and I are inspired by a number of our colleagues' work, particularly Cam Cameron from Kootuitui ki Papakura Cluster planning our Term 2 Cybersmart Lessons.

My colleague Linda Ojala also gave me some feedback on the site's layout and UDL principles.

If I genuinely believe in equity, then getting the devices into students hands is only the first step. We then need to ensure the content itself is accessible and equitable.

We have attempted to do this following Universal Design for Learning Principles and our own experiences in education. We have tried to take a lesson and differentiate the content into three parts.

The teacher, whether online or face to face, would then modify in response to individual students' needs. They would also emphasise critical thinking and strategic learning. I think we still have a way to go to create lessons that reflect a high competence of UDL however we need to start somewhere and this blog post is the beginning of my reflections into our planning efforts.

So what have we done?
As I stated in the previous paragraph, each lesson is in three parts, beginner, stepping up and confident and is aimed from Year 3 - 10. We are expecting in the classes we work with we will have students ranging from beginners to confident and want to support and stretch all the students. The lessons can be guided by a teacher or completed independently with some teacher or peer support.

Each lesson layout is the same and also colour coded, grey for beginner, blue for stepping up and white for confidence, with a button at the top of each page to take the student to the correct place. We will reflect on our layout once we have taught in some classes to get feedback on the amount of information on each page.

Any text on the web page or in the Google Slides has narration reading the text. We have done this as we find that the text to speech tools can be a bit hit and miss for the students, and we want to remove as many barriers as possible.

Each lesson has a screencast video on the left explaining the learning task and on the right side is the Google Slides of the learning resource. As you can see in the slideshow, there is a Learn Create Share overview, videos teaching, explaining or modelling the tasks as well as instructions to work through the learning.

Each lesson also has a "Pathway for Learning" to support students who like a pathway or list to support their learning. These may be added to the slides in the future; however, at the moment, they are separate as some students may like them printed out so they can tick off each task as they do it. I know personally, my son loves the format on the left, whereas my daughter prefers the one on the right. Maybe another future step is colour coding the list to Learn Create Share?

In my head, this sort of access to learning for the student should

• Free me up as a teacher to rove and support students with discussions and critical thinking.
• Allow time for students to choose and opt into workshops and conferencing to support their learning.
• Empower students to drive their learning and choose when they wish to complete the work.
• Spend longer on a lesson if it interests them and go deeper by moving onto the next stage for example beginner to stepping up
• Reduce time the students have to wait for the teacher to explain the learning

The planning of this content has been time-consuming and has added to our workload; however, we are getting faster as we develop our processes for recording sound etc.
How would I make this work if I was in a classroom?

• Just like learning at home, I would reduce the content I wanted to get through. LESS IS MORE!
• Collaborate with others to plan content and share the workload.
• Utilise Multi Text databases, and other teachers work off their sites.
• Use everyday authentic texts that are engaging and interest students, such as journals and books both online and offline. 
• Plan for one to two-week lessons allowing more time for discussion about the texts and learning. Separate discussion from collaboration. What is the quality of the conversation that these students are having?
• Go wider and deeper into texts about an area instead of more texts on lots of topics. Focus on the thinking about thinking, e.g. "Do I have evidence, have I justified myself, is this an opinion or a fact etc."
• Allow more time for the Learn. Encourage students having a role in the workshops, for example, questioner, summariser etc. Do students understand what is expected of them, and they have permission to speak and think?
• Allow more time to Create. All these lessons work on the assumption the teacher will encourage and empower students who are capable to utilise the best tool to present their learning depending on the task.
• Allow more time to share. Collaborating and making choices in the sharing. Encourage students to think "what is the purpose of sharing this artifact?". "Why did you choose to share in that particular way?  

If we believe in equity, then this is the next step in supporting students to ensure all our students discover success in their learning. It should work in all subject areas and right across the curriculum.

I think It is well worth the effort! Do you?

Please comment on any ideas or suggestions you have to make our teaching more accessible to our learners.

Creating personal knowledge from existing knowledge - Understanding the How

Agency, Collaboration, Connectedness and Ubiquity are all catch words in the New Zealand education sector.

But do we truly understand these terms as educators. Along with two of my colleagues we attempted to gain a greater understanding of Agency as we were about to present to a cluster of schools at a teacher only day.

Having mentioned these terms in workshops in the past we were quite surprised to discover that between the 3 of us our understanding of Agency was not very consistent or well formed in our heads.

So we looked to existing knowledge to help us clarify our understanding. After turning to Art Costa, Derek Wenmoth and numerous other papers and articles we started to form a greater understanding of agency especially when we had to think about teaching others about it. By collaborating together on the presentation and bouncing our ideas and thoughts about agency, a greater clarification occurred for ourselves. The ability to connect with others thinking at anytime ensured our learning could occur when we were ready, as we all needed to first process some aspects of the new knowledge before we could move on.

Keywords from Art Costa's Video

The personal knowledge of agency that I have gained through this collaborative approach of synthesising existing knowledge has enabled me to understand agency and also see a much bigger picture when it comes to Modern Learning Practise.

What we need to focus on as educators in this new and exiting time is not the Why or What aspects of technology in the classroom, as these are focussed on continuously and often lead to the digital tools being used as consumptive or as substitutes for traditional tools.

Instead we need to focus and unpack the How. Looking at Agency, Ubiquity, Collaboration and Connectedness. By focussing on the "How" we can use the digital tools to ensure personalised learning, creativity and sharing are embedded in our practise. 

So the next time you open a Google Doc for your learners, start to think "this is not a word processing tool", instead see Google Docs as an opportunity to increase collaboration, give learners agency, connect them outside the classroom and allow them to learn anywhere and anytime.