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.

How to Create Half an Ironman!

Create is often seen as a product that you make, for example, art and craftwork, music, sculpture, photography, bridge building, boat making, weaving, screen printing to name but a few.

However, create can also be a do. I want to unpack this in terms of my training for the Challenge Wanaka Half Iron Man.

Learn
I already knew a fair bit about running and cycling, as I have done many half marathons and 100-kilometre road cycle races, a couple of marathons, some short duathlons, one short triathlon and one 500 metre ocean swim. However, my knowledge of endurance multisport events was limited.
So I was able to access my knowledge. However, there came the point where I needed to obtain intelligence from others through a variety of sources, modes and text types.

So to access my new knowledge I have a coach, I’m using Facebook to access swimming tutorials, and I am connected through communities like Strava, Garmin and my Coached coaching app to keep my motivation up. I also belong to the Ellesmere Road Runners and Christchurch Marathon Clinic running club to stay motivated, get more knowledge, hill work and variety in my training. I also belong to the Leeston Road Cycling Club for the same reasons.

All the components I have mentioned above enable me to access and engage with a variety and multitude of knowledge through face to face discussions, text, video, audio, and self-reflection. They allow me to access recognised effective practice from expert practitioners ensuring my training was best practise and minimised the risk of an injury.

Coaching became very important providing me with access to knowledge in the Learn phase and giving me a focus to analyse the Create phase.  Having a coach became a big part of my training. The coach helped build a training programme, examining my outputs and consistency and giving me access to a library of resources to support my plan.

Create
My most significant change to mindset and understanding as up until now I would have possibly put creating a training plan in as a Create, however, now I see a training programme fitting more into the Learn aspect of learning.

The Create is when I got to combine my existing knowledge with other original ideas in new and imaginative ways to create a new outcome. These Creates involved each training swim, cycle and run as this was where deep learning occurs and gives you more opportunities for self-reflection and understanding.

These Creates included many moments of looking very silly completing swimming, cycling and running drills to build up my strength and efficiency to improve my speed and endurance, running in the public parks with high knees or completing squats and lunges on the side of the road.

The most significant learning, however, came when I competed in races, these included sprint triathlons, Olympic triathlons, ocean swims and half marathons. These are the most critical Creates, as events stop you from lying to yourself or making excuses for your performance which is easy to do in training. The pressure of a race is hard to replicate in practice. I remember my first competitive ocean swim being one of the worst events I had ever done, and it was not until I was debriefing with a good friend that I realised I had not been breathing out underwater, meaning I could not take a full breath when swimming.

The competitive events also gave me an opportunity to put into to action my learnings about nutrition, pacing, cadence, transitioning, hydration and endurance. It also surrounds you with a multitude of like-minded people of all ranges that you can glean nuggets of gold from watching, listening or talking too.

Share
The digital technology I utilised during my training really amplified my ability to Share by connecting with others, it empowered me to be able to Share easily and look at my own and others performances, it gave myself, my connections and my coaches ubiquitous access to my data and visibility of all aspects of my training and events.

Without the use of my Garmin GPS watch and Garmin cycle computer, Coached app, Strava app, Garmin Connect App my experience and learning would not have been as turbocharged.  This turbocharging enabled me to rewind and review sessions; it allowed for me to collaborate with others quickly and efficiently online in real time, access and share knowledge with other athletes and my coaches and create connections online which then became face to face when at events. The ability to connect online with other athletes was quite comforting especially when I was competing at a new race and did not know anyone, having a connection with someone online and then meeting face to face at the event helped calm the nerves.

A safety aspect that the technology-enabled was the incident reporting on my cycle computer, as much training involves 3-hour rides I was often a long way from home on quiet country roads. My cycle computer can recognise if I have a crash and will text specific contacts with my GPS location, this is a sharing component that was unheard of only a few years ago at such a cheap cost.

I did much sharing with my coaches and colleagues through the Coached app however did not share a lot through social media such as Facebook. I felt my friends on this would find the sharing of nine specific training sessions a week as well as a multitude of events a bit much and possibly defriend me. It is essential when sharing that you connect with the right audience to get the most of the connections.

Overall my experience of Challenge Wanaka was really excellent and looking back and reflecting was amplified by the new learning, connections and access to technology. The only thing is now I want to take this new learning and have another crack in 2020. Bring it on!

Mentoring and Coaching - Building foundations - Reflection

In your context, what difference could effective mentoring have on teacher retention?

Looking at the teachers I work with, the 1:1 support offered each week has the potential to decrease the leaving rate as the teachers are supported in class each week. This support helps ensure the teachers in their first year of a 1:1 digital level have support in their learning and creation of structures and systems to prepare them for effective use and the ability to maximise the affordances of digital technology.

Part of my role is also to transition these teachers into their second year when my support ends to ensure they still feel connected or supported at an appropriate level.

In your context, what difference could effective mentoring/ coaching have for priority learners?

The impact on priority learners is large with engagement in their learning increasing due to the access of technology and the authenticity through Learn Create Share and Blogging.  For me, it is to move into being a high effect facilitator to get a more significant shift of teachers in the year I am with them. It is also to ensure that ownership remains always with the principals, SLT and teachers and not with me which limits buy-in and shift. There is a fine line between supporting to stop overloading and having it being done to them.

What difference could effective mentoring / coaching have in your context for building teacher agency and leadership capacity?

The teacher's capabilities in a digital world increase, giving them the skills and knowledge to apply their pedagogical knowledge to students using the affordances of technology to increase student achievement, well being and engagement. In the second year, opportunities could arise to take a leadership role in the school around Manaiakalani Outreach and Learn Create Share. The new confidence and leadership opportunities also can lead to more agency as they then become the drivers of Learn Create Share.

What does a coach/mentor ‘look’ like and what do they do? Is it the same across cultures?

The coach/mentor needs to be highly adaptive and able to change to meet the needs of the mentees. If they cannot then they need to recognise this and suggest alternatives. They need to be able to build relationships and make connections quickly with the mentee to enable relational trust which ties in nicely with Five Dysfunctions of Team learning I have done in the past.

My definition of Mentor and Coach (developing)

Mentor = Guide - Greater use of questioning and learning talk to get the mentee to set a goal and then work towards it? Educative mentoring represents a shift away from advice and guidance / pastoral care to the facilitation of “evidence-informed reflective learning conversations.”

Coach = Support - Goal is preset, and then the coach is there to support the mentee to get there?

Learning conversations are crucial for both.

Listening to Manu and Anaru's Podcast and thinking in my own context it does seem there are synergies between cultures with knowing your learner being at the centre. Maori may prefer a group mentoring model to a 1:1 model.

Where do you think your current mentoring / coaching relationship sits in relation to these definitions and the ‘Situational coach-mentoring continuum visual diagram’? How do the definitions/continuum approach shape your expectations of this relationship?

My role possibly has me sitting in the middle of performance and potential on the continuum as it is context driven around Cybersmart and Learn Create Share, is a medium-term and focuses on roles and competencies. Somehow I need to be able to move this into the Personal Space for leadership as they are long term and have a more complex and evolving landscape to the teachers. There needs to be a partnership where the leaders to take more ownership in the strategic direction of the school in relation to Outreach and the cluster and requires me to facilitate this rather than do it to them.

While you read through these principles consider why they might be significant for you in a mentoring / coaching relationship and how they might influence the way you work with your current mentee/coachee.

Adult problem solving

• Watching and feeling
• Watching and thinking
• Doing and feeling
• Doing and thinking

What other practical applications of these adult learning principles can you see?

What’s on top for the mentee? Need to know this first before we can move forward and ensure the discussion is actually supporting the mentee and relevant to them.

In our model of Learn Create Share the opportunities for Watching and feeling, Watching and thinking, Doing and feeling, Doing and thinking are amplified as the mentees go through the process of learning. By accessing some new knowledge/information and then either creating or watching someone else produce a learning object is really going to support their education. The sharing of the new knowledge also gives opportunities for Watching and feeling, Watching and thinking, Doing and feeling, Doing and thinking as they interact with the blog post and potentially comment.

I guess in a 1:1 session there is going to need to be times when I am modelling in order to give the mentee an opportunity for Watching and feeling or  Watching and thinking or giving the mentee opportunities to do the Doing and feeling, Doing and thinking and being able to talk through this if they so desire.

Staff meeting implications - Adult Education

• let learners know why something is important to learn,
• show learners how to direct themselves through information,
• relate the topic to the learner's experiences,
• help ensure that people are at the stage where they are ready and motivated to learn, and
• help learners overcome inhibitions, behaviours and preconceived beliefs about learning.

This is an excellent framework to use when planning staff meetings and would complement the use of a site rather than a slideshow. I would need to know my learners well to relate the topic back to their experiences.

• Following a formal process
• Getting to know your coachee/ mentee
• Setting aside a time for the session
• Protecting the time from other responsibilities or keeping the different roles clearly separated
• Taking the meeting off-site

When thinking about your current mentoring/coaching relationship, which approach do you think you presently take in your mentoring relationship? Why? What outcomes are you trying to achieve? When might you need to use a variety of approaches with the same mentee/coachee?

At the stage when working with teachers, the approach I take is Directive  - Control to Directive - Informational. This is due to teachers not feeling empowered to direct the learning and move into the collaborative space where I would much prefer to work. This is possibly due to many reasons

• Lack of planning time with the teacher - need to book in time with each teacher at the end of the term to plan the following term
• Lack of buy-in that they can drive the learning - make time to discuss this and use active listening. I may move to problem-solving before hearing all the message?
• A structured context of cyber smart making them feel like they have no choice - I have tried giving options in the past to choose from still found little buy-in.
• Poor communication of expectations and opportunities for engagement of my support - School leadership taking some role in here as well as my part especially at the start of the year.
• Busy teachers overloaded - working Cybersmart into what they are already doing.

Coaching and Mentoring to Develop Practice

Sometimes being a reflective practitioner really sucks, all these ideas formulating and getting chewed to bits inside my head. I have been thinking about my inquiry for 2018 and have been lucky enough to be mentored by Sarah Whiting as a Whānau lead. Going in for my first session in 2018 my head was definitely full of ideas and reflections that Sarah skillfully drew out into a concrete substance. This allowed me to then group the themes together which had led to the formulation of my inquiry and my new learning for 2018.

Busy - this is part of a new cluster and will slow down as we move into Year 2.
Relationships - This has been very good in some classes however I have possibly not invested enough time in some classes to build these. The lack of a day at the start of 2018 to set expectations etc for the year has contributed to this. I need to reflect on “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” and remember relational trust is the first part to build.

• Expectations of Learners - Sometimes the expectations on learners completing work is not very high. This has been noticed in other cluster schools as well and even measures have been put in place to support learners with learning how to finish task. How can I support teachers in setting expectations for their students?
• Accountability - Who are the teachers I work with accountable to? Do the teachers understand the expectations of the programme and their leader's expectations?
• Value Added - What is the value-add to the teachers from my work, I see the value with the students. How could I measure the value-add with staff?
• Frustration - The risk of the above themes developing into frustration on my part and then this impacting on the relationships with staff and schools.

My inquiry is going to focus on the use of coaching and mentoring to facilitate better practice. I am interested to learn the skills and knowledge of coaching and mentoring and then see if this can be utilised in the Manaiakalani Outreach Programme implementation. I am intrigued to know how I could use coaching and mentoring in the programme.

Next step is to do some new learning around coaching and mentoring as part of a CORE Education Tātai Aho Rau Empower Course on Coaching and Mentoring.