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.

Impact Stories - Uru Mānuka

Teaching Writing with the Tools

I have had an interesting experience recently working with teachers helping them make the transition from paper-based writing sessions to digital writing. All the teachers seem to struggle with the transition, seeing the use of a Chromebook as a completely new way of writing and unsure how to engage with it.

My way of thinking is that the process still remains the same as I have blog previously, and it is just that the tool is different. There are some setup and systems required before the lesson to ensure a smooth lesson, these include creating a document and template to write in and ensuring the learners have guidance around protocols and expectations of writing in a shared document.

Once the learners and teacher get the hang of this then the writing can really start to fly. Engagement increases and ideas being shared generate a lot of quality writing.

The writing can be read back, using headphones, by text to speech tools allowing learners to hear their mistakes and lack of punctuation as the computer will only stop at a full stop or comma etc.

I have created the template as seen below which helps guide teachers that are new to digital writing. I find for myself that having a document that is used with a group for a term helps manage workflow and provides a modelling book for future reference.

I was very proud of the work one teacher did with her class, working with me on the first day and then making the connection with the writing process and using an innovative approach to have the students self-reflect on their learning by highlighting the language features in their own writing on the second day.

The learners can peer-assess their classmates by commenting on the right-hand side of the table as can the teacher by the commenting feature in a google doc.

I would see the next step being the students posting to their blog as below - 

WALT - 

• understand the purpose for writing
• Use our senses
• use a range of  written features to engage the audience;  e.g. metaphors, similes, onomatopoeia
• Use basic punctuation that is mostly correct;

Gurgle, slip, slop. There was some thing lurking in the misty, shadows of the dark alley way. It had five rorange tentacles that were making the slipping noises. And purple, wet flippers were making the sloping noises. When he went over to it, I nearly fainted.A skunk lurked in the room. Then I saw it's face. It had 2 sets of jagged  teeth that were pointy as iron tips, It also had 3 triangle eyes, 4 square eyes and 1 giant, fat circle eye. It had a nightmare nose that wanted revenge. In its hands was something with eyeballs in it. It...is...a...horror...CUPCAKE!!! The thing was an alien.DA DA DAAAAAAAAA!

Success Indicators -

• My writing will paint a picture in the reader head
• Write each sense (taste, smell, hear, sight, fell) into its own paragraph.
• Has at least three language features, eg personification, simile, onomatopoeia, metaphor, alliteration

• Can re-read my writing to check my punctuation

This then means the learners get an authentic audience that will hopefully comment on their work and learning.

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.