Trouble Shooting

7BK - my main class for trialling SPARK - MIT initiatives are just lovely. They tolerate and buy into me trying new things out on a very regular basis. AND they tell me they love Art. What more can I hope for :-)

Going week to week, sending out mass copies of google drawings to be completed by the class is messy and confusing. Particularly when we are enrolling new students all the time who are not necessarily added to your Hapara class lists...

I lost my phone again. And my keys (not new). And my head doing this. I had messed around in workspace and then decided not to use it. Now it can be made public and now that I am steadily confusing myself with what is sent and what is not, I have come to the realisation, it is the cleanest and most effective way to get their literacy work out to the class.

Their Hapara drive looked like this:

 Which was my fault....

We were all confused and only got about 20 minutes of practical art work done in a lesson...that is not fun. I persisted with this for a while before I decided I was making my life worse.








WORKSPACE - I think has saved my life


How tidy is this? I can set up the do nows as 'evidence' it is public and I am about to link it to my site so that they can enter through there too.

Life is better.

Hornby High School Kapahaka

"It's just an excuse to get out of class..."

Not a student, but a former teacher. The prospect of students coming out of a timetabled class for Kapahaka practice.

"I don't think it is fair that they miss one of our classes and we lose that time, they are usually the most behind"

It is not the most accurate quote, but it is a sentiment expressed often when, as a dean a few years ago, I was the space between the rock and the hard place in soothing fears and hurts over the school attempting to get some traction in setting up Kapahaka as a culture here. Unsuccessfully, I might add. In both respects.

The key word here being 'they'.  Us and them, you and me, management vs school vs students vs Māori students. When fear is a factor, the 'other' becomes a significant stumbling block, ignorance outweighs compassion and common sense. All we end up seeing and being, is a part of a divisive and negative culture.

So I joined the Kapahaka practice. It is the most surreal thing to watch students who in the grounds, and in some classes, are at times sorta, kinda wicked hard work, not always particularly open to you as a teacher, be the star of the show. Take control Ms Tongotongo and direct your senior girls to stand with, and help teach the new girls (and women teachers), dictate the volume output with your command and your own voice, amp it up, control the 'pause', teach 15 new students the first section of the school haka in 7 minutes, thank you very much.

Back inside the auditorium we all go, back with the boys, standing together. A male and a female lead again control the volume, determine the pace, and within 15 minutes we all know those first few lines well and the roof is being raised off, like a lid of a soda bottle shaken up by the pressure of our voices. We went from 40% to 110% input in stages, as directed and maintained by our student leaders.

There are benefits to all staff being in this room at this moment. We see confidence where we didn't know it existed, a sense of togetherness demonstrated by the students, the collective consciousness as a real thing. Manaakitanga, Kawanatanga even, there as real tangible elements. Taking this and translating it into the classroom means more than just being there at the practice as a teacher. I want to explore this more, I'm hoping that some of what we do is already doing this. At the end of the year, I want to compare how my new senior class structure compares to this style of education and whether results have in fact been affected, or even whether I care about those results or something more.

Random Thoughts

As I hung the washing on a freezing Canterbury morning (-4), I couldn't help thinking of further steps:
- How to see this through a te reo lens - we have a bi-lingual unit, there is a minimal requirement for how that is handled in te reo. I know that my having they year 7 and 8 bi-lingual class once a week helps diminish the time spent doing this.
- Dropping back further to level 2 of the visual arts curriculum - knowing how this is already handled at a primary school level would be beneficial, particularly a collaborative environment.
- Not forgetting how SOLO fits in.

"Write That Essay" PLD day notes

Our focus is writing and based on the Woolf Fisher data we received on Wednesday, That is pretty much what it should be.




There were a lot of useful tips and tricks that we can implement starting Monday, and we will. Blog posts are about to change for our senior students.

Language Accessibility Again

From this,

 

to this...

This does work, but, man, the language is hard in the CI and UC strands for them. A lot of repetition is needed. And some definitions still need tweaking.

Not all of the words are straight from the curriculum statements. In each strand I have included words I teach to, and have taught to. For example 'Tache' in PK.

Next steps; 
- Starting at a level below what I think they are
- Building up a cache of language google drawings that they 'get' quickly and can start to show some fluency in,
- Applying the words to their own and others pieces of Art pieces and building a communal bank.
- Making this accessible to other teachers to start using and add to.
- Measuring student's performance from starting to finishing and within curriculum work over the year. Using self-assessment as well as teacher based assessment.
- How does this link into SOLO and how I am re-structuring units of work around Learn, Create, Share.