Cluster wide PLG's 2019

Terry, Marina and I lead two groups of teachers from three different schools in the same geographic area of Christchurch through the theme connected guided inquiry. It is one of my leadership roles in our kura.

Today's task was to bring our two Extended Learning Conversation groups together and brainstorm what our DLO's could look like for presenting our 'golden moments' from inquiry so far and to support and inspire each other in how that looks.

I made the suggestion that I felt that the teacher's voice and following on, the students voice seemed to me to be the most powerful 'tool' in making a DLO that is centred on conversations, and that I wouldn't be adverse to just holding up a cell phone and listening to everyone tell us their moments directly. Given that no one had a strong idea of what was expected today until 24 hours previous, this would be a lot to take in and may not be an idea that flies anyway. Though I still see it as the strongest as I am not sure lots of trick and gadgets is absolutely necessary, as this is about some of our more introverted tamariki and rangatahi finding their voice.

I will leave that concept to the side, as it may or may not be a reality.

Once we had clarified the expectations of the DLO each participant would send to the leaders and that the leaders will then pull 5 minutes of something rewindable together for the Uru Mānuka site, we moved on to zooming our individual focus in to one student and/or moment so far that we felt showed a shift in engagement through developing their extended learning conversation skills beyond wherever they started at.

The notes I took while our participants were speaking revealed some underlying themes from new entrants through to high school:

- The process is educationally significant and positive for the introvert - the type of personality a school is not really developed for (Stade, Linda. Knowing Girls. 2018) (Matt, Ali, Abi, Kate)

- Feed the Language; Language needs to be given before it can be used - 4 comments to one question is a successful strategy in doing this as it helps provide modelling of learning language first. (Julie, Rovenna, Megan, Georgia, Matt, Kate)

- Reflective open questions need to be provided with academic take up time (Warwick, Kate, Sheri) which will be longer than we are used to. Intervention, not interference (Heather). The adult needs to learn when to shut up.

- Relationships for learning are required before any of it works (Abi), these are not always formed within the formal classroom - extracurricular (Allan).

While I have felt like I am swimming badly in the deep end facilitating a group that runs across education levels I am not an expert in, today was my gold, in that I heard first-hand themes that run across education from new entrant through to senior high school.

The gains I made in understanding were valuable and something that I will continue to ponder. Without this model of inquiry, I wonder if I would have this new lens to see my learners and my teaching practice through.



[Free image from Pixabay]

TEACHER ONLY DAY 28th June 2019 notes

John Quinn - Well being specialist

Social worker/counselor, education and sport as a background. 

What protective clothing do you need when you are in the eye of the storm? Being in the centre of the
storm is not good well being. It's ok not to be positive all of the time. You can't always be strong all of the time ‘kia kaha’ for instance, sometimes it is ok to be vulnerable. Can't always ‘leave it at the door’. As adults we don't always leave it at the door, so why are we expecting it consistently from our young people who are growing and changing? “Learn how to dance in the storm”. When things are tough do we have the tools to manage it?

Managing your reactions rather than your circumstances.

If we don't look after ourselves generally our reaction is not what it should be. We become the storm
rather than just being inside the eye of the storm. 

It’s not about being happy all of the time, but it's about having the tools to deal with things when its not. 

Ratio of positive vs negative emotions

Engaged and focused

Strong positive relationships - not over the internet - we are feeding the beast at the moment. 

A sense of meaning and life purpose - why do you teach? If you don't love it anymore do something else. Sense of accomplishment

Eat, sleep, move. 

PERMA - Seligman's theory of wellbeing

What determines happiness - 50% genetics/nurture, 10% external circumstances, 40% actions and
thoughts. 

18-month window - lose a limb, win the lotto - you will go back to your prior state of being within 18
months regardless of the change. We chase the wrong stuff.

There is not a bad or good emotion, there are just emotions but how do you bring the top ten positive
emotions into our lives? (Fredrickson, 2009).

If you have had that day that has really challenged you, how do you remember gratitude when you go
home? 

The negative stuff is always going to be there - we all have a negative bias. Combatting this. Kids are
great observers, but terrible interpreters. If you feel safe, you engage. Same with students. 

• 3 a day, 3 times a week, 3 a month, 1 a year. Well-being. 

What gives you: 

Joy

Gratitude

Serenity

Inspiration

Hope

Love

Awe

Amusement

Interest 

pride

Praise and critique the process not the outcome. If grades were the most important thing, there would
be no such thing as job interviews. Reward the stuff we want from our young people.

We have got to stop educating kids to do jobs that robots can do. The airy fairy stuff is what we need to
look at. 

The average time a father communicates with his child is 4 and a half minutes! If that is the average,
there are 50% kids who are not getting even that. Devices get in the way, adults are often distracted.

Have a goal, a five-year plan. Even if you don't get to it apparently research is that planning around it
will improve your well being.

Intentional activities are the key to happiness. Playtime and downtime - both are intentional activities.
Downtime should be ‘nothing’ time. Legitimately so.

“Time in” as opposed to time out. Mindfulness being aware. Being present. Paying attention. Gratitude
and compassion. Non-judgemental. It's impossible to be present all the time but we need to be aware
of where we are - focussed on the past anxious about the future, or in the present? Making sure it's not
too far either way. But focus on making the NOW part bigger. It is usually very small. 

The more awareness one can bring to bear on any action, the more feedback one gets from the
experience. And the more naturally one learns and is able to respond. 

“Flip your lid” visual metaphor for when you are in red brain mode (flight, fight, freeze). Bring the lid
back down is green brain mode (logic and reasoning). 

What allows us to focus? Quiet? Order? Often disconnecting does allow us to focus. We cannot
multitask properly, even when we think we can. Making lists helps. Having an ordered space helps.

You have got to treat technology like any other drug; have rules around it. What are your rules around
it around your kids? What are they seeing you doing? There is no research that says using your phone
improves your brain.

We get 1/24th of the relational time that we used to as hunter-gatherer societies. 

Loneliness is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. 

We teach perfection and we create anxiety in doing so. We ignore real engagement. 

Every day make a choice to create some positive emotions.

Pause-reflect - leadership TAI LCS NOTES only

Analyse recording of staff meeting for what I have managed well and areas to improve:



Before we presented, we shared this with two other staff members. One went through it on her own at home the other went through it with us and teased things out, questioning points, phrasing and wording of certain elements and how we would deal with certain reactions from staff.

Both critiquers noted that our original presentation was too long - you can see we now have a part two inserted. Both also felt like our point lacked clarity. This led to changing the title of the presentation after orally reworking it with the second critiquer.

By the time we were presenting, we had developed a clear understanding that we would set this up to finish wherever we got to by 4.15pm regardless. We were able to stop at any point up to Part two without compromising learning for staff.

Analysing voice file for examples of my good and bad practice as a leader and presenter

The recording was made as audio only to simplify the technology at the time:
(link here) 54 minutes long, Katie Tozer and I presenting.
What I wanted to achieve:
A shared understanding that we must craft our language to reflect our desired outcome; LCS.
A reflection from all staff involved in their own use of language
Connections made between how language has been used to fool the user and the power of it.
Willingness to collaborate on learning between colleagues
A concrete interpretation of LCS and creating a DLO along with fish hooks you might encounter.
Setting the scene to develop cultural responsiveness from language forwards.
Opening of possibilities for learning by seeing, hearing and sharing different points of views and ways of thinking.

Positives:
- I set a time limit of 4.15pm - reassuring staff that there was going to be a stopping point
- Explained a rough structure of what we were presenting and expecting regarding interactiveness.
- Voice appears clear in presenting.
- I paused with straight outta the south pacific slave trade! and tried to paraphrase...
- I believe I made each task the 'why' for each task pretty clear.
- Pulling staff back together seemed fairly successful
- Paraphrasing what one of the staff wrote on the Padlet to sum things up.

Negatives:
- Fumbles with the technology
- I pronounce AKO badly. I can do that stuff better.
- Stuttering when we got to the slides about language... I knew that I might offend and was ducking linguistically?
- Have to work on paraphrasing as I am often just restating what has been said.
- "Not a horribly long article" is definitely my kind of phrasing that I should work on! It is said from negative pretexts; "not a" and 'horribly'. How I phrase these things can be better.
- Inflexion of my voice - I often end with my voice moving lower.
- "give us some feedback I guess" so not professional. Annoyed that I said it like that.
- I don't hear myself feeling happiness in my voice when I hear it back. I am actually feeling really happy when I am presenting once I am into it.

I'm still in the Learn phase of my inquiry. I'm still gathering evidence and developing my hunch and hypothesis more fully. Although some of that is happening concurrently, which is preferable to me, as I would rather see this as a fluid process.

 Notes:

Stuff for me to look up and reflect upon for next steps:
Joan Dalton -"Develop the art of the inquiry"

In questioning to open up the language of possibilities; how do I pause to reflect and allow myself . and others time to paraphrase in their own heads what is it we want to develop a shared understanding of.
It  takes 3 - 5 seconds to process high-level thoughts

I want to develop my capability around this as a leader.

Book 4 page 13 - 32

6 types of paraphrasing.

All stuff that I want to process and use somehow in how I develop my leadership capabilities.

What my next steps are:
1) Get someone to monitor my classes during the day for feedback purposes
2) Get a range of people from a range of leadership scenarios to assess me against leadership dimension 4.
3) Work through the Joan Dalton stuff and identify how to use pause, paraphrase etc... (book 4)

Move forward based on this and my own analysis.

Notes on what my tai is focussing on

Rough Notes from meeting with Deirdre and Terry. I have chosen not to tidy them up for the purpose of authenticity. 

LEARN:

Focusing Inquiry

“What is important (and therefore worth spending time on) given where my students are at?”

My hunch:
how language is used is important to maintaining a positive trajectory.

my hypothesis: that Language - how it is crafted to deliberately empower those using it.
Singular to plural. the language of possibilities
inflecting your voice at the end. Some of what I have read recently debates the language of possibilities. Ronald Rebore 2002. So I know I need to flesh this out further.

Terry observing the planning process between myself and Katie Tozer.

Observing the outcome as a staff meeting with distributed leadership present.

Guiding people 
- Say what you think, say why you are using valid information. (data is any valid information not just numbers, no anecdotal stuff though)
- Check in for others thoughts around what you have just said and why. Argryss and Schon. Invite critique back.





Getting another staff member for a day to observe when I could be doing these things and when I do them well.
Some specific examples of where the language was used well. Purpose of asking Liisa to observe for . day is to be more consistent about how I craft language to enable and empower their responsibility and collective accountability.

Is this a smart goal? How am I going to measure it?

Impact on myself -  see above

Impact on my colleagues - use the leadership dimension as a feedback tool 

Impact on my or our rangatahi - 

What does it look like?

Students understanding of LCS in practice. 

Could select a range of classes across the school and measure their understanding now and then following the meeting re-measure based on what impact I might have had 

PLG TAI reflection on leadership dimension 4 and how I would use it.

This year one of my roles is the leadership of a professional learning group across the Uru Mānuka cluster. The purpose is to generate enough evidence following a theme for each group, for teachers to meet the PTC's.

One of our challenges is to interweave the guiding pedagogy of the cluster throughout the process, even though each school will have its own documentation methods for TAI - that of Learn Create Share. 

I do believe that many staff are still not willing to spend enough time unpacking what LCS means. It's too easy to go on the Oxford dictionary definitions of those words without actually buying into the work and research behind it. While that is a separate frustrating issue, little steps will lead to more meaningful evolution of ideas eventually. I found this particular article which clarified Learn as to know, create as to act, and share as to value, and specifically identified these as 21st-century educational skills. My argument is that staff should value the pedagogy not the words. Maybe we just need to see it in different words, with research behind it from other sources such as this.

Learn

Focusing Inquiry

“What is important (and therefore worth spending time on) given where my students are at?”

As PLG leaders we are working on leadership dimension 4 from the Best Evidence Synthesis (BES)

In identifying two elements of leadership dimension 4 (I haven't questioned deeply why this is the one we are focussing on yet), I have struggled which I focus on. I'm erring towards three and four. In this TAI, the 'students' are my colleagues, the outcomes are their own learnings from this process. The most gain for them is going to be making sure I have the knowledge of effective professional development from a researched basis and ensuring collective responsibility and accountability and how to foster it. Acting as an instructional leader is a focus, but with two of us as leaders for this group, 'we got this'. Use of data is actually just a pain when you are working across schools and there is no time allowance for this 'job'. It's a good way of making my own TAI unachievable. Good individual processes should mean data collection happens naturally anyway, and if it's causing the TAI's to fail, then I guess I revisit this hypothesis. There are 8 participants in the group from 3 different schools and only one meeting per term. In focussing my inquiry, effective professional development and collective responsibility/accountability are probably of the most significance for our learners (colleagues). This is my activation of the process, my Learn, and what I know.

Unpacking the matrix on LCS at HHS

Staff were presented with the matrix we are measuring ourselves against.

It was an interesting exercise to complete and I'm still not finished. From within it, I was able to generate two more goals to work on in our practice in visual arts, and it also gives me something to work with our staff in aligning practice.

What I really liked about this exercise is that it was a way of quietly starting off each learner's mindset with LCS again, it was non-confrontational and we could set our own pace. 

I would like to have spent more time with the solo stuff at the start, but this does give us the scope to go back to SOLO and LCS midterm perhaps.