Refreshing our google sites and trying to get everyone on board

One of the somewhat intimidating parts of being called a 'leader' in any area is those moments where you know there could be resistance, where people feel like you are always asking them to keep on doing; like maybe there should be an endpoint in an ever-evolving world. That is a contradiction in itself.

So here I am, preparing to do just that, annoy my colleagues into changing what they potentially already saw as finished, knowing that there will be the 'for goodness sake, when does it end?!' Umm, never? Nothing is static. Even Stonehenge is changing (albeit crumbling slowly away).

So here we go, adjustment time:

Is what we are doing the best of what we could be doing?
Does it fully encompass the school direction(s)?
Is it inspiring our learners?
Does it just need to be finished/started/used by your learners?

Following on from trying to find anything other than Prezi as an interesting alternative to slides or powerpoint, I clicked on this blog post from Matthew Guay:

https://zapier.com/blog/best-powerpoint-alternatives/#spark

Adobe Spark was most interesting to me and accessible, being online. No point advocating it if I didn't know how to use it, we need to model what we want, or what a load of hypocrisy. So I have prepared the first step in 'annoying my colleagues' by reminding them it is their professional responsibility to refresh their sites and remember they are in fact just path and course of 'the way we do things around here' on Adobe Spark. Which had some pros and cons as it turned out - though I am always hopeful for a wholly positive experience;

Pro's:
- Free
- Pre-set templates with good font/colour coordination and layout - design for dummies takes away some of the choices and can make the actual work output much faster for people like me who like to alter everything
- You too can have that annoying elevator-type music you see on facebook videos with no words (woohoo, always wanted that!).
- You can record your voice over your slides one at a time, and you can re-record until you get what you want.
- Really, very good stock photos available, which keeps artists happy, if you are not stealing things off google image.
- Strong encouragement from within Adobe Spark to keep your content and audio short and simple.

Con's:
- There is a limited number of templates
- The grid your text snaps to is limited (but is probably for the best)
- It felt like I needed to put more work in to get a finished product with the words, image and then the audio (but I could have been less fussy)

So overall I will be using it again. It does make rewindable learning a little more attractive. It is not inaccessible (I find Prezi can be intimidating to some who feel technology is at times, overwhelming).

Coming back to my point; refreshing google sites and getting our staff on board with that; resistance is a part of the challenge, doing is part of not only the learning, but the leadership (who is going to listen to someone who doesn't know how to do? Probably not me), and change is normal. No one wants to crumble away like stonehenge. My goal as e-learning leader is to be walking the talk, able to adapt and available.

Bring on 2019.

PLD with John Parsons

Duty of care needs to be around yourself before you can look after anyone else.

Schools are left responsible for too much. We are not responsible for bad parenting. The parent that allows the 11 year old to have a facebook account, by suggesting/allowing they change their year of birth instantly is impacting that child’s sense of identity. The date of their birth. They need to own that. One little white lie tells that kid it is ok to lie if it is an online lie, creating a division between cyber and real world, when really there isn't one. You are ‘you’ online and in real life. When you start allowing, or even encouraging your tamariki to mess with that, you are in effect colluding to create that division.

There should be no need for cyber safety. It is safety. There should be no need for a ‘digital citizen’, you are just you. Trying to make the internet into an abstract world is confusing and unnecessary, it is a part of the world.

Questioning kids -  never ask questions that give the information - i.e. ‘was it alcohol?” -  “what was it?” is better.

Always report concerns to the ‘leads’ - kg and wk

Rule of optimism - don’t go with ‘but they are a nice person’ date and record every concern you ever have. A nice person can still be a predator/offender. What if you are right on your first instinct? Better to be wrong and err on the side of caution. Allowing the rule of optimism allows more harm to be done.

Don't make assumptions about what has happened to the child, just record.

Act without delay, to report. Encourage staff to trust gut feelings.

Make sure you know NAG 5 - safe physical and emotional environment for staff and students

What is our child protection policy? Find out and know it. Don’t leave it to be someone else's problem.

Four behaviours that are not a part of a teachers role:

• Creating social network connections that are not driven by school and educational needs with students - keep your boundaries up. Imbalance of power. Which does not cease until they mature
• Teachers who like to give gifts to students that are unknown by management. Even a pair of shoes. Everything must go through ‘the school’.
• Teachers who instill themselves into the whole family and become the go to person for the whole family. Ego based and unsafe. Use the systems in place with the school. Don't take things on board without being a part of your own systems. EVERYTHING goes through the leads of the school. Bigger systems cannot be followed if you take these things out of the system by siloing yourself. You don't have the skillset and you will be drawn into the drama of the situation and will fail to meet the needs of the student
• Teachers that hug students - confuses the boundaries for every other teacher with those students and it is not collegial. Its meeting the needs in us, not the needs of the students. Gotta be sensible about it, sometimes you cannot avoid a situation!

Don't let your kids use the school laptop. Don't let anyone at home use your laptop

Password protect your laptop when it is unattended even momentarily.

Purge your phone of images of students every two weeks, don't leave them on your personal device. Get them onto the school network where they belong. If you lose your device and it is found and/or hacked, it could give the community an unbalanced view of your professionalism which is not what you want.

LCS Quick responses to online questions

Today's staff meeting gave us 15 minutes of time to answer questions around LCS and sites, blogs, hapara and apps/extensions...

If there are more, let us know and we will add them on.

google drawing card for analysis and why it didnt work

Language. If you don't have it, you can't apply it. Interestingly, as I explained the concepts, it clicked into place, but I still had to keep doing this and in the ned, I really just made  a bunch of kids "repeat after me..."

What I have I learned?
1) they are clever enough there is not deficit with their intellect.
2) It doesn't matter if you are clever, if no one has exposed you to the language to express it
3) All of this correlates to our data on writing.

Shikobi tells me it was alright, but why were my words so confusing?













Next steps:
Go back to language base, and develop it based on breaking down and analysing the curriculum levels. This will be an interesting exercise as I don't think it has been done. If so, there are no easily available resources on it. How would a general teacher expected to cover all subjects at junior levels be expected to manage this? Not cool, TKI!

I used to use flash card, which worked (i love organising things by colour) but were easily lost, not something they could take home and laborious to make a student copy for, let along keep up on maintaining full sets int eh right colours. How to do this digitally.

Also, I want to use a small group of kids that I can take out of a class and work with as opposed to relying on my own art time.

What I Am Going To Try; Google Draw

Click on this link for the original Google Draw file

I think this is at the substitution level as it is. What happens to that information they create with these is how it becomes redefined and modified.

Breaking it down into low, mid and high of a curriculum level is really what is happening on the google sheet that I have already worked on with the students.



This as a do now - 1 - 2 curriculum strands from students work so far, or work done previously that I know they can manage. All the answers are ones that my current Year 7 and 8 students could provide based on the work we have completed this term. They know what Tache is, and they can identify all of those elements.

We teach the vocab using flash cards anyway, so just making sure they are available or even developing them into google drawings as well, would help.

Getting the students to 'bank' these in a file somewhere is the next step and relating it back to SOLO for Visual Arts.

Student self assessment - Qualitative Data gathering using google sheets

Spark - MIT have given me the opportunity to explore and figure out a way of developing a way with my students to unpack the curriculum in Visual Arts for themselves. In order to do this successfully, (shoutout Tania Coutts for help with this) I need them to be able to not only self assess, which they do anyway, but to be public and brave about it.

Google sheets is essentially 'live'. 'Protected sheets and ranges' means that I can have multiple editors and lock them down to only what I want them to be able to edit. Qualitative data is significant in understanding how students are managing that top end of the curriculum.

This is where we are at with all of our junior classes. Because it is all of them (13 classes in all) it is a bit of a Himalayan trek to get it all done.

This is a screen shot from one class who are incomplete so far.
Each student can only access their own row. It is colour coded and is my marking schedule anyway for the class, with alterations made to the language, as they tell me some of my criteria were too confusing... They can see what each other are entering right then and there and this can be good or bad. How I manage the culture, as the teacher running the task at the time, is important here. It does take clear explanation first as well.

We are working on refining it with each class and there is differing feedback from each class. So it has to be developed with the class, not for the school.

Practice Makes Perfect.

At the centre of our school plan is Actively Involved Learners. 

In my teaching Inquiry, I have been looking at how critique and collaboration affects resilience and outcomes of student work and creating agentic learners in creating those scenes described by our Principal of the teacher skipping out the gate at the end of the day, with the students crawling, exhausted, as opposed to the other way around. I have touched on resilience a few times, as a key factor as it is one of our school vlaues and I keep wondering how we measure it; the timed drawings in year 11 and Manaakitanga in year 12 and 13 for instance have been active examples of me trying to figure this out. Achievement is going to come about as a result of commitment and resilience in my opinion. Respect is almost an aside, though necessary, obviously. In researching resilience as a topic to explicitly teach my students, in order to improve their outcomes, I go back to this each time; Carol Dweck wrote a theory about how your mindset affects your success. We have been looking at this as a larger part of our school professional learning:

Being able to pick yourself up and have another go is success not failure. Un-resilient students see falling in the first place as failing, so don’t even try and pick themselves back up. It’s too late. Picking yourself back up is resilient behaviour. The default setting as 'hard work and effort', make this real. People with a growth mindset are already doing this. People with a fixed mindset are hiding and avoiding having to, looking for the things that they are so ‘talented’ at, that they don’t have to work hard at, so that they don't have to risk failure.

How does it come about?

According to Dweck, it is totally able to be taught. Developmental stages do not seem to mean anything in teaching ourselves to become growth mindset kinds of people.

This slide is from Carol Dweck’s own youtube presentation in which she elaborates further, citing a Native American school on a reservation that was the bottom of the equivalent to league tables for their state. They were pulled back up to the top using her theories of how to praise, when to praise and how to speak about the power of “yet”.

This is slightly left-field but I was watching Sesame Street with my daughter last weekend and this was on; Sesame Street is one of those mainstays of Children's TV that is well researched and cleverly sequenced together, being the first childrens' programme to systematically use research and it's own 'curriculum ' in developing it's content (Gerald S. Lesser. Children and Television: Lessons from Sesame Street. New York: Vintage Books. p. xv. ISBN 0-394-71448-2.). And look at that, this is written with direct reference to Dweck's research on "YET". It is a fantastic example of explicitly capturing children's attention with a message that teaches a growth mindset. She was singing along after less than a minute. 

Carol Dweck's presentation on Youtube with VideoNot.es notes 

There are larger social factors that are positively affected by teaching this theory to communities; aggressive reactions are lowered, teaching a growth mindset about personal qualities lowers a person's chances of reacting violently. Bullying is lowered. Dweck calls it a basic human right for children to exist in communities that allow them to develop growth mindsets. 

It seems to me that teaching agency and resilience are interlinked concepts. One doesn't easily happen without the other. Teaching students to be their own leader of change is reliant on understanding resilience and having a growth mindset. 

My next focusing questions:

• How does this apply to Year 11 critiques and removing some, or in fact quite a lot of the scaffolding/whole-class teaching? The speed drawing methods we used earlier in the year?
• How does that apply to Manaakitanga? What data do I have?
• What are my next steps for Year 11? What data am I collecting?
• What do I do differently in Year 12 regarding the Manaakitanga?
• Is it worth making visual cues on the growth mindset for the classroom and explicitly referring to it in each class? How would I measure the impact of this?

Same approach with white medium on black paper, a range of finishes and skill levels.

 

 

 

 

9SK Printmaking - being resilient about our mistakes

So, Art students are shocking for this; make a mistake once, HATE the whole page, screw the page up, hide it from the teacher. Deny they have learn't anything, try again, miniscule mistake no one else can see, screw it up AGAIN, 25 minutes later, it's like they have spent half a lesson doing nothing...except they haven't. When you ask casually, they "can't do it, its way too hard..." and your help is apparently not going to remedy this, unless of course you feel like completing the work for them, so that it looks 'perfect'.

Our values are Commitment, Achievement, Resilience and Respect.

Respect is easy to teach, achievement is generally an outcome and you can get there, commitment depends on the context as to how hard it can be to explicitly manage, resilience is the hardest; that pushing past a lack of confidence.

Wednesday - we have run out of time to finish this unit the way I would like to - our final resolution is a mono-print as opposed to a woodcut print. Students have worked through a process to achieve a stylised form, learning from two examples and comparing them - Art Nouveau and Kowhaiwhai. They have lovely drawings. The rule for this lesson, was everything they stuffed up we kept. Everything they got right we kept. The expectation was that they HAD to stuff it up at least twice, and they had to try and rework a 'mistake' to make something interesting from it.

Below are the examples from this class

We will complete this tomorrow, with the students who don't have their ISLA reward.