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.

The Development of a Collaborative PBL environment in Visual Arts reflective documentation part one

Collaboration is about doing stuff together. A partnership. It is an expectation that students will work this way in PBL environments and likewise staff will have to also.

We have been working on how we manage our senior courses. For the last two years, instead of Level one Art, Level 2/3 Painting, level 2/3 Design and level 2/3 Photography, I asked if we could change things up. We always bang students in the back of level 2/3 Design when they cannot fit into level one Art. Likewise, designers end up in Painting classes when they cannot fit in Design. It's considered a nuisance, something in Art departments that we are meant to fight against as it hampers the growth, the validity, realness, ultimate truth that our course is far-far superior than our senior managers see our courses as, and our ...egos I think if we are honest.

2015 numbers rolled in, as they always do around October. We had 39 students listed for Year 11 Art. We were asked to cull at least 10 of those. 10 is not such an accidental 'I had no other option' number sitting there. Whereas in Photography we had 15 students. Enough for a legitimate class. Likewise in Paint and Design. Really good numbers.

I knew full well that there was an Art teaching colleague at another school on the west coast 'doing it tough' in the opinion of some of the bigger school Art depts here in chch. She had only one senior Art class, one of her students had down's syndrome and she had written up what she was doing for her students for TKI as a planning resource for smaller departments. It was all about going with the mixed discipline/level approach and embracing it, leaving things open for students to come back and complete level one over two years and it all focused on concept as the driver, over a whole class approach.

Little nagging thought in my head: We always taught our level 2/3 students from that position anyway. Why would it be different for level one?

When we went to Tamaki College for Manaiakalani professional development, we saw this cool thing in English where they didn't teach academic, vocational and communication English from level one upwards. They took the labels of smartness/dumbness away and had theme based classes. What do you really care about? What makes you think, be passionate, have a voice? That is how you chose your English class. That is also where you start an Art concept from. Then I have that lightbulb moment, followed by that slight guilt moment of how I may have been disadvantaging students for a very long time, culminating in the 'I'm changing the world' moment. In my Art room at least.

So again, why was I making it so different in Level one? Because the standards don't quite align to level 2 and 3. So I sorta used that as a justification. But that doesn't actually matter, there are always ways around things.

I was making it different because it was easier than altering my mind set, I still had that fear that I was going to upset traditionalists in my field (they don't even know my name, so I'm not sure why I cared) and if I am honest there is still the 'You're from Hornby? Oh...' thing going on for me. I don't want to make things too different here at Hornby and therefore have our students not able to do as well as 'theirs'... forgetting the fact that the will, drive and passion of the student is what will eventually cause success, not whether I cared about whether they were going to be the kid in the second-hand jumper getting teased about hand-me-downs.

Yes, content, technique, skills are all really important, but first and foremost is the 'catch'. Fostering will, determination and passion for learning something is what we must do first. And sometimes the only thing we may end up doing. But eventually that will come back in on that same person and the light will be re-ignited.

My proposal was to intentionally mix the 4 lines of Art up into being a mish mash of everything and then going for it.

That year had been a mare for Cindy with 5 level one Art students sitting in the back of her level 2/3 Design class. The designers did well - 100% pass rate in the external in the end. The year 11 students all passed too, but they were all hard on her - 'you only care about the designers' followed by 'why do you spend time with the babies? WE are more important!' from the designers.  There was a total non acceptance and division between the two groups. But there was this really interesting student in the class who had come to us from alternative education. He only did level one. He struggled in a lot of relationships with a lot of teachers and only met his dad that year. He had moved from the North Island and everything was just weird here. Wickedly talented, creative and interesting, when he was on top of things personally, not so much of any of those when things were going wrong personally. He worked in the same kind of way as you would at Art school. Independently and interdependently. Coming up with new trains of thought, discussing these out loud with others, bouncing ideas back and forth and taking everyone's opinions really seriously and always, in his own little space of what did look like a fine arts studio in the end, down the back. He worked like a senior painter. Cindy just had to keep up with him to make sure he as ticking the boxes for the internal standards along the way as well.

Level one pass rate external folio for 2016 - 92%

This bit of data is important because of the school results for level one in 2016 as well as the fact that level one students do not understand how they get assessed in Visual Arts at this level. It is the second year we had run our programme this way. 2015 was not shabby either at around (don't quote me) 85%. We do not have time to make that clear and real in junior Art. 2 hours a week for half a year does not allow us to capture their passion for Art as well as school them all on entering into NCEA as competitive, geared up, understanding how they are likely to do in NCEA, machines. Its enough to ascertain that they have readily developed skills that stand them in good stead already and passion.

What it looks like:

We keep lines 1, 2, 3 and 4 of our 6-line patterned timetable open for Art at all three levels. Students are well-schooled into understanding that they are responsible for their concept, and have mostly begun developing this in year 10 if they are coming into Year 11 Art. Anyone who wants to come into year 11 without year 10 Art gets a sit down chat with me about what I expect with their own direction.

The first two weeks of the new year are spent on brainstorming what students care about, reading through books on art and learning about artists that catch their interest. Discussions with the teacher and with each others (levels 2 and 3 help a lot in guidance here) help formulate the direction a student wants to take. We discuss, question, and develop a plan.

We use our google site to unite them as a class with a tracking sheet for each class loaded onto the page for each class. For each course, there is a course outline digitally presented with a hyperlink to the folder containing the assessment schedules for each standard they can earn. It is up to the student to make sure they are ticking things off...We also use teaching blogs to then differentiate subject and level specific resources, help and guidance. But most is on a more individual level. All students are using a blog to document their work. Some are still reluctant, but the more it comes through the junior school, the less foreign it is to them. Their use of a blog allows us as teachers to pursue their progress beyond a class time. I'm marking and giving formative feedback essentially, just online.

We frequently demand that students prepare a timetable of their week for us on the whiteboard at the start of the week. Telling us what they are doing, not the other way round.

In that, there must be outcomes - a piece of work for 1.2, a research paragraph for Art History, a blog post. If their outcomes are unreasonable, they rewrite them and take some responsibility. If they don't meet them they have to replan their next week to sort it out. It is their credits in the end. if we do this right, they should care more about them.

Because we approach our classes willingly as mixed level and discipline, it alters our mindset about how we feel about teaching them and how we approach it. It is a placebo effect.

The flaws/areas to work on:

- Communication between the two Art teachers - we both have different skill sets that we could be using together more for the benefit of the students.

- This model is threatening to some people. Some students do want to be told what to do. We try and adjust approaches for them, but that is quite a lot of work in this environment.

- Art History standards are way better for research skills in Art than any of the research standards in practical art. We need to offer these more at levels 2 and 3, not just level 1. That does lend to addressing literacy standards more for us too.

- Communication with the deans as to how full the lines are - one ended up with 37, another with 33, one with 24 and one with 11 at the start of this year. That needed to be addressed.

Blogging; why, what, how (Sinek)

The above is the Hornby High staff feedback on why Blogger helps our students learn, followed by the presentation on how are students are blogging, and developing our next steps into 'what' we will be doing to not only teach them this way, but in fact just keep up with them.

2017 Inquiry Update

Professional accountability in amongst self-perpetuated chaos. That might be a slight exaggeration. But, the decision to split up teachers whilst we had mixed the levels and disciplines of our classes is from an outsiders perspective, just confusing. And it leaves us teachers open to lose track of students and not spread attention equally and effectively.

The inquiry question is: Can teacher collaboration improve student achievement in senior art? 

The use of google sheets to track the students and keep ourselves in check. However, it is not us two yet collaborating. it effectively tracks our thoughts as we check through with each student and hopefully provides clear feedback for students. But, we are not yet collaborating in the true sense of the word.

I like how we are using it, as it has changed since we started with it.

There are some barriers to doing that effectively:

- Cindy is part time, though at 16 hours, her life should not revolve around being at school when I feel like talking about this!
- Four of her hours a week are on the other side of the school, jokingly referred to as Siberia (rebuild logistics), timeliness to classes following a Siberian lesson is costing us.
- Home time for both of us is precious and necessary due to our own circumstances (We don't live at school, nor will we be planning to take this up to solve the issue).
- After school time is stretched across a lot of demands - staff meetings, task forces, learning team meetings...
- I annoyingly use the Art room office as a Dean's office because there isn't space for me elsewhere while the rebuild is on.
- I get caught up with the pastoral side of my job more than I should if I'm balancing things fairly.
- We never will have a timetabled non-contact together... when I'm teaching Cindy is not and vice versa.

There are some solutions to these barriers also (and I am open to others too):

- Working online more effectively. We have done this before, timetabled ourselves to be online at the same time so we can discuss how something is working through 'chat'. but there will be other ways to maximise the actual collaboration that may not require online at the same time.
- Using lunch hours to discuss students progress more frequently... oh fun.
- Being careful to divide my time between my roles and sticking to those time separations. Setting it up in a more timetabled manner.

2017 for Visarts at HHS

More messing around with the limitations of google draw than real planning... 

ULEARN 2016

Thank you Spark and MIT for this opportunity.


 notes accompanying the slides:

Slide 1 - Tēnā Koutou Katoa Ko Kaiterau tōku Māunga Ko Waikōau tōku awa No Kaikoura ahau Ko Annette rāua ko Paul Bourke ōku mātua Ko Rowena Clemence tōku ingoa

Slide 2 - He Kaiako Te Huruhuru Ao o Horomaka Nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa. Welcome to my presentation as a Visual Arts teacher at Hornby High School in Christchurch. 

Slide 3 - We have new tools requiring new pedagogy that allows learning to happen ubiquitously, rewindably. Teachers dream of facilitating learning rather than ramming knowledge down throats to be regurgitated later. We have an opportunity for self-efficacy.

Slide 4 - ‘Why’? Woolf Fisher data from 2016 highlights the problem we knew we already had with writing. 72% of our new entrants into year 7 are below or well below the national standards in writing. The problem is not the ‘dumbness’ of our kids, as they are not.

Slide 5 - It is the skill-set to break up language and reapply it. People with good writing skills are generally seen as more credible. Are our students equitably empowered when they are constantly playing catch-up with national standards in writing?

Slide 6 - There are no ministry exemplars in Art for the junior levels. Art teachers apparently ‘just know’. Equal emphasis and weighting is on all four strands. Two of these strands require written/vocabulary based understanding.

Slide 7 - So I’m look at Writing. Understanding key words so they can use them effectively. Compare their work to what they understand of the curriculum, assess, plan their next steps. How do we manage this ubiquitously? And in a way that supports learning beyond Art?

Slide 8 - If the students have the words, they control their learning. When they don’t have the words, it’s easier to talk one on one and watch you understand (there is a certain amount of reading your reactions going on) natural intuition and intelligence.

Slide 9 - Every child I surveyed returned a low self-rating of curriculum level. Most children surveyed demonstrated they didn’t understand that visual Arts had curriculum levels. We are doing everything as a school to address this stuff.

Slide 10 - So much we get confused, and it all comes from the one place of wanting to do our very best for our students, to undo the deficit theorising, social expectations, social issues that affect their daily lives.

Slide 11 - I had to move from how I have always done stuff to making it ubiquitously accessible. SAMR is clear measure for me to assess my own teaching methods against. This was not an overnight success. It was a gradual realisation based on the pedagogy driving it.

Slide 12 - I tried this. Over-complicated, too many words, I am an experienced teacher, but I still do not know much about teaching at year 7 and 8. Clearly. I had a whole class complete these and basically i told them the answers as they went.

Slide 13 - These are matching exercises. I broke those strands into keywords for level 3 of the NZC. Then it became obvious that I could use it more than just as a substitute for flash cards. A bank of learning cards could be created. With work on them.

Slide 14 - We have recently started to refer to these as ‘delete it’ exercises. In modifying the task, google draw was a pretty simple tool. I picked a year 7/8 class that I was only getting once a week, choosing to focus on understanding over doing.

Slide 15 - I figured I may as well see if I could extend their literacy over their practical skills in the time I had. Initially we used smart share on Hapara to send these out and a whiteboard to organise who had done what...but the whiteboard was always erased next time, and it was messy.

Slide 16 - More modification was required Drives were cluttered and students were not yet working on wholistic blogs. Hapara WORKSPACE allows for a cleaner interface and embeddable in the google site for Art. It changes this into something much more ubiquitous too.

Slide 17 - I can grade it and send the students feedback. Students who have arrived late to the class can be included in all prior learning. I can see when a student misunderstands their work, they can save their work as jpegs and upload them to their now functioning blogs.

Slide 18 - Beyond this, what is good and not so good, at each level? Using google sheets, I have made self-assessment sheets; rather than students guessing what ‘good’ looks like. I ‘know’ what it looks like without much ministry guidance, but still it needs to be carefully quantified.

Slide 19 - This is shared with all the students in their class. They can only edit their named row. Each row is locked down to only that student. They can see each other’s assessments for their work, but they cannot change it. It is coded to achieved, merit, excellence.

Slide 20 - So what can my students do now that they couldn’t do before? The students in this particular class can explain there are 4 strands, that they feel they are within level 3 because they can see it. An autistic boy does his work at home away from class, and that is fine. I can see it.

Slide 21 - This is where I want to take this next. In doing this, I will be working alongside our local primary school and another, to determine how Visual Arts is handled within a teaching programme, at the same time using this as an opportunity to refine project based learning skills for my own use.

 Christina Fortes, just for you.

Google slide for developing a unit of work with the students

Working on systemising how we break down the units so that the students can relate it back to their analysis on google drawings of each strand based on examples of work.

The idea being that we create and discuss the unit and it is added to as students experiences and understanding unravels in that first lesson. Will be seeing how it goes this coming week.

Making the Language Real and Accessable

   

Talking myself around in circles. The plan here is to make something that students can use to create their own DLO's. This is why I haven't bothered with Quizlet or Kahoots. They are engaging, accessible, and relatively easy to use. However, I want the children to be able to make something that they can digitally keep and refer back to. Without the language. I have some hesitation is continuing to use google draw, I don't want to come out of this one trick pony. But I do see it suiting my needs here.

I envisage crating a bank of language that is specific to each curriculum level, each curriculum strand. Flash cards/definitions that can then be applied to one art image or piece of documentation in making art. Students can then have their image surrounded by 4 to 10 different card, different colours as strands never sit neatly as one task per strand.

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.

7 BK SPARK MIT trial with google drawing 'cards'

Learning outcome; Understanding the Visual Arts strands at Level 3 of the NZC

Objectives:
- To be able to recognise explicitly what is required in meeting each strand
- To be able to figure out what is potentially missing in a piece of work within each strand
- To be able to negotiate their own strengths and weaknesses in their own work based on this breakdown of understanding

What we want to achieve because of this:
- A bank of resources that demonstrate understanding of each strand, within potentially the same piece of work
- To be able to differentiate not only between curriculum levels, but also between a low, mid and high standard in each curriculum level
- To be have an open, accessible and collaborative bank of student work that can be used in self-assessing, comparison and idea gathering for other teachers and students beyond Hornby.

What I have so far:
Level 3 Practical Knowledge;

We used a piece of work from another class that was incomplete, but clearly demonstrated this strand, at this level and in the unit of work this particular class is just finishing up. Verbally, students could easily identify everything I wanted them to be able to see. However, translating my intentions and their answers from a verbal conversation to the google drawing 'card' I made was more challenging. I have not taught this age level before. I over-construct sentences at the best of times. For 10 and 11 year olds, it must be terrifying. Working on the chrome books is significantly different to my laptop, which meant that we had some technical challenges, however, 7 bk were remarkably prepared to continue trying out 'how' to do this right. Eventually, we go t a good number of cards completed and saved.

What I am doing differently next time:
- Working on defining the strands in clearer and more simplidied language than last time.
- Using a chrome book as my teacher's computer, so I am in the same place as the students.
- Simplifying the language used on the google drawing 'card'.
- Use CARR awards more regularly during the lesson - no one seemed to notice, but it is a school system and I should have used it.

What I am happy about:
- It sorta worked
- The resilience of 7bk is awesome
- Their digital citizenship was on point - no off task behaviour on chrome books
- I can see this taking shape (just slowly) and a good positive direction.
- I can see how I could integrate the google self assessment sheet I have already worked on, with this; self-efficacy has to be an outcome of that approach in my opinion.
- I have found an educationally sound and useful way of working with google drawings - I initially just thought they were too basic to be of use with teaching something like Design and not relevant to anything else. I have changed my mindset, and solutions have presented themselves.

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.

Spark MIT 2016 first day of Professional Learning here in Auckland

Today I am at the Spark Headquarters here in central Auckland. 

Hotel room view

...and now without me in the way

We have had fantastic coffee, wonderful food and are awed by the amazing design of the building internally.

 

And then we had to go back to our actual reason for being here; what is the PROBLEM. This was a struggle as at times, it is easy to jump ahead to solutions for a problem you have a gut feeling about. But, have you checked yourself? Do you have enough to keep an inquiry going for a whole year? It occurred to me after I finished the process with the fellow Spark MIT recipients, that I had not done what I preach to my senior students to do, well enough; know your concept/theme (in this case problem) so well, that you always have a base of knowledge to go back to when you get stuck or require a new direction. So that is what I am doing.

Assess, Critique, Extend - Learn, Create, Share Visual Arts Junior Curriculum Levels

The problem: We have the potential for a culture of excellence within Visual Arts at Hornby High School based on sheer talent alone and certainly results are consistently very good and more so at UE level than ever before. Retention into those senior levels however, does not necessarily reflect the true level of ability at Hornby High School.

Students don’t necessarily understand what is expected of them or how to get there at levels 4 - 5 of the curriculum, this affects retention into year 11. Year 10 is the first year Art is an option class.

They don’t have achievable goal posts because there aren’t any within year 9 and 10 Visual Arts curriculum from NZQA. It is not their fault. This impacts on senior skills. They are not experiencing success as they could be if they cannot see the goal posts. If they can co-construct and self-regulate the goal posts, surely they become even more achievable. They also become ubiquitous, and allow for learning, students creating and then students sharing of their work in breaking down their understanding and helping to teach others how to break down an understanding of the curriculum at these levels. The flow-on should be better retention into levels 1, 2 and 3 and more consistent results at level 1. Students should be developing resilience in putting their own ideas out as assessable benchmarks.

The Data so far:

• Level 1 NCEA 2015 results, including retention into Level 2 and at Hornby High School. PAT stanines for those now level 2 students, from when they were in Year 10 in 2014.
• PAT stanines for the current year 10 option Art class that I teach from year 9 (soon to be updated with year 10 results).
• Blogs from Level 3 students who have low academic results in asTTLe/PAT as junior students, yet passed UE Photography.

So now I have my starting point more clearly laid out. I still have a lot of work to do, but am less solution minded and more problem focussed, which if I want to ensure the problem is actually addressed, is rather important.

MIT Manaiakalani Innovative Teacher's Scholarship 2016

This is something I applied for in 2015 as something to address in imbalance that exists in getting talented, priority learner Art students through into NCEA with as much confidence in the written/analytical strands of the curriculum, as well as handling the visual/technique based strands.

I want to create an online exemplar forum of student work that is live and demonstrates the curriculum at the junior levels as low mid and high. we are moving to reporting to our community along these lines, as a lot of schools already do, and even using NCEA terminology of Achieved, Merit and Excellence within each level. Years' 9 and 10 are my target group at the moment.

Writing and literacy is a major focus for our school and this inquiry I have planned addresses that focus in Art as well as working at making digital learning opportunities ubiquitous and moving critique and self-assessment into the modification and redefinition phase of SAMR (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition)

Rough Breakdown Of the Visual Arts Curriculum:

PK - Practical knowledge - at ALL curriculum levels this is technique/technical based learning in Art
DI - Developing ideas - likewise all levels, it is about formulating ideas to make your own art works happen and showing thought in doing so.
UC - Understanding Context - that art works are viewed and/or made
CI - Communicating and interpreting about your own and other's art works

The top two do in fact require a very good level of literacy at all levels to generally excel at them, however, you can to a certain extent do really well without this, as thinking can be so very visual too. But I feel it hinders not having that literacy.

The bottom two strands are most easily assessable (but I wonder if that means not necessarily understandable) with good literacy.

The order I have listed these strands is how they were initially released when the Visual Arts curriculum was released in the year 2000. However, when it was revised in 2008, the order was changed to have UC, PK, DI and CI as the order. While that may seem like not terribly important, it was a way of trying to get teachers to focus on making sure students understood the context of what they were studying. Hence making the emphasis a little more important that the students have higher levels of literacy, in order to truly manage the higher levels of the curriculum (NCEA).

Each year, there are students in our classes who are highly skilled visually, but are sitting much lower than you would want, with literacy. It is at every level. There are students who despite this, have been known at achieve University Entrance level in their chosen field of Art and I could rattle off a few dozen names from memory (not doing that on the public web though!). Equally there are just as many who don't make that level and it often appears, or can be explained by literacy levels.

There has been a clearer distinction for me lately - students who have participated in critique, even with low literacy levels, manage to eventually get to the level required, even though their language skills were less evident. Though this is often at the expense of the teacher's time and other teaching opportunities. More frequently, we have good examples of student learning and end achievement in the senior levels from students who not only participated in the group critiques, but also blogged about their work, in their own language, were more likely to succeed. I am not giving numbers here. My numbers are too low to use as statistics with any real integrity. I had 1 photography student at level 3 in 2015. So that is 100% pass rate. Really, that is not a good way to report statistics. My 3 painters gave me stats of 66% merit endorsement, 33% achieved grades and in total, obviously 100% pass rate. So clearly, I am amazing. Or the numbers are just too low to read as statistics. Those stats also don't show the students I lose leading up to level 3, and those the school itself loses before I could even possibly get them into a level 3 class. Again, lies and statistics.

That throws up the other issue that I am using this to also track and hopefully positively impact retention into NCEA courses here at Hornby High School as well as provide a real resource that other teachers can key into, students can access ubiquitously and use at their own pace to measure, target and improve their own learning. They will also be able to take their own work and share it as a valid, real, teaching and learning resource.

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?