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.

Reflecting on PBL Developments with Business & Enterprise Kete in Year 9.

How have things gone in year 9 Art this year so far? Probably ok, but man it was disjointed. I have finished with Teaching 9 TN and Cindy has finished up teaching 9 Ca. We take on 9 mn and 9 hy for terms three and four.

We finished the term with the Business and Enterprise kete for years' 7 - 9 and a market day on the netball courts. It was overwhelmingly successful, with most student business making a profit over a loss, and all student businesses having learnt some lessons about the harshness that can be business.

We are in a world where our young people can seem so entitled - how do you get the latest iphone worth more than a good second hand car, without actually paying for it upfront? Pretty easily it seems - and the pressure is on for parents to provide their children with these things because of that sickening feeling that they will be the odd ones out, the rejected child and less likely to survive the hostility that can be adolesence.

From within this very world, Janine Morrell-Gunn from Whitebait Productions and Matt Brown from 'My Father's Barber' lectured every single Year 9 on how realistically hard, full of failure and fear it was to get a business up and running.  There were still pockets of 'this is what I want to do, so you should want it and buy it because I said so'. That is entitlement, without actually putting the work in, knowing whether your market even exists, or if it is just a vanity project. BUT, these pockets were remarkably small. Most students put thought into their product, and went beyond this is what I want to do because I like it, into how will I encourage others to like it too, or should I consider something else instead of, or as well as? That is business. Know your market and work to that, not against it or ignorant of it. At the end of the day Art sells too and is just as marketable as any other product.

Back to my point. The disjointed nature of this was somewhat down to me. I wasn't sure how I fitted in with this and in fact I was disappointed that we didn't shut the whole curriculum down and whole heartedly attack it with our own expertise as leverage. So we did our thing for term one, then tried to teach around the kete in relation to business and enterprise.

However it wasn't just a 'me' problem, it is a 'new thing' problem, 'unfamiliarity' problem, 'time-based' problem, 'how does our hierarchy/systems work with this' problem too. There were meetings to try and keep things together. I'm not sure we were reporting back or updating progress from any of us in our 'siloes' that we are desperately trying to break down. We did our own thing because we hadn't resolved how we all fitted together. Room to breathe please. We were still doing the traditional job we have been employed by the school and MOE to do; subject specialist teachers. Gotta start somewhere though.

We were only teaching the Visual Arts aspect of this to two of the four Year 9 classes due to our timetable. There was clear crossover between DTE and Visual Arts, but the other two year 9 classes that we didn't teach, were not doing DTE this semester, only one of the two classes Visual Arts had, was currently doing DTE. More disjointedness.

For whatever reason DTE only gets one hour a week, but were trying to do the same thing in terms of advertising and visual language, but there was no room to breathe to even correlate that. I note that although jingles were written with groups through Music, no where were they able to use these to market their wares on the day of the market, adding to my sense of disjointedness between subject specialists and the process itself.

Planning in relation to how we may or may not fit in with the Arts kete (undecided from beyond me) for Visual Arts will take this stuff into account. As will an expectation that we are either in it full on or not at all and doing our own thing. In the mean time, until we are at a point where we can shut the curriculum down and go for it, we still have our traditional jobs to do, for us, teaching Visual Arts according to the curriculum and reporting back to whānau on the strands within that subject.

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.

Developing Resilience continued...

Last year, I started thinking about how resilience could be addressed in a more explicit manner in my classes. As one of our school values, it is obviously something we as staff here feel is needed to be boosted. I heard something on the radio on the way to school the other morning about how 'Human Resources' teams in big companies assess potential employees' "RQ" or resilience quotient. I don't know if that is true! Half way through writing I just did an internet search and there is definitions and a website on which you can test your Resilience Quotient. There are PDF forms and online forms you can use to be tested.

I have become a little more sensitised to this, having an intern (student teacher) from NZGSE with me this term. She has noted, strikingly in her opinion, how quickly a high proportion of students give up, rate themselves as rubbish, and are not resilient. This is something that though I'm aware of, I think it has become something I take for granted - my awareness of it, that is. I know it, I don't fully accept and I do actively work on it, like it is just something to work on, as that is what it is for me. And it is for everyone who teaches here. It is why we have resilience as an explicit value. It worries me that I could become so used to it, that I don't take the time to care about raising it up in my classroom.

So last year, in SK we did the mono-prints, and I wouldn't let them throw them out, even if they hated them. For the last 3 years, my first project with year 10 students has been all about not hiding your mistakes, but making something more of them - "beauty in your mistakes" was one year, and this year it has been our learning outcome of  'making your mistakes your intentions'. Going with the flow, and adapting an attitude of  'oh dear, the ink went there, how do I make that work for me?'

1.2 - Level one: At Year 11 we have been making sure they don't have enough time to even acknowledge them in the learning process; Nicole (intern) and I were both first year fine arts doing similar programmes. Life drawing was a pretty normal part of this. You do 3 hours of drawing in one session, once a week. For me, it was a compulsory aspect that you had to pass to graduate onto level two. So, your first half hour is warm up drawings 30 second poses, followed by 2 minute poses, then something like 10 minutes, leading up to 30 mins or an hour or more, depending on how your teacher felt at the time. Always you would start with 30 seconds. So did we. We took the chairs away (locked them out the back), encouraged gestural drawing and set a timer:

 

These are a few of the more finished ones so far. We gave them more time on this, but at a certain level, they are losing some of the fluency they were achieving.

 

 

Students created a good 10 - 20 pages of drawing each, and because they were drawing so fast and changing papers without reflecting on them, looking for flaws, they had no choice but to develop a sense of fluency that they would have been too scared to do, if we had let them just meander their way through the three lessons that they did this for. It does mean a lot of unfinished drawings, but we are hoping that there is still enough honest evidence of fluency (excellence) or control (merit) in most, as there is definitely enough base recording information (achieved). I'm really proud of these drawings and of how seriously this lovely class have been taking themselves. We even had one of our students, who messed up with her  personal management (taking time off class, knowing she should not have) asking if she could work through the 30 second drawings by herself to catch up. While it's harder to be successful without the classroom momentum, it showed she was doing something resilient. Progress!

Year 7 & 8 Extension Progress

On Friday morning, The group of students doing extension Art will be presenting their work through their Hui. I have not been to one of these before, so this will be my first time.

We have had a go at some spray painting to create tonal and textural grounds to work on top of and painting back into these with white paint. This has been a lot more challenging for the students and they have tried really hard.

This has been an interesting learning curve for me in regards to how to manage that learning phase that is not as close to developing abstract thought. Breaking teaching sequences into smaller steps has been more important.

In working on a tonally darker ground, students had to figure out how tone worked in the first place, almost backwards to their traditional learning when it comes to drawing. they already have a mid tone or a dark tone in place, so instead of drawing their mid tones onto the surface with a pencil, pressing harder where they want an area darker, they have to reverse their thinking - applying more white paint or chalk where they want an area of their drawing lighter, leaving the ground in tact where the tone is already there. It's a little like the visual equivalent of patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time. Students have to ignore their natural instinct to apply more of their drawing medium to the surface to darken their tone.

Claudia

Cinnamon

Kingston progress

 

Amber

Jordan

Kingston finished

Kingston Progress

    

Mikayla Progress

Mikayla finished

End Of 2014 - Using a Blog to Collect Evidence for Teaching Criteria

SO, we started using google sites just recently for creating ubiquitous and hopefully discursive teaching in our classrooms. Anna Taylor (in the photo) and I worked together to set ourselves up with a professional blog, having  started the morning with some work on our google sites. Then we located the teaching criteria and the first one listed was:

1. establish and maintain effective
professional relationships focused on
the learning and well-being of all
 ākonga2
i. engage in ethical, respectful, positive and
collaborative professional relationships
with:
• ākonga
• teaching colleagues, support staff and
other professionals
• whānau and other carers of ākonga
• agencies, groups and individuals in
the community

The first step for us was to use each other to figure out the best approach for this. I have used blogs previously, but only for Year 12 and 13 photography, rather than an all out approach to collecting evidence of being a professional teacher.

Next step, new posts, a day out during the summer holidays in which we work together as a group on blogs...