New Google sites

First look, loved them. Second and third look did NOT love them. Up to my fourth look and genuine attempt at dealing with them and I am back to loving them.

Things to remember about Google sites in the new format:

- You have to expect things to work differently and for you to be adaptable to those differences.

• I spent quite a bit of time making myself recreate our Art site in the new version, and in the process sending google endless feedback about what annoyed me so far. Then as I went, I realised my own mindset was just a bit stuck. I used to use tables and then alter the html code to pretty it up, in adding buttons to my site. That is not what I even need to do now, I just didn't see that I didn't need to mess with the code to create a clean look that I wanted. In essence that was all I was after. I still hate that I cannot lock down pages to be private, which was a tool I found extremely useful with the classic sites, but I am becoming more used to just hiding that same content within my drive and keeping it locked down there to who I want to see it. So while the buttons or links might be visible, the content just needs to be within the locked down file. 

- You don't need to have an IT degree to manage aspects of it like old sites. It is actually just click and drag.

- You should definitely have a plan of how your page 'tree' works. I was able to develop this more organically with classic sites, though every now and then i did disconnect the wrong pages and reconnect others I was meant to leave.

- You can only go one page deep into sub-pages.

- I cannot embed padlets into it. Maybe because they aren't a google owned tool?

- It will continue to improve. Google continues to develop these things, so it will do more eventually. May as well catch the train when it's not moving so fast, then have to catch up to it at full speed.

Click on the pic for the site so far... Aiming to be ready to go at the end of term two.

Signing up to this forum is a way of understanding the differences, imitations and keeping up to date with changes google makes to their new product.

Hornby High School Kapahaka

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

Start of 2015

We need a selfie stick! Today we are working on the best mocktail recipes, and blogs and google sites, in the country heat of Swannanoa, locked inside away from rather large blowflies, dobermanns and the nor'wester when it winds up every now and then.

Intentions for today are for the 'culture vultures' to get more comfortable with each other's blogs, for us to hoepfully facilitate each other's learning on blogs and to then work on. All without vodka...

still working...

So we intended this day to be about working on our blogs and google sites. This was a collaboration of colleagues who all had similar goals. We have succeeded in further up-skilling ourselves in blogger, albeit with frustrations with the technology, and we have nicknamed ourselves the 'culture vultures'. Rhymes well, but I am not sure about the meaning we are mean't to draw from it. Katie maintains it is 'sexy'. ? Don't they eat dead things? All of us are set up for continuing on with this process of gathering supporting information around the registered teachers criteria within our own practice, we have set up our own mini learning community that covers a number of the humanities within the school, and could easily and willingly cater for a more diverse range of representation, though we are just a group of colleagues who are also friends, and we are responding and supporting our own learning needs locally.

We will organise another learning time for google sites following this.

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. 

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

Year 7 and 8 Extension Art Programme

This has been running for the last two and a half weeks. Students were selected by their J block teachers as having shown an aptitude for Art AND being deserving of the opportunity. It does not mean that students are not talented if they didn't get selected, but the numbers were kept small deliberately. The Kete system does allow for the teaching of Art, and students have done some very cool stuff this year with their teachers using the Visual Arts strands.

Students worked on developing an A2 page of drawing centred around themselves. Easy - we started with their name and then extended it out to drawing stuff about them. They took it really seriously and have worked consistently on these, some taking their work home to complete and some staying during break times too.