The Power of ‘Word’: Why Students Should Blog, Especially in a Manaiakalani Setting

Blogging is a powerful tool for student learning and expression, offering lots of benefits that extend beyond the traditional classroom. When integrated within a pedagogical framework like Manaiakalani, the impact of student blogging is amplified, fostering connected, visible, and empowered learners.

(Click on image to go to Scarlett's blog post)

Above, the image is linked a student blog. The student is able to present their process along with their finished work and reflect as little or as much as they are comfortable doing. I had very little to do with provocations or scripting this particular post, as the student was ahead of their classmates. With possibilities of directed provocation, scaffolding and kaiako guidance, it might have looked different, OR it might not have been authentic. In saying that, once a student begins their writing, how much can I really 'control' the process even with provocations and templates, in a class of 25? How much should I control?

At its core, blogging provides students with an authentic platform to develop and refine thinking, communication and writing skills. The above example can be seen as a starting point, or it could be enough of an artefact of learning process that is stays as is. Nevertheless, the act of writing for a potential audience, (whether this is classmates, whānau, or the wider online community), encourages clarity of thought, improved grammar and spelling, and the development of a personal voice. It moves writing beyond an assignment for a single reader (Kaiako) to a meaningful act of communication - whether or not that is read by others. This process naturally enhances literacy skills and builds confidence in one’s writing abilities.

Beyond basic literacy, blogging develops critical thinking and the ability to analyse, as you have to research, organise your thoughts, and articulate/speak your understanding of a topic. The interactive potential of blogs, through comments and feedback, helps foster communication and collaboration. This small act helps to teach students how to engage in constructive dialogue and respond thoughtfully to others' points of view. In an increasingly globalised world, blogging provides students with valuable digital literacy skills, including cybersmart tools and responsible digital citizenship.

The Manaiakalani pedagogy of "Learn, Create, Share," provides a base for student blogging to develop and evolve. The "Learn|Ako" learning aspects see students acquiring knowledge and developing understanding. The "Create|Waihanga" learning aspects are where blogging becomes a natural and powerful tool for students to process, synthesise, and construct their own understanding by creating blog posts. The fact that students can and should include multi-modal elements to support an engaging post, enhances this. Communication and articulation of ideas and theories becomes more than ’word’. The "Share|Tohatoha" learning aspects are inherently embedded in blogging, as students publish their work online, making their learning visible and accessible to an authentic audience. (note; blogging is not and never intended to be the only way ākonga express and engage in sharing).

Ubiquity, Agency, Connectedness, and Visibility; central tenets to the Manaiakalani approach, are significantly supported by student blogging:

• Ubiquity: allowing learning and sharing to happen anywhere, anytime, extending the learning environment beyond the classroom. Students can access and update their blogs from any internet-driven device, making learning a continuous process.

• Agency: Empowering  students, by giving them ownership over their learning; a platform to express their ideas and perspectives. They can make choices about what to write, how to present it, and how to interact with their audience, encouraging independence and self-direction.

• Connectedness: Connecting students with their peers, kaiako, whānau and potentially a global audience. This provides a genuine purpose for their writing and opens up opportunities for collaboration, feedback, and exposure to other’s points of view.

• Visibility: This is one of the most significant impacts of blogging. Students' progress, understanding, and creativity are made evident through their blog posts. It allows kaiako, whānau, and the community to see and support their learning journey. Transparency also encourages student reflection on their own learning process.

In conclusion, encouraging students to blog offers a wide array of educational benefits, as researched and proven by both Woolf Fisher and in turn the Manaiakalani research team over the past two decades; from improved literacy and critical thinking, to enhanced digital skills and self-confidence. Because it is embedded within the forward-thinking pedagogy of Manaiakalani, championing learning, creation, and sharing in a connected and visible environment, blogging becomes an even more potent tool for empowering students and accelerating their achievement in a setting where we know, with our own kāhui ako data, they oftentimes (but absolutely not exclusively) begin with a deficit of learning of between 18 months and three years.

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.

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.

Developing Scholarship as our new normal.

I keep threatening this idea that all of our senior students will complete scholarship pages as normal practice. The reality of making sense of this exam in Visual Arts is in fact, exhausting. At least I found it so.

For the second time in the time I have been at Hornby High School, we had a student submit a scholarship work book for painting. The work was beautiful, but the pages were regenerated based on work she had done to fit the exam. So she entered it blind.

The focus was on her completing the folio with an excellence (you cannot be considered for scholarship unless you first attain excellence in the field you are submitting for). And she did that. But missed out on the scholarship. The most beautiful Excellence board I have seen though maybe I am biased, as she was also one of the most beautiful people to know as well. 

Why are we doing this?

Three good reasons why;

1) If it is normal, it is achievable. High expectations allow for higher achievement, you get what you expect and that is in line with Carol C. Dweck's mindset theories too

2) Again being fed up with the idea that we can't because of the stigma of being in the wrong area of a not that big city anyway... my blood boils over that one. 

3) The tools we have with GaFE and digital learning, the support of Manaiakalani in developing resources, lends us to be able to support learners to achieve this exam with more surety. So why on earth wouldn't we? If we were encouraged to have low expectations of our learners and ourselves, I suppose we may not... that is to to be our pathway though. 

So the development of such a plan for our learners here begins. 

Steps in the process:

- Reaching out to other schools who already offer a scholarship programme without offering a scholarship class (I feel that defeats the whole purpose of what a scholarship is, though I do understand that many schools see this as a highly competitive thing that adds a special kudos to their wider community)

- Breaking down Scholarship into meaningful chunks of understanding and clearly relating them to how our students learn throughout the year, so they can be completed in real time alongside real work.

- Making sure all resources and supports are ubiquitous and accessible online

- Using SAMR appropriately to support online development. 

Now onto do the work. 

I'm starting with moving our site into the new google sites platform, within that, it may well just be easier to develop scholarship resources, as we are starting afresh somewhat. As e-learning is a role I already have, making the switch to the new platform is in my best interests.

Genius Hour

Collaboration in PLD at work. Shared google doc with notes a few staff took simultaneously during our PD with Caroline From Christ's College on how she runs Genius Hour. Awesome session;
Contributions from:
Joanne Clark
Ben Carter
Sarah Richardson
Rowena Clemence

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.

Solo updated posters/steps for Visual Arts Hornby High 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.

CORE ED Modern Pathways to raising Maori Achievement

Janelle Riki's Presentation

Our Professional Development today focussed on Maori Achievement and digitally connected kids.

While the URL above is a link to it, most of the presentation was Janelle's spoken words around it. This was a very concise definition of why we should be using MLE's, which is one of the strongest points I took from it. Janelle was a very analytical and well-spoken presenter.

Slide 8 "...to be modern, anything were designing or building must be conceived of and developed for what we know and understand 'just now', drawing on our lessons from the past, an d considering the demands of the future.."

Explaining that our 'modern' spaces are about recognising what we need now and catering for the future made this seem a whole lot less 'catchphrase-y', and more about being realistic with our design, rather than just trying to force the modern practices we are already likely to be using into boxes that were designed for modern practice 50 years ago.

I liked that she started with "don't throw the baby out with the bath water" and took the time to break down how Maori culture and education values went from a traditional village system to victorian education systems, without anything in-between leading them through to this, and that this is likely according to some researchers, to still be impacting on the current state of affairs. I have read other pieces of research along those lines in reference to a number of other issues Maori are faced with, so while not a surprise, Janelle was really concise and confident with the information. Her point being, what can we learn from traditional village education systems that did exist? That students were relationally connected with their "teachers", were being evaluated for their natural strengths and then encouraged to play to those for the betterment of their society. They didn't necessarily 'pass' and 'fail' at what they were being taught, they just tried again and figured out a better way each time. Survival depended on it and it was a system of education that was 'fit for purpose'.

I do continue to wonder why we insist on teaching exam skills, and putting students through these; it isn't real applied learning, it doesn't resonate with you in 15 years time as something that altered your life, because it doesn't allow for you to practice a new skill or break down new information in a way that you will use for real, over again, in real life situations. An exam is almost like bad reality tv, without the captive audience; placing the 'ordinary. And when only 9 % of our Level One students credits came from external exams, I do have to wonder why? Level Two was 14%, Level Three I believe was 8%.

In relation to yesterday's PD on Feedback I then have begun to consider this; It is really easy for most of us to say that internal achievement standards under NCEA are easier. I say it. However, they are all aligned now and technically are not at a lower standard. Our students achieve them more readily, because we are working on them relationally. We are allowing them time to digest through feedback, and following up with that feedback, on the information/skill/problem being assessed and really learn it. It is naturally discursive, unless you sit there and just hand them out a booklet to work through and do your best to ignore getting to know your kids. So are they easier, or are they a more realistic learning processes? In Art, they are smaller chunks of learning, but I don't see them as necessarily easier. I don't think I will call them so again. You get the chance to reinforce the reflection process in class, over and over again if need be. 28 times to create a habit. You can give students the opportunity to critique themselves and each other. An exam paper only gets returned if you ask for it, and you cannot necessarily decipher the why or why not for the outcome. Our folios get returned with no feedback as to why decisions were made, but we know they were present in their process. It gets treated like a big secret we can't know, in case it undermines the sanctity of the 'exam'.

So in relation to the topic at hand, raising Maori achievement, I am not sure where this leaves the New Zealand curriculum or our assessment.

Slide 18, Janelle points out what she believes our students will need to survive their career pathway. Within this she graciously allowed that creativity should have been there and will be next time. While it fits brilliantly with the front end of our curriculum, it doesn't sit nicely with how we end up shoveling our students through as much NCEA as possible and prepping them for exams, from which they then only get 9% of their credits.

Is what we are doing with how many assessments are handled 'fit for purpose' for where we want our students to be at as people when they finally leave? Is what i am doing in our Art department fit for purpose in the same way? I believe it is, but I also think I need to analyse it further to really know.

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...