PLG -Sharing Collaboration

Our recent PLG for the Kaikohekohe Cluster was focused on each school sharing a 10 minute presentation on how collaboration is leading to better outcomes for teachers and students. This was a great opportunity to listen to what is happening in other schools that fit in with my inquiry focus. A lot of what was discussed was the use of digital tools by students that allows the opportunity for collaboration to take place.

One college shared about how two teachers from different subject areas are working collaboratively together and the impact this is having on their students. I think this is very exciting and look forward to booking a visit to see this in action.

Below is the presentation our school shared on how collaboration is leading to better outcomes for learners, especially our target students. The video demonstrates a targeted lesson that is taken by one teacher while the other teacher is taking the whole class for admin tasks in the morning. This presentation was presented by our junior team but this concept is happening across our school.

Another Day at Spark HQ

Today we had our second hui at the Spark HQ.

We had a great start to our day listening to everyone's journeys so far with their inquiries and making connections with our inquiries to others' inquiries in the group. It was affirming to hear that others are facing the same challenges that I am facing as I work through my inquiry with my colleagues.

It was great to meet up with my Spark buddy Christina today and discuss how we are going to work together throughout the year on my goals.

The big challenge today was to think about the Innovation aspect in my inquiry.
My innovation is about assessing the teachers about where they are at in regards to collaboration, visible learning and use of digital tools to help accelerate progress.

As a staff, we need to work collaboratively to construct a rubric which we can use to assess where teachers are at and also to discuss how to use the rubric. We need to be having discussions about what we value, what collaboration looks like and what would we be seeing in a collaborative learning environment.

Teachers will be able to use this rubric to self-assess where they are at according to the valued indicators and decide what they need to work on and what they need support with. These self-assessments would also fit alongside classroom observations and reflections/surveys completed at the end of each term.

Target Students

End of Term One - Where are our target students at?

Every team completed an end of term survey to discuss how collaboration, visible learning and digital tools have contributed to student's learning, especially accelerated progress for our target students.
We then had a staff meeting and discussed the progress of our target students. We discussed what we are doing in our collaborative space, with the support of digital tools and visible learning to help accelerate these learners.

So of the key points were:
- Making use of time where one teacher can manage the team. The other teacher taking accelerating learning groups for feed in lessons of skills before their learning groups)
- Specific target group teaching times (split from the rest of the team) really focusing on their needs. Creating their learning pathways of what they need to do to move to the next level.

This is one student discussing his learning pathway at the end of Term One.

Quote from one of the collaborative teams.
"We believe the children have made accelerated progress by participating in the target group. They have made more progress than children at the same level that were not part of this group."
- Changing groups and teachers when the need arises, not waiting!! Students are not waiting for the rest of the group to catch up etc.
- Providing rewindable learning eg videos, slides etc that the students can revisit if they need to.
- Less whole class time. Students are making use of the class sites / visible learning to come in from break times and get on with their learning instead of waiting for teacher instruction.
Quote: "It has gained us more time to work in a flexible way 1-1 or in small groups with lessons targeted to specific problems as they arise."

-Using mixed ability grouping. Students are learning from one another.

-Students making more use of the commenting tool to provide feedback/feedforward to their peers.

-Having multi-modal sites for the students where they have choice in what they want to learn/create and share.

Sir Ken Robinson Video

So just watched this short video from Sir Ken Robinson talking about changing the education paradigm, so we prepare our student's for the future and how we are killing creativitiy. A very interesting watch and one that we as teachers at Ohaeawai school can really relate to. Towards the end of the video he talks about education still be single classrooms, separate subjects and how we should be getting students to work collaboratively as it is the key to growth.

In our collaborative working spaces at Ohaeawai we are getting students to work collaboratively, teachers are working collaboratively, children are moving to different spaces with a larger classroom space and we are working hard to integrate our subjects through our term themes.

This term our Manaiakalani Outreach themes are Creativity, Empowerment and Engagement.  We need to think carefully how we allow creativity for our students.