Term Three

Term Three Self-Managing Timetable

Over the holidays I thought about how 'leaping' into the timetable had gone.  Some things to think about:

Good Points:

• students liked working on their own thing in their own time.
• students did not need to pack up to move on to something else.
• After preparing everything in the weekend I was more free to work with individuals and groups.
• students felt like I was freer to help them
• No obvious 'groups' as such, to label the students
• Students felt they were more in control of their learning

Things to think about:

• How can I ensure that students are coming down to the workshops they need?
• It seemed that the students who really need the workshops can sometimes be the ones who don't come down to 'avoid' work?
• Maths independent work seemed the thing that dropped off when they were allowed to choose when and what they did. Students were getting literacy done as a 'priority' because they actually had an activity to 'do' whereas the maths is independent work or follow-up to a workshop.
• Some students found it hard to focus on one thing to get it completed.  Too much choice.
• some students chose workshops that I thought were too hard for them?

CHANGES

I decided to make a few changes.  Week One of Term Three would not be a self-managing timetable.  I wanted a week to re-focus the students and look at some of the key competencies.  We revisited Relating to Others and Managing Self and how important these are to the time-table.  I introduced the 'Thinking' rubrik as a focus for this term, both for their actual learning and what thinking they would need for successful learning.

I also decided to bring some structure back into the timetable.  Monday would be a day we would discuss the timetable and look at what the week's focus would be.  

To ensure that all students were completing their maths the middle block would be when I took maths workshops and everyone would work on their maths goals and practices...no exceptions.  This would also fit in with Jo's focus groups.

Example of Timetable

I split the class in half for the mult/div workshops to ensure that they would attend workshops focused around their level at least three times in the week.  Also I did have specific reading tasks for different groups depending on their levels.  Students were told they could come to extra workshops if they wanted to.

I felt that these changes have covered some of the things I felt unsure about.  The students still feel like they have more ownership over their week but I feel more secure in the knowledge that there is some structure around their learning.

Self-Managing Timetables

We got some student voice based around Student Agency at the start of Term Two to see where our students were and what they already knew about it.  Also to see how much choice and input they thought they had into their learning.

Student Voice

It was interesting reading through this.  The students want to have some freedom and choice in their learning.  Talking with the other teachers the students also want to have some structure around what they should be doing.  I will start with a simple timetable that they can fill in with tasks that need to be done.

After discussing and thinking about ways to start the classroom's timetable I decided to start Week 8 of term one.  We had been working on our managing self rubric and knew that this would be important.

I wanted the students have access to their own copy of the Weekly work so they could change, highlight, write on and have ownership of their week.  Here is the first weeks slide:
Week 8 Term 2

The students had to fill in their own timetable making sure that they completed all of the work.
I really just leaped in with the students to give this a go.  We looked at the managing self rubric to make sure they were 'split-screening' and thinking of this as well as content.
I found that some students were very good at their time-management and some clearly only wanted to do what they 'liked' doing.
I had some things to think about over the holidays to make the time-table more effective and make sure the students were completing what they needed to.

Google PD Summit Two Day Workshop April School Holidays

Google Summit Notes and Links

This Summit actually helped us think about what our focus should be and moved us even more in the directions of student agency.

This really became important for me:

'Start with Intro of Ako, goal setting and individual timetables.

Making them feel like they are in charge.'

This is where I could start. My Maths was already heading in this direction. I could continue with this and then build in individual timetables.

Questions:

• How much freedom should I allow them?
• what pre-loading would they need?
• Very important to focus on key competencies...(already had done Relating to Others, this term would be important to focus and self-assess using Managing Self)key competencies

From Good to Great with G-Suite

Slides from summit

What does student agency actually mean?

Students acting for themselves

Agency is the ability to make choices about and take an active role in one’s life path, rather than solely being the product of one’s circumstances. Agency requires the intentionality and forethought to derive a course of action and adjust that course as needed to reflect one’s identity, competencies, knowledge and skills, mindsets, and values.

Self-directed learning Links:  Self-directed Learning

We had a meeting and discussed our change in focus.  See link below:
Notes from meeting 30/5

Ideas and Reflections

Ideas and Technology:  Technology

Learning Inquiry 2017

Initial ideas around our Inquiry for this year:
Term One Week Three
Week 5

During Term One I decided that I wanted to work on how I could use technology as a tool to help with student agency in Mathematics.

At the end of last year I decided to let the students have all of the learning intentions that they needed to meet the standard in statistics.  They then had to follow a process whereby they could choose what they worked on and when.  They then had to prove that they could meet their goal in some way.

The students really enjoyed this.  Many were more focused on what they needed to achieve instead of me just telling them each day what they needed to learn.  I decided this was a good place to start this year to help the students have more input into their learning.

The Process:

CHOOSE A GOAL

What do you need to know next?

RESEARCH

Where can you look? Who can you ask? 

JOIN A WORKSHOP!

TAKE NOTES

What will help you remember it? What can you write to help you understand it?

PRACTISE

Give it a go! Use repetition! Test each other!

Prove IT

How can you prove  that you now understand it?

The students had to follow this process and needed to be able to say where they were on it at all times.  This works well with the majority.  I use workshops for students who need more input when understanding and researching.  

Example of Goal Sheet:

Geometry and Measurement

Length. Perimeter and Area

Learning Goals

Goals

Level 3 LENGTH, PERIMETER AND AREA I am learning how many centimetres there are in 1 metre I am learning how to use a ruler to measure an object in centimetres I am learning to measure the perimeter of a shape I am learning to measure the area of rectangles

Level 4 LENGTH, PERIMETER AND AREA I am learning about the size of a millimetre and how many are in 1 cm I am learning to measure objects that include parts of cm I am learning how big 1 km is and how it relates to the other measurements I am learning to convert between units (whole numbers, decimals) I am learning to find the area of triangles and parallelograms I am learning to find the area of more complicated shapes I am learning to find the perimeter of a circle I am learning to find the area of a circle

Extension – Level 5 ·         I am learning to select appropriate measurements for a variety of problems ·         I am learning to convert between metric units, using decimals. ·         I am learning to deduce and use formulae to find the perimeters and areas of polygons and the volumes of prisms. ·        I am learning to find the perimeters and areas of circles and composite shapes.

Since the holidays, however, my focus has changed more to:

"how do we reduce the reliance on the teacher and how do the students own their learning?"

I feel it is much more important to focus on student agency and getting the student to have more ownership of their learning.

 http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/Curriculum-resources/NZC-Online-blog/Learner-agency

http://elearning.tki.org.nz/Teaching/Innovative-learning-environments/Student-agency-in-an-innovative-learning-environment

Here are the student examples that we used to look for good features of narrative writing and to see where they sat on the 5-star writing guide.  The students liked using their own writing and as they were working in groups the discussion about the levels was pretty detailed and pretty spot-on.

SPOOKY STORIES CONTINUED....

An interesting thing happened after we had been doing a lot of story starters, discussions and sharing.  We discussed the idea of writing our own spooky stories from scratch using all of the things we had been working on, and using our criteria.  I thought this would be a great ending to this unit and that the students would leap into it with enthusiasm  Our purpose to was to create our own book of spooky stories for the classroom.

They were all very keen and we used graphic organisers to plan our stories.  (A simple narrative one and a 'kapiti island' story starter. Kapiti Island looks like a short story with its events (hills) leading up to a climax and then down to a conclusion).  It was not long after they started drafting however, that I realised, particularly with my target group, they were reverting back to their dialogue-laden, this happened and then this happened, events-based writing, instead of their rich atmospheric and descriptive writing they had been doing when completing their story-starters.  It was like they could not transfer their new skills over to their 'own' work.

I stopped the class and I actually told them what I had been seeing and we discussed why this might be happening.  Most of them said that they hadn't realised that was what they had been doing.  I modelled writing my own story and reminded them of what we had been working on and how to pull it all together.  The power of modelling!!!!!  Some of them started again and some re-worked their stories.  Their end products were particularly good.  Some of the boys really worked hard on improving their drafts which was a first.  One of the target group who is usually sitting at 2a/3b, mostly because he can't be 'bothered' writing, wrote an amazing story that was at least a 4p/4a.  The whole class loved it and when they discovered who wrote it, were very impressed.  It boosted his confidence heaps! 

I chose 5 examples of their writing and we worked in groups to level them using the 5 star writing guide.  The groups were very accurate and levelled them well.  We put these on the wall.  The students liked having their writing used as exemplars.

This whole spooky story writing has been a great success.  I think my challenge now is to keep these boys motivated whilst writing in other genres.  How can I keep this enthusiasm when it comes to information reports, exposition, procedure etc.  Do I need to actually do these in a big way?  Would continuing with fiction work still continue to improve all of their writing skills anyway.....and at least they are writing and enthusiastic?  Maybe I could continue with a mixture of both? Mmmmm.....

SPOOKY STORIES

We had just finished our WW1 work where we had been looking at information reports and persuasive writing and I felt the students needed a change.  Thinking about how to engage the boys I wanted to try the story starters again.  They had all been talking about scary movies and video games so I decided to show them some spooky story starters and try to do some narratives that created an atmosphere and painted a picture in the reader's mind.  We were also working on inference in reading so we could look at 'showing not telling'.

I knew that if I just said write a spooky story, my target group would struggle and say they couldn't think of anything.  I found some great spooky mini short stories on video on the Literacy Shed.  I watched them to make sure they were appropriate and chose a good place to stop them.

Literacy Shed - the ghostly shed 

All of the class loved these stories and were very engaged with these.  They loved sharing and even the target boys were eager to share.

This is one sample of a target boy's starter for his own story:

Kate wearily opened her eyes.  The darkness engulfed her.  Her surroundings were unfamiliar, her head was pounding.  She was in a world of pain.  Her chest rising and falling, snippets of the night before racing through her mind.
"Need a hand?" asked a familiar voice.
He pulled Kate up.  She felt like a train wreck and probably looked like one too.

Example 2:

This is an excerpt from one of the boys who found it very hard to start but worked on this quietly and was proud of his 'short sentences to create tension'.  This is his first draft, he obviously has to work on surface features but for this boy he's made a great start.

Not only the target students benefited from these activities.  My able writers were also loving it:

(unfinished)