Interesting times up ahead

New Zealand will soon officially be on lockdown. Only essential workers will now be able to go to work. Families will stay within their 'bubbles'. So many changes are happening now due to the spread of Covid-19 around the world.

New Zealand's Prime Minister announced on Monday 23 March, that the nation will be on Alert Level 4 from Wednesday 26 March for four weeks.

My first initial thoughts when I learnt of the lockdown was MY FAMILY!!!! After I phoned my mum and discussed how our family will prepare for the lockdown, supplies shopping for my siblings and their children, I then set out to prepare my class for the lockdown and working from home for the next four weeks.

All teachers in our school made learning packs. I was not as frantic as the other teachers as most of my learners take their devices home and I knew we would continue to collaborate while they will be home.

In class before the end of the day on Monday, I tried to organise a hangout with my students by sending my class a hangout invitation. That was a total fail and it didn't work. Therefore, I sent an email to Fiona and she quickly responded and we set up a meet up on Wednesday morning to set up how I could do hangouts with my class during the lockdown.

I am so glad Fiona came to the rescue because she helped myself and Mr Nath in Room 10 set up how we could have hangouts by setting up the links for each class and giving us tips on how to set up our home learning pages on our class site. She also gave us very important Dos and Don'ts about having hangouts.

One of the Dos is to prepare a little recording of yourself to remind the students about the hangouts and what preparation they need to do before coming to the hangout. These recordings should be on the class site the night before.

This is my very first recording. You can tell that, as I was speaking, I was also trying to think about what to say next. I suppose the whole nervousness about remote teaching is also evident in this recording.

Teaching from home for the next four weeks. WATCH THIS SPACE!

Starting off my inquiry by doing proper profiling of the students

Today at our CoL PLG, we were asked to look at how we are profiling our learners in our target group. In my previous blog post I had selected what I was going to focus on for this year. However, I was able to learn today from Aaron the importance of looking at what has been happening to students in writing and then inquiring into how we can accelerate the learning of our students.

In my notes I have attached above are some really important questions. For example, looking at literacy practices in different contexts. My focus this year is on writing therefore, I need to look at where do the students like to write? I what curriculum area do they like to write. I feel this is important because their motivation to write in certain curriculum areas will tell me what motivates them to write.

I really value the statement above from Aaron. The student strengths are more important than their gaps. I reflected on this statement and I have realised in doing inquiries, I have often thought of this student has these gaps, that student has these gaps which is a deficit way of thinking. From this important learning, I will now move forward with a more positive outlook and look at where the strengths of the students and using these to address the gaps they have in their learning.

Last year in my inquiry, I wanted to have more whanau involvement as I was able to get. This year I want to work on getting more whanau to be involved in my inquiring into the accelerating of student progress in writing.

Profiling is important because one, it gives us a clear understanding of where to start with our inquiries. Two, it gives us the valuable baseline data we can use to measure our end of year results against.

Where to from here - PROFILING!

2020 Inquiry Focus

This year I am part of our school SAF (Student Achievement Function) team. In our meetings we have been going through our student achievement data for the past years and have identified the writing achievement of our students is not accelerating but rather declining for some year levels and stable for others.

We have shared this data with our teaching staff and we have all agreed that writing will be the area of focus for our teaching inquiries this year. 

After much reflection and going through notes from our writing intervention with a facilitator from Infinity, I have decided to focus on the authenticity of writing tasks. I believe when students have a purpose for their writing and receive feedback, they will be motivated to write and produce good quality and meaningful writing. 

This focus also links in with our class push to be better at blogging and trying to reach audiences around the world with our work. We have signed up for the Tuhi Mai, Tuhi atu programme and are eager to collaborate with our buddy teams from the Toki Pounamu cluster. 

Therefore, my inquiry question for my 2020 inquiry is:

Will providing authentic tasks where students have an authentic audience to read and give feedback about their writing, motivate my students to write and accelerate their achievement in writing?

I have yet to confirm my inquiry group for this year as we are completing our assessments this week. The majority of my focus group will be Maori boys as we identified there is a great need to cater for the learning of our Maori boys in their learning in all curriculum areas. 

Next steps:

• Identify inquiry group
• Collect student voice about writing
• Collect past achievement data from past three-five years
• Identify trends in student writing progress
• Collect whanau voice about how we can collaborate to support the student
• Share inquiry with my inquiry group
• Collaborate on group norms 

Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua: ‘I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past’.

2019 Inquiry Stocktake

The year year has started and I am now getting inquiry for 2020 started. I was not able to attend the first PLG for our Manaiakalani CoL team but have had the opportunity to catch up with Fiona afterwards. 

My first blog post for this year is a stocktake of last year's inquiry. Being a first year CoL teacher last year, there were a lot of new learning, challenges and great opportunities to network with other CoL teachers and the Manaiakalani team. As Mr Burt always says "We are a whanau in the Manaiakalani cluster". I really tautoko this. 

You will be able to see in my stocktake, the aspects of inquiry, challenges and ways to move forward for myself as a CoL teacher within Glenbrae School. 

This year my inquiry focus is shifting to another area of the curriculum but I will still be maintaining what I focussed on in 2019. 

My 2020 inquiry will be in a post soon to come. 

Kia Kaha Mrs Tofa!