Connected Learners Share

The Manaiakalani Digital Immersion programme is designed to support teachers in their first year of teaching in a 1:1 digital learning environment. This eclectic group of teachers includes beginning teachers and teachers who have been decade(s) in the profession; teachers who are in their first year in a Manaiakalani school and teachers who have been in one of our schools for years but have never had the opportunity to teach in a digital learning environment until now.


One of the professional learning opportunities designed for this group is a whole day professional learning group once a term. This provides a chance for teachers to come together and explore their own teaching inquiry, to network and share, to learn more about Manaiakalani pedagogy and valued outcomes, and to develop some new digital skills.

Click to open presentation

Today we had 35 teachers attend our plg exploring the Manaiakalani focus for Term 3: “Connected Learners (young and older) Share”.

We began the day with an overview of the goals, valued outcomes and pedagogy of the Manaiakalani Programme, and teachers formed groups of three to share how they were outworking these in their practice after two terms (six months) in our schools.

The focus then shifted to how we as adults share. This initial conversation separated out personal, social and professional sharing. There were predictable differences  and robust opinion sharing around:
How do you share?
How do you define the boundaries for your sharing? If you have them.....
How do you deal when the boundaries blur or are breached?

Click to open this collection of reflections

A ’speed dating’ session followed designed for our teachers to each share aspects of their professional learning arising from their Teaching as Inquiry this year.

After connecting with half a dozen teachers they were invited to reflect on what they had heard and learnt, in light of their own Inquiry. With 12 schools represented here it was apparent that this was quite an eye opening time for everyone. Why? Schools interpret this important aspect of teaching in a variety of ways and this can be seen in this slide show.

We then spent time exploring how our young people share in Manaiakalani schools and touched on some of our celebratory events like Schools Inc and the Film Festival. But our major focus was blogging which is evident in all our schools.  We have endless anecdotal evidence from teachers and learners about the power of blogging in raising learner engagement and outcomes and discussed this.

Click to open the padlet

But it was the research of Rachel Williamson which excited attention and debate. An external evaluation of an integral component of our education programme. After spending time reading the report and talking in groups, our teachers contributed to a padlet with an ‘I Should” statement.


The most frequently recurring statements indicated that our new teachers had not been interacting with the learners’ posts and had become aware that this was important.

We ended the day with a ‘Create’ activity inviting everyone to create an infographic sharing the data they could gather from their own blog analytics. These were shared on their own blogs and in our Manaiakalani Google+ community. Reading through these showed the ongoing depth of critical thinking in this group. Some of the teachers chose to share their infographics on the presentation below as well.




 It is a privilege to be part of a group like this who are so open to exploring their own practice and go to great lengths to improve outcomes for our tamariki.

Thanks to Karen and Georgia for sketchnoting the session today and sharing on your own blogs.

Blogging Supports Writing Outcomes

Blogging has played an important role in the Manaiakalani pedagogy for over ten years now and a generation of young people have been through our schools knowing that sharing your learning publicly is an important part of the learning process.

Many of our learners have chosen to continuing sharing on their blogs during the school holidays and I have written posts like this sharing anecdotal observations about their holiday writing. Writing is a social activity for many people and our learners are encouraged when someone interacts with their post and they see on their feeds that people have viewed their blog.

Over the 2015/16 summer holidays the Woolf Fisher research team set up a project to encourage more of our young people to blog during the long summer break to observe whether this was in fact a valid way to arrest the frustrating 'summer drop-off' that so many of our priority learners experience. This was led by Rachel Williamson. Rachel constructed the Summer Learning Journey using the Manaiakalani pedagogy and the young people had multiple opportunities to Learn, Create and Share as they explored the world virtually.

A full description of the programme and the outcomes can be seen on this page on the Manaiakalani website.

Two observations I have noted from the research report:

The first one is a highly valued outcome in our Manaiakalani schools. The learners who participated in the blogging programme did not experience a significant drop off in their test scores as measured by the e-asttle writing test. The blue line on the graph shows the summer bloggers test scores over the course of a calendar year. The red line shows a matched sample of learners who did not blog over the summer (matching gender, ethnicity and achievement level) and displays the trend we are familiar with - writing outcomes rise during the school year and take a deep slide over the summer break.

The second observation is an outcome that is valued by some people who question us about 'WHY' we 'LET' our young people share their learning prolifically online. These adults express concern that the writing might not be perfect, and imperfect surface features may even reflect negatively on the child, the family or the school.

Glass is half full people!!

Rachel analysed the surface features of the writing shared online during the summer break - presumably completed with little direct adult support - and came up with surprising results that should reassure people whose inclination is to micro-manage children's published writing.

Accuracy was measured using four indicators: Percentage of words spelled correctly, percentage of word sequences that were correct, percentage of punctuation marks that were used correctly, and percentage of sentences that were complete and correct.
In each case the percentage score was calculated as: Number of correct examples/total number.

Spelling:
On average, 96.7% of the words in each post were spelled correctly

Correct Word Sequences:
 On average, 88.2% of word sequences in each post were correct

Punctuation:
On average, 77.1 % of punctuation marks in each post were used correctly.

Sentences:
On average, 73.6% of sentences in each post were complete and accurate.

We highly recommend you read the report yourself.

It Starts with US: LCS Pedagogy

"If we are to successfully implement the Learn Create Share pedagogy with the children we teach, it has to begin with the big people - the adults."

Teaching is a profession where we need the support of the adults in our work life  - cause we’re surrounded by kids!  Whether these kids are wee children, teens or almost adults, they can’t (and shouldn’t) replace the friendship, collegiality, professional energising and empathy our fellow teachers provide.

But sharing is a funny old thing in teaching; it seems to come naturally to some and has to be specifically elicited from others.

In the past millennium, as a bright eyed beginning teacher, I walked into my experienced buddy teacher’s class next door the day before school started and as I was looking admiringly at his walls he snapped, “Don’t you go stealing my ideas!” Who knows what that was about?

For many teachers a reluctance to share is mostly about underestimating their own competence, shyness, fear of the ‘tall poppy’ syndrome or simply never having been told how good their ideas and practice are.  I don’t think it is a competitive streak in most cases.
One significant barrier to teachers feeling empowered to share has been the term 'Best Practice' that is used by government, academics and senior management in education.  We need to get away from this mentality which emphasises if something is being shared by a teacher it is considered to be an exemplary model of teaching for all to follow. Sharing (within the bounds of ethics, common sense and good taste) should be a snap shot of what I have learned today and I am putting it out there so you can learn from it too.

“If we are to successfully implement the Learn Create Share pedagogy with the children we teach it first has to begin with the big people - the adults” is a quote from Russell Burt.

The digital age we live in has made it so much easier to share with our colleagues as we enjoy the same affordances our children experience - anywhere, anytime, any pace and with/from anyone.  Many teachers are now well established in social networking with their peers, sharing their experiences and learning from each other. Some school leaders have formalised the processes for their staff to share professionally in spaces such as Google+ Communities, Blogs, Google Groups etc.

However we choose to do this, it is of huge benefit professionally and very important to have established in our own practice before we embark on this with our learners.

Some examples of how our Manaiakalani teachers share their practice include:

Google Plus Communities - we have our own public Manaiakalani community, and many of us belong to and contribute to other communities as well.

Blogging - a number of us blog professionally and in some of our learning groups it is a required part of the process. Here are some to get you started: Aireen,  Kirsty, Laura, Matt 

Twitter - lots of us can be found sharing on Twitter

Face to Face - our teachers put their hands up to share with colleagues at conferences and unconferences regularly, as well as at our local professional learning opportunities.

We invite you to explore some of the links below that will take you to resources and sharing communities contributed by our Manaiakalani teachers.

Manaiakalani Innovative Teachers

Explore the links here as teachers have shared their inquiries from the 2014 school year.  These cover the full range of learners from Year 1- Year 13.






MDTA Beginning Teachers

This group of beginning teachers have shared their journey throughout their first year of teaching in Manaiakalani schools.  Lots of interesting ideas to explore from the link above.

Digital Immersion Network for new teachers.

Our teachers new to our cluster begin publicly sharing from the very first orientation session they attend and this becomes an ongoing part of their practice.

Teachers contributing resources to our websites

Manaiakalani Teachers regularly contribute resources to our profession learning websites so their colleagues can learn from their practice.  These are never called 'best practice'. These reflect how we are, what we have learnt, on the day we make them.

Share: Learn Create Share Pedagogy

Two of the foundation goals of Manaiakalani are encapsulated in the word 'Share':

1. Work with learners to establish an authentic audience for their learning outcomes
2. Empower our learners with an evidence-based belief that their personal voice is valuable and powerful

I have written several posts on this blog over past years about the significance of an 'authentic audience' and this one back in 2008 is still highly relevant.

Sharing, like giving, has benefits in both directions; the person shared with is blessed as is the person doing the sharing.

For both our learners and our teachers the act of sharing is hugely beneficial. It it is affirming to receive feedback and a sense of appreciation, and motivating to raise the bar on ones own performance.

I am sure many adults shudder when memories return of having to handwrite a neat/perfect copy of something so it could be 'displayed on the wall'.  Especially for those of us old enough to have experienced the drip of fountain pen ink ruining a laborious copying task.
And who read it?  No-one.
Or to have been selected by the teacher to come out the front of the class to read our completed piece to disinterested-at-best classmates.

The digital age, with social media leading the charge, has made sharing the minutiae of our lives with all and sundry the norm. And in the process created a new social disease as well as careers and business opportunities.

In 2005, when social media was becoming main stream, it was a given that education needed to rethink how to move into this world that our children want to inhabit and to harness this new source of energy and engagement for our bottom line - raising student achievement outcomes. Our journey in Manaiakalani has been one of carefully weighing up the pros and cons of developing a learning environment increasingly online. We've been proactively using tools that would 'hook' our learners while constructing systems and processes which are age appropriate, legal and allow us to teach our young people to be Cybersmart from first arriving at school.

To use a transportation metaphor, sharing your learning online follows a similar process to learning to drive a vehicle; 
you start as a young child strapped into a car seat in the back simply enjoying the ride, you hear the types of driving talk and explosions the driver makes from time to time, you graduate to sitting in the front seat next to the driver and observe their driving habits, you swap seats at the right age taking the wheel while the adult instructs you, etc etc

We do harness the huge audience potential of the internet to engage and support our learners, but we certainly enjoy more localised audiences such as our own school publications and assemblies; big events such as productions and learning showcases; our Manaiakalani Film Festival; and a live audience of thousands last night at the Movies in the Park event.

I conclude with the tagline chosen by the first KPE Podcasters in 2005, a group of Year 5/6 children who are now all grown up and have left school:
"We want you to hear what we have to say"