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.

Global Collaboration

One of the joys and benefits of technology developments in the past decade has been the ability to connect, communicate and collaborate with people from all over the world as part of our shared learning experiences. We have benefited from having a number of schools in the USA interested in video conferencing with our students and working together on collaborative projects. However, because we have some shared history from Europe a few hundred years back, we can be lulled into thinking that we need to be doing 'projects' together rather than spending time finding out about how each other lives and sees life.

After two weeks in the USA enjoying the unfailing hospitality and kindness of people across the six states we visited, I have been reflecting again on the many cultural differences between Kiwis and North Americans. Many times I have reminded myself to not be deceived by the fact that we speak different versions of the same language. We have very different cultures, influenced as much by factors such as geography and climate as by our forebears.

I would urge both Kiwis and Americans to make the most of these digital communication opportunities to explore (and enjoy) the real cultural differences between us and not make presumptions based on what we glimpse on television ( NB: Kiwis) or how Peter Jackson and other movie directors portray us (NB: Americans). This is the first time I have visited the USA when more than 50% of the people I have talked to have complimented me on my soccer team! And even more have told me that visiting NZ is 'On my bucket list'.

I have been taking notes as I have travelled around, mainly via photos on my phone, of things that have intrigued / amused / astounded / informed because we don't experience them in New Zealand. In no particular order, here are some snippets - Vive la difference!

items with an ** are illustrated in the photos below....

First item has to be: everything is larger than anything New Zealand has ever experienced - you name it, it will be much bigger :)

• Portions and malls; trucks and land; holiday houses - 4 bedrooms seemed minimum- and campers; fishing lines; airports

America has great roads - huge roads, fast roads, well maintained roads. Lots of toll roads to pay as you travel on. And they drive fast on them.

• Everything on the the roads seems to be huge. The trucks, the cars, the SUVs, the boats being towed.
• People tow amazing combinations - fast eg a ute towing a very large camping trailer towing a car towing a boat. All in one long line. Going fast.
• Motor cycles don't seem to require helmets - even on the freeways going fast **
• Radio station frequencies are advertised on the sides of freeways dedicated to giving you information about the area you are traveling through
• Sign on the back of a passing truck: "My USA - no comfort or aid to the enemy".
• Every state has different laws about seat belts. They change as you cross state borders eg Virginia says " Buckle up Virginia - It;'s a law we can LIVE with!"
• In some states the speed limit is enforced by aircraft!
• On a very fast freeway we all screeched to standstill while a state trooper shooed a family of ducks across the highway
• We saw 3-4 dead bambis on the side of busy roads. Maybe cars are more lethal than guns nowdays

National pride - you have to experience July 4th in the USA to really get a picture of people who know how to do national pride.

• Every house on the street flying the flag and sporting bunting. And if you go to church over the weekend you get to see it in the church context too. **
• The food in the supermarket came flag-themed with masses of red/white/blue food for sale on July 4th **
• Interesting the way they sing "God Save the Queen" on July 4th - kinda nice

Other stuff

• Inside a decadent ice-cream eatery, Cold Sone Creamery, there is a sign on the counter outlining all the ailments that these icecreams will NOT cure! We thought we were just out to get an ice-cream, not to cure cancer! **
• People kept telling us that Virginia Beach was 'very strict'. We discovered that you get fined for swearing in public, for appearing drunk while walking etc there **
• The visual pollution: power lines and billboards cluttering the sky in remote parts with beautiful scenery
• We were quite surprised that we could not eat outside when we were having meals in beachside cafes in North Carolina. The waitresses said it was against the law.
• A long public pier put over the sea was gated off and payment of $10 was required to fish and $1 to walk out onto it. **
• The air conditioning units - you need a jersey to wear inside on very hot days or you freeze
• Pennsylvania billboard: "We treasure our country, our cows, our children" - we passed it too fast to get a photo :) However, in all the miles of farmland we never saw a single cow outside on the farms. Maybe the cows were all inside somewhere….
• Bathrooms have long been a fascination of mine and this trip I saw an effective method of controlling graffiti; they placed a board inside a picture frame on the back of the toilet door - and it worked - all the messages were contained within it. But the dreaded gaps are still there! **
• Cheese - well, there is nothing that resembles the cheese we eat in NZ
• Coffee - Funny how something that you would think would be the same the world over can be so different!
• Tipping everyone, everywhere; the price appears to have gone up and they have started publishing notices to 'foreigners' that we HAVE to tip 18% of a meal bill **
• Visitors are no longer called 'aliens' - now we seem to be 'foreigners'
• Cafe menu have appetisers, salads etc but the entres section turns out to be the main course?? Asked waiters about it but they didn't understand the question (or the accent!)
  

There is lots more, but I think that we need to take time with our students to help them connect with each other and try to put themselves in each others' shoes. I believe it is easier to have a quality learning experience with kids from countries who speak a different language because we don't make presumptions that they are the same as us - just with a different accent.

Rock Our World - The Movie

Global collaborative projects for classrooms have become one of the education buzz terms for happening teachers in the noughties. This term is used to cover a wide range of programmes and activities and from my limited experience they are not all created equal! They range from: "I've Got this Idea and I would like some foreign schools to join it - but strictly on my terms at my convenience"; through to the inclusive, sweeping-across-continents Rock Our World. Some of the projects are really successful with only 2 or 3 schools participating, and some have very large numbers involved.

I have a long personal interest in learning in this way because I had a teacher in primary school who set us up with penpals from around the world, and I exchanged letters with 3 of them (Japan, France and Argentina) for a number of years. It is hard to imagine now how I had the patience to keep that up when the delay between letters was weeks or months. I supsect that it was an ongoing curiosity about how other people around the world lived that provided the motivation for a child living on a dairy farm in the Waikato.

Recent technology has created an opportunity for huge numbers of children to extend their learning, their understanding of others and their world view and have a lot of fun doing it. So I am always interested when I see new ideas for projects being tweeted or blogged or publicised on places like the GlobalEducation Ning. I do have a few things that I look out for before I even consider bringing them to a busy teacher's attention back at school - which is all I can do now I don't have my own class:

• the learning- what is this all about for the students?
• does it look like fun?
• who is organising it? (I've been caught out in the past and discovered when we were all set up and waiting to go that the organiser started it as a way of them learning how to use video conferencing tools, and so we never actually got to speak because they weren't able technically to connect with us. Very disappointing for the children.)
• is it truly global or just a bunch of international school expats working together (I love International schools and taught for 5 years in them, but I want our students to meet the locals!)
• is this going to be a synchronous or asynchronous experience? To be practical it needs a significant asynchronous commponent, but nothing beats the synchronous for kids. Actually talking to, or being on a chat with, kids from somewhere far away and mysterious is fantastic.
• is there give and take in the synchronous, or will the time zones always favour the organisers? It is part of the learning fun to get up in the middle of the night and huddle around a webcam, but it gets a bit tiresome if there are members who always schedule the conferences for Period 2 during school at their end!

I tweeted a question about this back in October: "What is the biggest difficulty you face when connecting kids globally? Time zones? School term dates? celebrations/holidays?" I was surprised how many responses I got and a very large majority said time zones. In fact 100% of the Kiwi responses said that, and I supsect that is because our time is so out of kilter. One of the greatly appreciated touches in ROW is the table we all get handed with our times all mapped out so we can find our own and the other schools with a quick glance down the table. This is a much more inviting solution than being told to "Join us at 9.00am EST" or similar. Another appreciated solution is to take the time to look up the other participants' time zone and invite them saying something like, "This will be 12 am your time and 10.30 am our time".

I noticed in the last round of Rock our World that holidays and celebrations were a biggie too. Carol Anne organised a calendar of all our school holidays and festivals and on any given day of the project there was at least one school either away on holiday or having a short break for a festival celebration. I guess this was bound to happen when 40 schools from all 7 continents were participating!

This has been a very long introduction to Rock Our World - the Movie. In the second half of 2009 Pt England students participated in the 11th round of ROW. This one was around the theme of 'Tolerance'. As well as the usual learning experiences we have with ROW (all learning about a topic together, writing music together, and lots of video chats with each other to share the learning) Carol Anne organised a song that we all learned to sing and everyone videoed themselves to contribute to the final music video - which has now been published on iTunes as a song and YouTube as a video. You will glimpse the kids from Pt England and Summerland schools in it. Rock Our World! Song sung by students in 40 schools in all 7 continents!

Andrea Tele'a was the teacher who managed Pt England's participation in ROW and published footage and updates on the Ning. Student reflections were published on their own blogs.

This is how Carol Anne introduces the video on YouTube:
ROW is an international collaboration where students from around the globe compose music, make movies and meet each other in live chats! http://rockourworld.ning.com/
Songwriter: Stephen Petree
Sung by: Stephen Petree and the Students of ROW 11
Also available on iTunes! http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/rock...



Congratulations if you made it this far. Carol Anne has just announced on Twitter a new round of ROW....."What do you get when you cross Rock Our World and NIKE??? A brand new season callled "Walk Our World!" WOW!" Looks like another fun one to sign up to!