ULearn 2016 - keynote and breakout notes.

I have the privledge to attend this year's ULearn conference in Rotorua.  Its the first ULearn conference I have attended in 4 years.  There are approx. 2000 teachers in attendance.  The atmosphere is one of anticipation....I guess because the Minister of Education is speaking.

The Waiata we sang together was:

There are three things
Three important things
In the bible
Belief, faith and love
That keep us together




The opening included welcoming speeches and a performance from the Selwyn Primary School Kapa Haka group.


Reimagining leadership
Tranforming professional practice, teaching approaches
Modern conference for practice

Keynote speaker: Larry Rosenstock
Reimagining - "the Lie"
Sometimes we have to treat different differently in order to treat them equally.

Jackie from Ruapotaka
Chrome book celebrations with whanau.  Survey carried out with whanau.
Creation of a whanau blog

Heather Matthews - Hornby Primary
Antword profiler - app to analyse writing
Multi modal approach - padlet
Using experiential and multimodal approach to motivate writing

Nicola Wells - Tamaki College
Using online posting and shared docs for students to revisit, catch up

Sandy Lagitupu
Using film to motivate writers - character descriptions, setting descriptions

Christina Fortes
The listening guide - Jane Van der Zeyden
https://goo.gl/mYSGFz - a site being developed for Samoan English language learners


the Pulse of te reo Maori - Strong or not?
Charisma Rangipunga
Translation of modern language to Maori is difficult to make relevant to the young.
After 25 years, still learning the language.

• 8Billion people
• 250 Nations
• 6000 languages
• 1/3 of all languages in the world have less than 1000 speakers
• 450 languages with only have a handful of speakers left
• A language dies every 12 days 
• By 2100 90% of the worlds languages would have vanished.
• For a language to survive, it needs to be the primary communication between parents, children and grandparents.
• For te reo to survive...it needs to become normal.
• Played kahoot - 210624
• 460 Kohunga, 72 Kura
• 29 iwi maori radio stations
• $225 million per year on te reo maori 
• 1 in 7 NZers is Maori
• Average age of Maori is 24, Average age of pakeha is 40
• It is estimated Maori will be the bulk of the workforce in 2050
• 2.5% of Maori live in Auckland, 90% live in the North, 10% in the South Island
• 10% of the Maori population have a tertiary degree
• 30% of Maori are under the age of 15.
• Nga Puhi have 20% of the Maori population - 1 in 5 maori hail from Nga puhi
• 10.5% have no affiliation with any Iwi
•  60% of Maori know which of Marae they affiliate to
• 30% of Maori know their pepeha - have confidence in their identity as Maori
• 70% are still in some way searching for their identity
• 60% of the maori population have been to their marae at some point in time
• 30% have visited their Marae in the last 12 months.
• 10.5% have been to their marae more than once in last 12months.
• If marae is the one place that we can get access to te reo maori, how do maori get access if they don't go?
• 10% of Maori children are learning te reo Maori at school.  90% have no or little access of te reo Maori in the current school system.

Michael Fullen:

• Systems change - working with clusters of schools
• Building knowledge and practices that foster deep learning and whole system change.
• Humans are innately wired to connect, wired to create and wired to help humanity
•  life in education should amplify the innate characteristics, suppresses or eradicates them
• New Pedagogies for Deeper Learning.
• 6 Cs - global competencies are in line with the NZC KCs.
• Deep learning and equity go well hand in hand.
• DL  connects all their real world providing relevance, are especially congruent with native values, builds relationships of trust with students, creates a culture of high expectations, increases efficacy and optimism, provided support systems for students who do not have much.
• Whole Systems Change Strategies
• Accountability (history of failure)
• Standards (insufficient)
• System culture (promising success)
• Breakthrough Leadership
• Respect and reject the status quo
• Be an expert and apprentice at the same time
• Experiment and commit
• Dynamic Duo
• New developments in neurosciences
• New developments in Learning Environments

•  When you weaken hierarchies you open up lateral solutions.
• The young are the most connected and the least committed to the status quo.
• The above conditions cause learners to outrun leaders and researchers.
• The job leaders is to help learner run better.

• New Pedagogies for Deep Learning.
• 6Cs - Collaboration, communication, character, citizenship, creativity, critical thinking
• New Leadership for DL - Cycles of trying things and making meaning, co-learning (among all) dominates, Leaders listen learn and ask questions, Leaders help crystallize, articulate and feedbac back what they see, Act on emerging solutions, including focus on impact.
• Big ideas #1 - students as change agents.
• Big idea #2 - professional capital of teachers (Human, social and decisional)
• Big Idea #3 - Coherence (focusing direction, cultivating collaborative cultures, securing accountability, deepening learning)
• A change mindset exploits disruption.

Empowering Pasfika parents through ako fakataha to raise student achievement 

• Pasifika education plan made relevant through the school curriculum.
• Using parents cultural capital to engage them in students learning.
• Ako Fakataha - Learning together.

 Global Trends in Digital Education

This speaker spoke about her trip to Colorado to attend an elearning conference.

Not a great deal gained from this breakout other than we need to pick our conferences carefully - what is the purpose of attending, is it:

• For pedagogical development OR
• Hardware/software products

Challenging traditional leadership 

• Working differently to teach differently
• grow capacity for leaders
• Unlearning past practices
• Looking at our context within Community - locally, regionally, nationally and globally.
• Collaboration not competition
• The power of thinking, collaboration and partnership is the currency of our strength heading forward.
• Working as part of a network - locally regionally nationally globally
• Multi agency meetings - once a month for 90minutes.
• Not teaching to assessment, will not be driven by assessment - 
• creating meaningfully designed programmes, designing experiences for deep learning, with a focus on the best learning conditions (reflect on what conditions you have experienced your best learning in), meaningful learning experiences drawn from student interest.
• An area school model - mixed level hapari

Karen Spencer:

• Weave the aho and whenu together - the ideas the learning with your school community.
• To be an educator today is to yearn to be better tomorrow that we were today - getting better should be part of our DNA
• Read blogs of people you disagree with to check your thinking...
• Hold the line before you trial something - pause before you leap into the next great thing:
• Find the urgency - the most urgent area that your students need
• see the story behind the data - seek deliberately
• Embrace discomfort - learning and designing ways to embrace the discomfort

• Pause before you leap:
•  Hold your ideas lightly - we plan carefully before we introduce anything
• Ministry of Education - My world, Our vision
• Kia Aroha College

• Kia Eke Pahuku - stories of what Maori success looks like
• Treat data and the stories of your students like a piece of art - bring different view points in order to look for what is really going on in our classes and look for where we can spend our time where it's most urgently needed.
• The ladder of inference
• We need diverse view in order to highlight usumptions we make about our students
• As leaders in school your role is to "keep the fear off the set" 
•  
• Compare your vision to your learners curriculum
• Let the data open the door to your understanding of your students stories
• Resist soltionistis - make sure your vision is dripping off the classroom walls
• Agree on your strong signals before you test and trial
• The learning we do together is not the extra thing put on the plate...it is the plate.
• Education doesn't change the world, it changes people and its people that change the world.
•  

Vision

Mission

Strategy

Direction

People

Guidelines

• Education is what people do to you. Learning is what you do for yourself.

Critical Literacy and Cultural Responsiveness

How can we practice Critical Literacy if we aren't culturally responsive or critical thinkers?  How can we be culturally responsive, if we don't reflect on our own cultural consciousness and know how and why we think, feel and act towards others?  These are questions I posed to staff when I presented my learning on Critical Literacy and Cultural Responsiveness.  Below is the presentation:

The Song of the Bird

This is an insightful video relating to experiential learning.  It's old but is still very relevant to this day.  Is this the key to unlocking Maori and Pasifika achievement?  Should we as educators be providing a more holistic approach with our learners, where the focus is on the Key Competencies and creativity?  Thought provoking and interesting...

Critical Approaches to Literacy - Summary

I have come to the end of my first semester back at AU and a highlight for me during this time has been my participation in the Critical Approaches to Literacy paper with Helen Villers.  I found this paper inspiring, thought provoking, reflective and insightful.  On reflection, I wish I had have blogged about each session I attended during this course (it was a block course, so the learning was over  3 Saturdays and four days of the April holidays).  While there was so much to ingest throughout the sessions I have attempted here to give an overview of the learning in brief in the notes I kept through the duration:
Multimulti everything -

• Multi media, 
• Multi culturalism, 
• Multi disciplines, 
• Multi literacies

A multitude of readings and academic references: 

• Professor Steven May - Making multi cultural education work
• Brian Bulevant - the pluralist theory
• Elwyn Richardson - the song of the bird
• Sylvia Ashton-Warner - Grounded theory in literacy development
• Murial Simpson - championed the first ready to read system
• Barbara Comber
• Pualo Freire - Social justice
• Clarke & Whitney - Deconstructing, Reconstructing text
• Michael Haliday - Linguist
• Delpit (1988) - The Culture of power
• James Paul Gee - big D discourse and little D discourse.  Discourse is bigger than the language but a way of being.  Little D is the everyday language.
• Jim Cummings - BICS and CALPS
• Helen Timperley - Adaptive expertise through continuous inquiry and being able to adapt practice to meet the needs of students.

Luke and Freebody's Four Resources Model:

Elwyn Richardson – Song of the bird.  Example of “Do it, Say it, Write it, Read it.”

Radical Change Texts:

• Researchers - Eliza Dresang and Sylvia Panteleo

• Accessibility, connectivity and interactivity - books that compete with digital text and push boundaries of sensitive subjects (death, childbirth, decency…)
• Be careful and clever about who the text is chosen for…
• Authors of RCTs - Shaun Tan, John Marsden, Emily Gravett, David Wiesner, Herve Tullet (Press), Istvan Banyai (Zoom), Jenny Baker (WIndow, Belonging)
   Emily Gravett – Wolves.  Pre lesson: Factual Hand/Literary Hand (Great inter-text book)
  Wolves change rivers (You tube video) links well to this book.
  Follow up with ‘The Wolf Story’
   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Wolves by Emily Gravett - breaking it up by introducing the cover, making predictions, making connections with what we knew about wolves, making connections between texts etc...
  
  
  
  
  Gradual Release Model:  To  -  With  -  By (Balanced Literacy Programme)
  

• Between paired reading and inquiry there should be SSR

• At the beginning point the student will be totally reliant on the teacher...at the end point student will have full independence.  
• Modelled writing is based on ‘Think alouds’.
• Guided reading and Guided Writing is the heart of the Model (Zone of proximity)
• Everyday in everyway there should be a balance of oral, written and visual.
• Fine balance between levels of activity and passivity
• Aesthetic opportunities should be available on a daily basis - Sir Ken Robertson
• Multimodal - aural, visual, spatial, gestural, written, kinesthetic, Linguistic
  
  
  Towards the end of the semester, we were facilitated through a bus stop activity where we had a minute to write out thoughts about questions posed on A3 papers, passed around the tables...These are in no particular order:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ARE THERE ANY DOWNSIDES TO A FOCUS ON CRITICAL LITERACY?
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  HOW DO PEOPLE'S IDEOLOGIES IMPACT ON US?
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  HOW WOULD YOU DEFINE CRITICAL LITERACY?
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CRITICAL LITERACY AND CRITICAL THINKING?
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  DOES IDENTITY COUNT?  IS THIS CRITICAL LITERACY?  WHY?
  
  
  
  
  
  
  IS THERE A LINK BETWEEN CRITICAL LITERACY AND NATIONHOOD? HOW SO?
  
  
  
  
  
  
  WHAT IS YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF HEGEMONY?
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  DO OUR STUDENTS NEED TO BE CRITICALLY LITERATE?  WHY?  WHY NOT?
  
  
  
  
  
  
  WHY MIGHT YOUR COLLEAGUES THINK CRITICAL LITERACY IS NOT IMPORTANT?
  
  
  
  
  
  HOW MIGHT CRITICAL LITERACY LOOK IN YOUR OWN PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT?
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  WHY IS CRITICAL LITERACY IMPORTANT?
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  So, that is some of the learning I received this semester in Critical Literacy...and when I look at the brief above, this only scrapes the surface. I was fortunate enough to be in a small class with 10 other wonderful women from across the educational spectrum, I learnt as much from them as I did from the lecturer.
  If I could do it all again, I would in a heart beat!!!...so much to learn in so little time.

CRITICAL LITERACY handout

The third and final assignment for our Critical Literacy paper was to give a presentation to staff at my school, of my learning on this course - with a focus on a key concept surrounding critical literacy. 

I found myself drawn to 'cultural responsiveness' as I felt that it was a component that, along with critical thinking, is the foundation of critical literacy.  Without either, critical literacy would not exist.  I also found that there was much about cultural responsiveness that I hadn't considered and was introduced to during our learning.  On reflection, I found that I was a 'surface proponent' of cultural responsiveness.  I needed to go so much deeper in my practice of this and cultural responsiveness is an area that I feel our school could further develop and deepen in classroom pedagogy across the school.  In giving the presentation to staff, it was all too brief, there was so much to be said, but so little time. 

When I finish my study leave and head back to my school, I will be challenging myself and staff with a more in-depth approach to cultural responsiveness, on a journey to bringing Critical Literacy to the forefront of literacy and inquiry practice at school.  Below is the 'handout' I created for staff to take away with them.  The reason I produced the handout in a digital form, was because I know what it's like to be given handouts at workshops and presentations, and a few months down the track I can't find them - either lost among a pile of other papers or in the bin.  With a DLO, staff can use this to attach on their own reflective blogs and reflect on the learning from the presentation...and it will always be a few clicks away!

You can teach an old dog new tricks!!!!

This year, I have embarked on a journey of study.  I have been fortunate to have won a 'teachnz' scholarship and been granted a years leave to finally complete my BEd upgrade and do a postgrad, hopefully on my way to attaining my Masters in Education.
Wow...who would've thought!!!!

Being halfway through the first semester, I've had time to sink my teeth into the 2 upgrade and 1 postgrad papers I'm completing this first half of the year.  I'm doing 'Leadership in Education in a Digital Age', 'Critical Literacy' and 'Teaching and Learning in the Visual Arts'.  All three papers are quite diverse, and I am completely immersed in them, loving every ounce of learning I'm getting. 

I look back on what tertiary study was like for me as a teenager and how 'disengaged' I was by the learning I did then.  I just wanted teachers college to end, so that I could get out there and begin the real work - at the chalk face so to speak.  I waited 20 years to venture back into University and 'oh my' how my learning this time around has changed.  As a 'mature' student, I have so much more experience to hang my hat on and connect to the readings and discussions I'm participating in.  Everything I read is either a revelation, confirmation, affirmation or complication (challenge) of my thinking. 

To have the time to soak up the learning I think has been key to my learning experience this time round.  I have my family, as always at the forefront of everything, and then I have my studies...completely unclouded by the business of a working school.  It took a few weeks to let work go and completely direct my focus onto the papers I am doing, but once I completely moved my focus, I have found study all encompassing.  It's surreal really to feel the freedom of it.

So, throughout this year, I will be posting my experiences, my findings and my assignments on my

blog to use as reflection and to remind me of the immense learning I am doing.  My experience has been and will continue to be a privilege and the people I meet both in person and online through the learning are also a privilege to learn from and with.  If there is anyone out there who reads this, and has the opportunity to go back to study...take it...with both hands...and hold onto it...don't let go...let it be the start of life long learning!

Because who says 'You can't teach an old dog new tricks!!!"...?

Miracle Worker by Taylor Mali

I'm a Teacher...That's what I do!