Come on baby, light my (Bunsen burner) fire

In 2019, I got assigned a year 9 Science class, something I specifically did not want. Mainly because I have focused mostly on developing the year 10 stuff and I haven't really got much in the way of resources or lessons for the year 9s. This means I am now busy planning what I need to work on to make sure I keep our classes fun.

One of the units we do is Introduction to Science, and part of that is learning how to safely and correctly use a Bunsen burner. In a previous school, I used to just give the instructions about lighting the burner, then got the students to do it. Later, this developed to using an online animation from Pearson Education (with no real risk of explosions...) and then lighting the real thing. Now, I think I may have well and truly overplanned this, and spent ages working on another way to do this.

We are still going to use the online animation, with a slide deck for additional information. The girls (I work in a girls' school) can work in small groups, decide the order of safely lighting the Bunsen burner. Once they have digitally completed this, they can again work in groups to light the REAL Bunsen burner while checking one another for the correct method. At this stage, I am going to be quietly observing making sure everything is OK, but actual teaching - not a lot needed, this is akō at work!

"So what?" you are thinking, "that's nothing special". Well, here comes the fun bit. Normally, we sign off the girls on a list to say they are proficient. Very boring. Now, once the girls feel they are ready to be checked, they complete a Google Form in quiz mode which has several sections, each with a list of possible stages for lighting the Bunsen burner. If they get this in the wrong order, they have to start the Form again, until they get all five steps correct which allows them to submit the Form. And of course, there is this great theme on Forms - very Sciencey...

So far, so good. The answers the girls give feeds into the usual Google Sheet, as per normal. I am using Autocrat as an add-on within Sheets, and I have set it up to create a certificate for the student from a Google Doc template, using the student's name as a tag for the script which inserts their name onto the certificate. This is then automatically emailed to the student so she has a certificate to prove her ability to safely light and use a Bunsen burner. The end certificate looks like this:

It wasn't complicated, but it took me a little bit of setting up in terms of time. I hope it is as much fun for the girls once they complete this activity... (Update to follow).

Culturally Responsive and Relational Pedagogy in practice

The research is out there; Māori learners are not performing as well as European / pākehā, leading to headlines like these, all relatively recent:

• Teachers contributing to Māori under-achievement

• Ministry urges bold step for Māori education

• Education experts say New Zealand needs major shake-up to boost the achievement rates of Māori

As a teacher in New Zealand, this hurts my heart. How has it got so bad? Why are these students falling by the wayside? How can we change things and make our classrooms more inclusive so this stops being a problem?

We have been discussing Culturally Responsive and Relational Pedagogy (CRRP) as a school for a few years in differing formats, and have constructed cross-curricular groups to carry out appraisal and internal PLD (the process has been given the title Kokiri). 

I am a Kokiri leader, responsible for checking in with my group of five colleagues and ensuring they are working on an inquiry, and that they are recording evidence for the Code and Standards for the teaching profession, as well as signing off their final annual appraisal. Part of the process is classroom observations. Having come from a #Manaiakalani school, I was happy to have happen (we used to get every visitor passed through our classrooms on a regular basis; it makes you a lot less nervous about casual drop-ins!). We have also been through the Rongohia te Hau observations, so are partially used to the process. 

I will put my hand up here, and state that I have felt somewhat confused (maybe nervous?) about carrying out observations and conversations with peers - what gives me the right to critique colleagues abilities to teach? How can I make judgments about whether they are meeting the standards as a practicing professional? 

In 2018, we have been working with Robbie Lamont from Poutama Pounamu, and have been trialing an observation tool that moves from making a judgment to being a mirror of practice for our colleagues. This has required a level of "unlearning" to happen - it has always felt like observations in the classroom are looking at how well the teacher works with the class, often with hours of (panicked...) preparation from the observed teacher to ensure the lesson runs smoothly and shows how brilliant at their craft they actually are. The refreshing difference here, is that we are actually acting as a mirror, being held up so the observed teacher gets a snapshot view of what was happening over a 20 minute slice of the lesson. This is difficult for the amateur observer, but provides the opportunity for the teacher to reflect upon what was happening in their class, and what they and their students were doing.

The tool (found here) has been gifted to the Kokiri leaders, and we have been trying it out on one another. It takes a bit of getting used to. It is done over 20 minutes, and is a hand-killer! As I mentioned previously, the intention is to move away from the observer / observee (is that even a word?) relationship towards a culture of reflective practice where we constantly evaluate whether we are doing the best for ALL of our learners, and think of ways to be more inclusive; where everyone is part of the learning process. I fully understand that by focusing on our Māori learners, no one is disadvantaged, and everyone benefits, and by going through this kind of observation, we can see the gaps that exist in our practice.

This process has already got me thinking about my classroom practice and my interactions with my ākonga. I have already moved towards more co-construction of the learning with my students, getting their voice as a valuable part of my planning and course development. Observing others has made me consider aspects of my own practices, and having others observe me in a non-judgmental way, just mirroring, has really got me thinking. Robbie told us that one of the hard parts was unlearning, and I feel I am trying to do this, but there is always room for improvement.

I welcome the idea of being observed; how can I be a better teacher if I don't reflect and revise? I look forward to continuing this journey, and feel I know where we are heading as a school and some of the confusion I alluded to earlier has started clearing. I feel that we ARE on a journey to make learning more inclusive for ALL of our learners, and that we are doing something positive (as are many other schools / kura around NZ) to lessen the cultural divide. 

Today was a bit of a light-bulb moment for me, so I sat and wrote this immediately as I was reflecting on what I have learned (and unlearned!). I hope to write additional posts on this process as we move forward on this journey.

Ka kite anō au i a koutou.

  

I wanna rock!!

**This post was originally made in Wordpress on March 13th 2018**

Back to the song titles for posts, with thanks to Twisted Sister for this one!
Now to explain the relevance of the post title. This year I have started an Earth and Space Course at Level 2 (Year 12). This is something of a passion that I have had the privilege to indulge this year. The course includes a geological study of the rocks of a locality in NZ, and we are spoiled for choice in Northland, an investigation into an aspect of ESS that most interests the students, a socio-scientific report, topic yet to be decided, the formation of stars and planets and an extreme Earth event in NZ, of which there are plenty to choose from. Throughout the year I hope to come back into this and leave some more reflections.
One of the learning experiences I have managed to organise for our students is a seismometer, which has been connected to the NZ Ru Network (after Rūaumoko - the Māori god of volcanoes, earthquakes and seasons) and is situated in the library at the school. The unit itself is a spring connected to magnets in a coil and a piece of copper piping (Lens' law for the physics fans out there!), fed through to an Arduino device which talks to a Raspberry Pi.
Within 24 hours of connecting, we picked up the rolling ground waves of a 6+ aftershock from the Papua New Guinea earthquake, which rolled on for nearly an hour. This was confirmed by other seismometers in the network, including the 'home' device in the University of Auckland. This picture shows the two traces one above the other. The top is ours, the lower is the UoA trace, and the highlighted yellow sections are the corresponding records of the shake.

The live images from the network can all be seen on this website.
We have also taken a couple of field trips, one to the Kawiti Glow-worm caves and Waro reserve to see karst limestone formations (incidentally,  the limestone that makes up these formations is part of the Te Kuiti group and are a long way from where they were layed down as sediments (25-30 million years ago). This photo shows the entrance to the caves, sadly no pics inside as it is firstly tapū (sacred) and secondly because it upsets the glow-worm (Arachnocampa luminosa in case you were wondering).

The limestone has been eroded into these fantastic shapes by acidified water gradually eroding the rock.
We were also welcomed onto the marae (Māori meeting grounds) as one of our students was related to the kaitiaki (guardians) of the caves. This was a welcome break from the rain, and a wonderful cultural experience.
The Waro Reserve also has good examples of fluted limestone / karst formations, as well as being an ex-marble mine (now flooded) and aboe the coal seams that run through into Kamo (Waro is coal in te Reo). Some of the karst is horizontal with erosion caused by water dripping from the branches of trees over time.

[gallery ids="172,173,174" type="rectangular"]
The second field trip was out along the Whangarei Heads Rd, and will be covered in the next post. This topic has certainly fired my imagination, and hopefully my students also have an appreciation of the forces at work to change these ancient landscapes that are so beautiful and striking. They certainly appreciate my passion for this fascinating topic!

Student blogging

**This is not a new post, but I have reposted it from my Wordpress account.**

This is a new thing for me; my year 13 Environmental Biology class are carrying out an action plan this year, around the local environment. As a change from keeping a paper logbook and submitting this at the end of the unit, they are recording their work in a blog.
We are using Blogger as the platform, mainly as we are now a Google school; it makes sense for the girls to use the single sign on afforded by having G Suite. I feel that this is an authentic way to collect information and also reflect upon what they are doing - all part of the action plan. They may even inspire me to update MY blog more regularly... Certainly as they are going to get an hour per week to update their work, I should maybe use the time for the same purpose.
Today we have set the blogs up, and now there are conversations around me about themes and plug-ins etc, so they are actually quite keen on getting started, and a letter has already been sent to the principal about one of the issues! Progress and authentic learning.
I need to find out a way of keeping an eye on each of the blogs, preferably without being too invasive, so I can ensure that there is work getting done. Currently, I am thinking of following each of the blogs so I get to read their updates. Any ideas from the rest of the world are greatly appreciated!

Pond Life

I couldn't find a Pond song title, so have decided this is good enough.

This post is about the Pond, a New Zealand (N4L - Network 4 Learning) website that allows educators and providers to connect and share resources and findings from around the web. It also allows you to curate collections of resources in Buckets. This is the bit that has suddenly lit up the light bulb for me.

One (maybe two or three...) of my earlier posts was about the pain of bookmarking all of the cool stuff I find on the interwebs that will be of use with classes. I have tried various different things, including keeping all of my bookmarks on my Chrome browser, but I have about 1300 bookmarks as a result and there is no easy way to visualise them all to get a feel for the content. I tried Symbaloo but was put off by the pricing, and while it was nice to create collections of bookmarks, it was still not what I was looking for.

The next attempt was creating OneNote Notebooks to keep all of the information, and while it was visually appealing, it was still not what I wanted (I have had issues with OneNote, enough to make me wary as much as anything). Also, the links etc within the OneNote notes are inactive as the web-clipper effectively stores the images as PDF files on the page. They were also not as easy to share with colleagues and students from OneNote.

Now I've had another look and play with the Pond. I have uploaded resources to it before, but it really is a great place to store all of those videos and articles I find online to use with classes. Added to that, there are resources and lesson ideas from other educators, as well as the connections with other educators around NZ (and some further afield). I'll be digging in and using this more and more, maybe I will come back to another post, or update this one sometime in the future once I've had more time to dig into all of the uses. I have created a Bucket called Human Evolution, and the posts shown above are all in that Bucket, so I know where to head to when I want to look at one of the sites. Buckets are shareable and can be added to someone else's Bucket as well. I find regular useful articles from +Tony Cairns which end up in my Buckets too!

The only downside at present is that it is only available to teachers and administrators, students will get access eventually, and I suspect it is limited to NZ as one needs an NZ school domain to create an account (this may have changed, happy to be corrected if anyone knows better).

Land of confusion

Whether you are a young whippersnapper and thought instantly of the Disturbed song, or are a little longer in the tooth and remember the original (with Spitting Image created video) from Genesis, it is basically describing a whole load of things about the way I am thinking currently.

The first is that after a hiatus and brief dalliance with Wordpress, I am coming back to this blog. I am keeping Wordpress for my genealogy stuff now, having found that it does not play as nicely with other Google toys as Blogger does! So yes, I will now be posting my educational / technology ramblings here again. Having said that, my average of 3 - 4 posts a year is testament to the fact that it doesn't matter what platform I use...

Secondly, the school I work at chose a few years ago to embrace Microsoft tools for educational purposes, which is fine by me. We have been promoting OneDrive, OneNote, Class Notebooks and latterly Microsoft Classroom. For whatever reason, we have experienced sync issues, fragmentation of OneNote notebooks (especially with Chrome extensions running - the IT guy told me to use Internet Explorer... seriously!) At the start of the 2017 school year we gave staff PD on using Microsoft Classroom. It looked like it was a little late to the party (it was a rehash of a product they used to call Teacher Dashboard, no relation to the Hapara tool), but it was working after a fashion. But then we noticed that posting a message in the stream was a seamless experience for teachers, but involved going to another app for the students. One or two other small woes appeared. Then Microsoft allowed Class Notebooks to be shared with parents and guardians - excellent job. Unless you created the Notebook via Classroom. What did this mean?
In a nutshell, Classroom was dropped  with about one month's notice at the end of June. It was to be replaced by Teams, which was launched to much cheering from the community. But, and there always seems to be a but, it was launched before it was ready and several of the features teachers want are not available yet. In the fullness of time, it will be a good product.

Our feeder schools are all Google, and with all of the issues we have been having, we have started to make the move towards going Google too. We plan to still give the staff and students access to the Microsoft tools, and yes, I will be revisiting them at some stage, but for the mean time, confusion reigns!

This is the end, my only friend, the end...

Well, I haven't used a song title for a blog post for ages, so good to get back on form... A gentle nod to The Doors in case you were wondering.

It has now been nearly 32 weeks since I signed up for the MindLab Post Grad Certificate, and in all honesty, I have really not enjoyed it. The assessments have been a bit like being caught in a huge wave, you just about get back on your feet and then the next one hits you and knocks you over again. Despite this, I have learned, grown as an educator and constantly challenged my practice while doing the course. I'm still looking forward to hitting submit for the last time, though, to know that I can get something of my life back. Friends are beginning to wonder where I have got to (my wife has once or twice said, "who are you?" when I emerge from the study...)

One thing is certain, I have been very reflective in this course, and have learned to challenge my assumptions once again. I have also looked at fresh new ideas to change the way I teach and learn, and this has tied in with actions that I have been involved in within the school as well. My goal, which ties in with the PTC (Ministry of Education, n.d.) has been to look at ways of changing assessment practice within Level 1 Science this year, and some of the tools and strategies I have learned over the past 32 weeks have helped to inform and drive some of the changes.
I have learned from the ideas of Lean Management; these techniques helping me with my managerial style. I have discovered, and in some cases, rediscovered some very cool tools that exist to make the classroom workload a bit easier to manage. Additionally, I have questioned and reflected more on my practice, something the MoE describe as important in the 21st Century educator. My reflection has raised as many questions as it has answered and this feeds back into my inquiry, allowing me to come up with ideas for the next phase of inquiry; something that was identified in research by Osterman and Kottkamp (1993), where they described how an inquiring learner can move between different phases of action research as a part of the whole process.

Two changes to my Teaching Practice that can be reflected in the PTCs.
I'm not sure I can really credit the MindLab course for these changes, as I suspect these would have occurred anyway, due to the changes in practice already being implemented at school. Nonetheless, Criterion 4, "Demonstrate commitment to ongoing professional learning and development of professional personal practice" has definitely happened. 32 weeks is definitely a commitment, for the issues it has caused along the way...
Secondly, Criterion 11 "Analyse and appropriately use assessment and information, which has been gathered formally and informally" has been covered more than I might ordinarily do. I have sought student voice about assessment practice, and looked long and hard at what we consider acceptable assessment. I have made some smaller changes as a response to the gathered information, and more changes are coming.
Along the way, I think I have dipped into the majority of the criteria, but it has been a mission to log this information and to make sure the recording has been done. There has not been the time, because of commitments at work, and because of my commitment to this course (wavering at times...). Well, now THIS commitment is over. Now I might have time to backtrack and find all the evidence of my meeting the PTCs - at least we are not expected to cover all of them in one year.

References

Osterman, K. & Kottkamp, R.(1993). Reflective Practice for Educators.California.Cornwin Press, Inc. Retrieved on 7th May, 2015 from http://www.itslifejimbutnotasweknowit.org.uk/files.


Ministry of Education (nd). Practising teacher Criteria and e-learning . Retrieved from http://elearning.tki.org.nz/Professional-learning/