Innovators Group Project

Curious Minds Project: Review.

Having gone past the mid point review in terms of time for the Curious Minds Project I feel compelled to review.   This is my personal thoughts at the moment and these need to be tempered as they are my own personal opinion rather than the official policy of the school.

Science Milestones:

•  Identifying of suitable sights along the Kaupokonui (March 2019)
• Water Sampling and Testing Phase One (March/April 2019)
• Awa Observations One (March/April 2019)
• Fish Survey Phase One (April 2019)

[These have been completed to some degree at this point with the first Awa Trip that took place and went to Yorke Road at Midhirst.  Two additional visits to the Kaupokonui River had to be delayed or cancelled due to the weather conditions in Term Two, this was re-scheduled to the end of Term Two and took place then].

• Restoration Initatives - Phase One Testing (predator control measures, cleaning up) [May/June 2019] - has not been compelted [July 2019]

• Awa Observations Two - (June/July 2019)
• Predator Observations Two (June/July 2019)

This trip took place to the Kaupokonui Phase two - unsure about part two of it, while it could have been included as part of the second trip. 

Community Milestones

• Hui to explore Ngaruahine its history and connection to Kaupokonui (not completed as of July was scheduled to take place in March 2019)
• Restoration and Working Bee (May/June 2019) has not been completed by July.

Update: I have had a subsequent meeting with representatives from Nga Ruahine about moving the project forward.    This has involved looking at ways to restructure the project to ensure that it is completed by the expected timeframe.   I have also looked into Taranaki Venture Curious Minds Project Funding - this has not yet been established but will be done so shortly.

NZ 2019 Principals Conference

Notes from Principal Conference:

3/7/2019

Challenge: 

What do we do for Maori? Iwi at Auroa Primary School? How do we deliver Te Reo at Auroa Primary School.    Do we meet the needs of our students, what else could we do to address the Well Being of our students? Yes we have Kapa Haka now but what else could we provide to students.   What else could we do? Thinking outside the square for Maori students?

Minister of Education:

Appraisal: This is a Low Trust tick box of requirements.   Ministry is providing the flexibility to manage ourselves; accord and agenda.   Decile system - equity process system. Support staff lack of specialists. Donations to School for Schools Decile 1-8 have been replaced by a $150 grant to schools, Auroa currently does not receive this grant but the Ministry is looking at pushing this out to all schools.   Camps and Camp related activities are exempt from this however the school cannot charge for additional activities (we currently do not charge).

Educational Members of Importance: Clarence Beeby - education no matter who and no matter what.   Education being broad and empowering for students.

Renaissance and Reinvention: Importance of ‘AND’ the link.   PLP should embrace achievements in education and classical arts, literature and science.   VUCA - Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity.     Cecila Lashlie - Education Campaigner.

Yong Zhao - Keynote Speaker

‘What works may hurt”.    Warning labels education, focus on one object.  This has consequences for the other areas of the curriculum.   Education to medicine - all medicines are a version of poison, is all education doing good for all students? Subjects vs Subjects? Cognitive vs Non Cognitive, instructional vs. educational, short vs long term.   What a great idea by Chris Thompson. Frequency/Age/Retirement. Children are less likely to discover unexpected outcomes Can teaching cause damage to learning? Choice of outcomes for students are very important.    In Easter Island the civilizations focus was on the statues at Easter Island to the detriment of the community.   International Mathematical Studies: What do test scores matter? Why are test scores the most important, as scores increase what do we lose? 

Entrepreneurship Confidence: Low in countries with high test scores.   Test scores go up and then as a result then creativity suffers.    Life satisfaction VS. Pisa scores. Homogeneous. Education is a sausage maker, bacon is an innovation.    Traditional Virtues of US Education (Golden and Katz 2018). Local decisions are made not by a national mandate.    Test scores don’t measure important things; Extreme Genius - Extreme Deficit. Unproductive success and productive failure; always think about the task/ask questions if it cures and it hurt does this method work? For whom? Details? Information? Quality of Education system cannot exceed the quality of the teachers - PISA study.    One size that fits all - the effect of the teacher cognition and non cognitive abilities of students achievements. Almost all research of test scores are slanted in favour of certain groups of students. We should revive the humanity in education.

Primary STEM Chat - Full Archieve

This is the archieve for the full lists of Primary STEM Chat which is not being going for several years.   As stated previously this is a Twitter Internet Chat which is based around a STEM Theme which takes place each Thursday from 10:30pm-11:30pm.

Primary STEM Chat Wakelet

Assessment and Reporting in a STEM Classroom.
Primary STEM Chat is an Australian based Twitter Chat with an educational theme.   It is run weekly with a STEM focus and different aspects of STEM in the classroom.  While it originates from Australia it has some contributions from New Zealand (including myself) and has resources that are not necessairily available in New Zealand.    The link is provided above.  Note due to time differences it starts on Thursday 10:30pm and finishes 11:30pm.

Digital Technologies Staff Meeting PD

Staff Meeting. This took place in week ten. Ideally it would have perhaps been better to take place sooner in the term but it scheduled meant this is when it was (perhaps could have advocated more for an earlier time). Two staff members were absent and the staff meeting was further complicated by a powercut which took place at 3:45pm which removed Wi-Fi and prevented the group discussions from being recorded. There was a sharing aspect of the staff meeting with a request for staff to bring an item to share from the Digital Curriculum that tied in with the resources. 

This wasn't successful as most staff didn't bring something (however this could be remedied by staff completing the slideshow at a later date which I can send a reminder out about).   The other issue that could have been followed up on was the staff who undertook the PD.  It was clear from the discussion that was centred around the Mindlabs PD for the Digital Curriculum that while it had been completed by some staff, which I believe was two others, it had not been looked at by most staff.    Given everything that happened and the follow up etc its something that I want to positively pursue to ensure that everyone makes the most of the opportunity.   I think the PD aspect from Mindlab is an exceptional resource but need to promoted as something positive for the staff as an opportunity. 

I haven't received any feedback on the PD at the moment however I think the experience and the slideshow and the building of it was positive, but the approach and the sharing of it and the delegation of the tasks could have been driven better (perhaps I could have followed up in person with additional emails and spoke more directly to people about completing the sharing part of the session).

From here:

• contact staff to ensure that the feedback was completed (during the holidays)
• provide staff with a reminder opportunity about the Flipped PD and the opportunity to gain a PD qualification, linking to the helpfulness of the task.   
• Use the 'Digital Fluency Playing Cards' which have been purchased by the school to further enhance the understanding and discussion about the Digital Curriculum
• Get feedback about the staff meeting from Senior Manangement who were there (KT) and feedback from Senior Management who were not there (JC, KB) about the slideshow.

Blooms Taxonomy Professional Reading

Moving Beyond Who, What, When Where and Why Using Blooms Taxonomy to Extend Preschoolers Thinking:

• Souce: naeyc
• Rationale: This is the number one 'hit' when researching Blooms Questioning and given where I was wanting to start looking at I felt it could be applied to my work, even though it is targetted at a lower level of student.  The big take that I took out was the questioning ring to make sure you were balancing your questions for me as the teacher.  This is something that I took for granted and assumed that I would do automatically but the keyring was a very proactive step and started to retrain me.  I focussed on the reading to start with as something to colour code and reflect (constantly) on where I was questioning.  The students were at first wondering what I was doing with the key ring, and some asked me directly about the process but I was honest with them and it worked well as a result.

Levels of Questioning in Blooms Taxonomy - Source: TeacherVision.Com: 
Some facts that need to be considered:

• Most teachers spend 90% of their instructional time questioning students
• Many teachers ask up to 400 questions a day approximately 80% are factual knowledge based questions
• Students who are constantly asked low level questions will focus on producing low-level answers to questons

Rationale: These facts could potentially not be correct and depend on the system involved - the  US has a test based system which I have spoken to educators about where-by the end of year testing that the students take part in essentially determines whether they have a successful year or not.   In the case of an education system like Singapore where I was able to go and visit first hand in 2016 the system is predominantly rote learning where the focus on the exams at the end of the year is a live and let die example of something that is based soley around the testing.  The data listed above clearly comes from an American site and dosen't site its source or reference point however the emphasis to me came on looking at what sort of questions that I was asking the students and what that was producing.  I think the most relevant thing that could come from that was for 3D Printing - when we were discussing a print and what was produced by the students  I found a series of Blooms Prompts (with the Lightbulbs in the resource section) useful to use to help my discussion with the students, particularly at the higher end of things.   One thing that I need to look at is that the higher discussions that come as part of that process need to be documented somehow because at present they are not.
Using Blooms Taxonomy for Effective Learning. (Source Thoughtco.Com)
This is esentially a series of visual resource posters about Blooms and revisiting of the key points about Blooms and questioning.   It provides a series of key images but by the time that I located this I had already found a series of posters and displays relating to Blooms that I was already in the process of using and didn't want to replace existing material.   (It should be noted too that this is one of the sites that still maintains the use of Synthesis for Blooms - which has been replaced by 'Creation' in the revised version, a minor point but something that perhaps needs to have a note made)