Week 10, Term 1

Goals:

To make time for my mental and physical health. 
To carry out all my roles (teacher, HSA director and Across Schools CoL) to the best of my ability. 
To support staff wellbeing. 
To actively maintain a positive personal outlook.

• Visits to the gym this week: Monday night between SAC days because I wasn't stressed about the second SAC day and didn't need to prepare anything, and Saturday morning with hubby.

• McDonald's eaten: One mental-health stop for a Cookie Time McFlurry and small fries after a particularly difficult day. It was worth every single calorie. 

Image stolen from the internet

• Casual sports games played this week: None again, but 5-a-side touch starts next week. It will be a chilly season!

• Books read: I've started to read The Madonna's of Leningrad by Debra Dean. It's only rated 3.8 stars on Goodreads, but I'm enjoying it a lot. It jumps back and forward in time between Marina's experiences in Russia during early WWII and her present life as she struggles with dementia. 

• Teaching highlights: 


• The teaching highlight of my week was the total silence that occurred for about 3 minutes during the Year 9 double-period Reading Comprehension this Thursday. It was beautiful. The sound of concentration. Everyone was engaged in ReadTheory, or answering comprehension questions, or producing a DLO. I have never, NEVER had a Y9 class have complete engagement like that before, and I wonder if it was in part caused by the repeated structure of the reading lesson across 4, now 5, weeks. 

• CoL things:  
• I still need to go and interview Y9 students who made accelerated gains in reading during Year 8, but this Monday/Tuesday they have Y9 camp so alas, that must wait till next term! 
• I continued to visit Primary schools to share my booking sheet, and had my first booking! 
• I'm going to visit Robyn at Panmure Bridge on Monday about her upcoming space unit. We had our first TC CoL teachers meeting with Soana and Russell and established how we will share with staff, and run the cluster 'Create' session at Tamaki College next term.

• HSA things: SAC conferences went fairly well with 7 of 11 parents coming in with 6 of 11 students. One parent is interested in being on the BOT, so that is very exciting. I'm sure they would do a lovely job.

• Teacher well-being support: alas, I was off sick on Friday.

• Gratitude emails sent: one to Graham, to thank him for his amazing work planning the Goat Island trip and opportunity for students to compare Pt England reserve with a beautiful marine reserve. He worked to really short deadlines and planned a large trip for half of Year 10, and kept them safe in the water while they were there. Students (and supervising teachers!) had a fantastic EOTC experience, and I think he is in part responsible for the number of applications I received from Y10 students to attend a Science day at AUT in the holidays! #makingsciencegreatagain Thanks Graham. 

Week 9 - The End is Nigh

Goals:

To make time for my mental and physical health. 
To carry out all my roles (teacher, HSA director and Across Schools CoL) to the best of my ability. 
To support staff wellbeing. 
To actively maintain a positive personal outlook.

• Visits to the gym this week: Thursday night between HSA Leadership camp days, when I felt stress-free enough to take an hour for myself.

• McDonald's eaten: Three trips again. None this coming week, I promise.

• Casual sports games played this week: None AGAIN - and it's starting to just slightly affect my self-esteem now as I feel I put on weight when I don't play during the week.

• Books read: No books but I read a magazine article for fun about Duchess Meghan Markle. She seems so sweet :)

• Teaching highlights: 


• Year 12 are writing their assessment so there is little exciting happening there.. 
• I only taught Y9 once last week because of the HSA trip on Thursday and Friday, and that period was just a massive uphill battle on Period 6 to get them to write compare/contrast paragraphs about hokey pokey that we made Friday P6 the week before, and lava/pumice. I had even taken the time to record their instructions, so the low-reading-level students could listen and still be able to learn:

• Year 13 have been stretching their brains and wrestling with the concept of Quantitative Trait Loci (QTL) analysis near the end of their learning about selective breeding. We had a nice double-period of slowly moving through a video, creating brainstorms, and sitting together in small groups and talking. It wasn't a particularly inventive lesson, just patient and collaborative. 

• CoL things: Half of my COL time this week was taken by an HSA directors meeting. I still need to go and interview Y9 students who made accelerated gains in reading during Year 8, but this Monday/Tuesday we have student achievement conferences and next Monday/Tuesday they have Y9 camp so alas, that must wait till next term! I will try to conduct some research into more reading comprehension interventions I can implement with the class :)

• HSA things: Period Zero numbers dropped last week back down to 5, but I am hopeful that after the Student Achievement Conferences these numbers will increase. 
• I took the class to a two day Leadership Conference on Thursday and Friday, which was undoubtedly the highlight of their week (and my teaching-week too)! There, students met other Y11's who will be travelling with them through secondary and into Health Science training at University. Here is the video from the trip:

• Teacher well-being support: this week I taught 7 staff members how to make scones! Glynis even went home and made some more over the weekend and sent me pictures :)

Showing the way of the scones..

Ladies ready to bake! (Alex taking the photo).

Glynis' weekend scone attempt - looking fluffy!

• Gratitude emails sent: back to none again. Oops. 

More Literacy with Year 13

I just published my last Class OnAir episode for the year! I had great fun editing this one because there was just so much quality discussion occurring between the girls in the group! 

The premise of the lesson is to have small groups of students co-construct a paragraph before sharing it to the class on a big whiteboard. This allows them to share ideas at first in the safety of a small group, and then have the anonymity of being in a group as their shared work is 'judged.' The process allows them to share and clarify their understanding together. 

This is a literacy strategy that Marc Milford, our TC literacy specialist, shared with us during a staff meeting at the end of Term 3.

Almost no resources were required for this - a word bank up on the board, some pens and paper, and a few big whiteboards and whiteboard markers.

I chose to front-load the biological vocabulary and speak about the words in context and in relation to each other, rather than starting with dry definitions that meant nothing to students. 

Please enjoy their discussions!

Click here to watch the 6-minute episode.

Learn - Create - Share - Year 11

I have a lovely, lovely Year 11 class this year. They're an absolute mix of abilities but most of them seem really driven to achieve. At the start of the year I asked them which standards they would like to do, and which topics from the junior years they felt they were the best at. Almost unanimously the class said "volcanos." 

So at the start of Term 2 we began the Surface Features of New Zealand assessment. I did only one week of teaching about hotspots and subduction, relying heavily on what they could recall from their junior years and hoping to give them enough of a reminder to cope with any online readings they came across. 

My focus for the internal was to build confidence and abilities in online research and report writing. To do so I decided to model the process from start to finish, and show students the skills required for report-writing in a way that they could return to and rewind whenever they needed. 

We spent a full two weeks doing a half-sized practice on Surface Features in America (Mt Rushmore, Yellowstone National Park, the Grand Canyon). 

Students had access to a series of screencast and narrated videos where I tried to speak my thoughts out loud as I researched and wrote:

Video 2

Video 3 - Searching Online

Video 4 - Skimming, Scanning and Selecting

Video 5 - Summarising

Video 6 - Chasing Understanding

I used the idea of checkpoints, rewards and punishments from my earlier PD on writing with Joseph, and while it was in place for all students my particular focus was on the boys in the class. I gave them some choices in rewards, and also let them honestly choose consequences that they wanted to avoid. For some it was chocolate or a phone call home, others wanted lollies and to (avoid) being sent to their Dean. 

Every single day I left feedback on every single practice essay, and I updated every single one of their checklists so they could see what they had done and where their next step was. Some students started to do this on their own towards the end of the practice time. 

For a few students who were really struggling, I made personalised screencasts of how I would go about continuing to craft their essay from where they currently sat. Here is an example below: 

Click here to view the full screencast made for one student as they composed their practice essay.

I don't really have a measure that I can use to show that every student in the class grew in confidence. I can't really compare this year's results to previous years' because the class itself is different. They're quite a motivated bunch. 

However, 13 out of 17 students who sat the internal did pass, 1 with excellence and 2 with merit. 2 students failed for plagiarism and 2 were incomplete in the time-frame given. 

One thing I can share is anecdotal evidence. At the end of Term 2 I presented students with this list of possible internals they could choose from, to do as our final internal of the year at the start of Term 3. 

They didn't choose the one with a field trip.

They didn't choose either of the ones with practicals and chemistry experiments.

They didn't choose the one that would help them with their exam.

They chose the one that was most similar in assessment FORMAT to their volcanos standard. They chose to research online and create a report (and evaluate their sources) about an Earth and Space science event. They told me they chose that one because it would be the "easiest." Even though I don't approve of the laziness underlying the word 'easy' - I was so happy that my students were confident enough to engage in a LOT of reading and writing BY CHOICE! 

Learn - Create - Share - Year 13

Literacy is still a massive issue in the senior years and a barrier to achieving credits at Merit or Excellence levels, due to student’s ability to explain, analyse and justify. Jannie Van Hees was talking yesterday about Lexical chains in paragraphs.

I’m just rolling on with my literacy inquiry and using the previous research on literacy strategies rather
than summarising them all over again.

Today I spoke to Marc Milford (our literacy specialist at Tamaki College) about some work he’s been doing with Karen in Design.

I’m going to try this idea with my Y13 biology students by analysing an exemplar about a socioscientific issue. The content and context are completely different to what we will be writing about in our own internal, so I think it will be a useful exercise.

First, I collected data about what students think the assessment will include and how confident they are about what they must write about. I used this form to do that.

Then we went through this short booklet that Marc helped me to create. It includes explicitly pointing out the language features in the exemplar, giving students the opportunity to identify them, using language and grammar features to recombine a paragraph, and teaching about key words such as what 'justification' actually means.

Before the activity, student's didn't know what was expected of them and confidence was low. After the activity, students were able to articulate requirements and felt much more confident. Unfortunately, that was the only measure I was able to take. The exemplar also managed to completely confuse one of the lower-ability students who suddenly thought they would be writing about folic acid (the context of the exemplar).

The orange pre test has a lot of "I don't know" answers. The white post-test answers are much more explicit.

The orange pre-test measure of confidence looks like an average of about 2 out of 5, while the later pretest answers look more like a 3-4 out of 5. 

Did this actually help them with their literacy? I had no measure for this. However, I did film this lesson and we can observe it for ourselves.. here!!

Study and Success

Today I returned the Year 9 exams to the students - but not before I recorded their data!

I thought it would be interesting to count the total number of questions each student completed during their opportunity to complete a practice exam during class time. 

This is a time-honored study technique. Students attempt practice questions on the material they know they'll be tested on, then get some feedback on it to 1) build their confidence (100% correct already), 2) expand their understanding (getting there) or 3) to fill any gaps in their understanding (unsure).

The practice exam I made for students had sections that exactly mirrored the real one they would sit the next week. The questions only differed a little!

There was a study doc that also matched the practice exam with revision activities, videos, etc, for students to visit and find answers, and I was very happy to help when they asked any questions. 

Anyway. Students took varying advantage of this across two lessons, despite my constant circling of the classroom.

Here is the scatter graph of the number of completed questions that I provided feedback on (or were correct but without feedback - I had to include this second category because the student represented by the dot in the top right corner took the practice exam home to study off):

My conclusion was that as a student increases the number of questions they study, the data shows that their number of correct answers in the exam also increases. 

The equation on the top right says that for each 1 extra question studied, students were likely to get 0.741 more questions right on the real exam. 

This is a nice gradient; the payoff for studying 1 - 2 more questions is to (mostly likely) get at least 1 more question right in the test!

There is one obvious outlier up the top in the middle, where a student studied only 10 questions on the practice exam but got 24 right in the real exam! Maybe they studied at home?

One unlucky person is also about the same distance from the trend line as the student mentioned above. They studied 16 questions but only got 5 right on the exam. Perhaps they were only copying out answers -words and shapes of letters-, rather than trying to understand why the answer was that, while they were studying.

Reflection on MIT Inquiry

My Problem: raising Year 13 University Entrance in Biology at Tamaki College.

Challenges: 

1. Students of 2016 are often not in biology class for many and varied reasons. Therefore, learning must be available for students online to access in their own time:

• to catch up
• to revise
• to move ahead

Further to that, students must be MOTIVATED to access their learning online.

2. Blogging during the learning of internal assessment content is like walking a tightrope.

This statement from me caused great debate within a few of the 2016 Spark MIT teachers. I said that during internal assessments students blogged during the 'learning' stage; sharing what we had done in class, different activities they completed, any practicals that we did, etc. The example I gave was having students diagnose whether an imaginary patient had Type I or Type II diabetes and share their 'Doctors Chart' online. 

See Fiu's blog post here

Students can't (on the other hand) share online any information they have analysed, synthesized, or extended from class learning or sources online. These understandings that each student has formed are their own. This distinction was made to minimize the risk of plagiarism, as well as meeting assessment conditions and authenticity requirements.  

Another teacher argued that her art class frequently post their emerging products online for peers to give each other feedback and help; and isn't this the nature of collaboration? I couldn't help but agree with her sentiment. 

However in Biology we assess the understanding of a concept that students are able to put into words and explain, analyse, or link, so to have access to another students' explanations would blur the lines of assessment as it currently stands. 

Term 1 Summary: 

1. I have been using Google Docs to create my visible planning that students can access. I had to explicitly show them that the column on the left is where their learning outcome is written, and the two columns on the right contain activities of different levels. I have used SOLO levels to differentiate the tasks.

Potential challenge: I am unsure whether my class actually understands SOLO levels, or that they are set out to gradually build understanding of a concept. 

2.   I could also be using Google Calendar, or Hapara's new Workspaces on Teacher Dashboard to format my visible planning. 

Potential challenge: I should survey my class as to which format would be the easiest for them to navigate, and which one they would be most likely to access and use to catch up or revise. 

3.   Halfway through learning the internal I surveyed students as to how they were using the visible planning document. I asked students:

• to describe where they could find my visible planning (all of them could).

Only 1/4 of the students who had accessed it outside of class time had used it to catch up, despite every student in the class missing more than one lesson throughout the term. 

• did they look at the learning outcomes for the unit?
• had they used it in another way?

4.  Challenge: due to the amount of time I have lost with this class, I have not asked students to reflect on whether the visible planning was helpful during their assessment, or what I could do better/more/differently to assist their learning. However, one student took the time to respond in their weekend to provide me some feedback (which was really nice of her!) She said:

What worked:

1. It worked for me because we have done an assessment similar to this one Yr 12.
2. Youtube videos were more helpful than website.
3. The topic was pretty interesting that I wanted to learn more about it.
4. I like that the teacher was always there when I needed feedback or when I think I’m going off topic.

What didn’t:

1. The time wasn’t long enough for me to do it my research properly.
2. Didn’t have enough understanding for the topic and what the structure for the assessment will be.
3. Researching helps but not so much information about the homeostasis whole cycle.
4. The time of the assessment was not a great, a lot of distraction was on at the time.
5. Distracted from other assessment and other stuff.
6. I went off topic most of the time because the topic was quite interesting i guess.

So overall, the website and activities were not so useful (although, this is based off the small sample size of just one student) and perhaps I wasn't clear enough in explanations of content OR the assessment criteria. This is a rather large failing on my part; I thought we had spent plenty of time covering basic homeostasis and different homeostatic systems, but from this student's perspective perhaps I did not.  

I suspect that this student may have found youtube videos more useful during the writing of the assessment because the visible planning document provided links to class activities such as reading simple presentations and answering questions, completing interactive animations, making and placing SOLO hexagons to discuss links between concepts - rather than just providing information to use in the assessment.

The activities were usually completed in class with teacher explanations occurring before, discussions between friends occurring during, and plenty of time for questions to be asked. Perhaps as a stand-alone document this format of visible planning is not as useful for the single solo learner trying to catch up on missed class time? However, it also can't simply provide links to resources for the assessment, as students require understanding before they can begin to understand and process resources online.  

The student did also have some other feedback (to herself!) 

What I would do again if I could?

1. Definitely my time management because I thought it would be easy so I left it to the last minute to do it.
2. Search for a lot of information on the internet to get more understanding about the topic.
3. Take note when the teacher is explaining the topic.

Another point to note from her feedback is around the clarity of assessments. We discussed this at Spark MIT again; isn't that exactly what we wanted when we were time-pressed at university? WHAT do I need to know to succeed? What do I have to DO? So I understand where she is coming from. We are within our boundaries to provide NCEA students with generalized marking schedules, as long as no exemplar judgment statements are included. So I have done that for their current internal, just as University students are providing with marking schedules for their assessments!  

5. Random positive outcome: some students' blogs have been so clear and concise that they can act as resources for students who missed a lesson. Case in point - Sela quickly caught up on the idea of phototropism by reading Rita's blog, and was able to create her own within the same lesson! 

Where to Next: 

1. Find out what students need in the time that they're with me.
2. Find out what they need if they're away and need to catch up.
3. Find out what would motivate students to access the online tool - because success in NCEA may not be enough to overcome any barriers in formatting, clarity, lack of understandable resources etc! 
4. Will have to survey them after school so as not to remove them from more class time, and will probably provide food to tempt them to stay! 
5. Upgrade sites with marking schedules. 
6. Provide time in class to interact with assessment requirements; perhaps have time in class to make own schedules? 
7. Consider how to swap the format of online planning; back to websites with links and videos and explanations? But then I am explaining content and could potentially just be giving students answers on a plate! 

Kahoot - Fun for All (and Data for Teachers)

All of my classes (except Year 11, for some reason) LOVE Kahoot. Even the Year 13's love Kahoot and regularly ask for it. 9KLe plays it every Friday afternoon, as a reward for working well and also for me to collect data and see who has understood what and where I need to go next. 

In case you don't know, Kahoot is a revision tool where teachers can easily and quickly set up multi-choice questions. Then during class time the questions and options can be projected up onto the board for students to answer on their devices. This comes complete with music and a constantly updating leaderboard.  I like to just ask 10 questions, and a review can be done in under 5 minutes, but that's just me. 

An important note: If you want to use the data from the game, students must log in with a username you can recognise. Just their name, for instance. I concede to modifications of their name; for example Robin in KLe likes to be Echo Robin, while Pili in Y13 likes to cleverly merge his name with the topic being quizzed, e.g. Pilikinesis

Link for teachers: getkahoot.com

Link for students to log in and play during class: kahoot.it 

Once all the fun and games are over, you can log back in and look at the full data set from the game. This is how:

Step 1: Sign in

Step 2: Look on the bottom-right hand side of the next webpage that you're taken to, and click on the little blue, green and yellow Drive button for the quiz's data you want to download to Google Drive, or the purple one if you want to download another way.

Step 3: Click save.

Step 4: Choose where to save your results to. I have a folder for Year 9 Kahoot data in my drive. Hit change to choose your save destination.

Step 5: When happy with the destination, click save.

Step 6: Open it by clicking the Kahoot Results link and have a look.

Step 7:  Quickly see which student got the most correct, or scroll sideways across to see which question/s stumped students the most (in red). 

How to Create Stop Motions by Phoenix

Stop Motion Animations - How to create Stop Motion Animations 

(This guide was created for Miss wells upon request)

Requirements:

• A chromebook
• Play-doh or whatever you are using to create,
• Patience,
• Listen to the teacher, Use your ears, that's why they exist
• Use your eyes, use your brain. Common sense.
• Google Presentation

What you have to do:

1)	Get your laptop out and everything you need.	This shouldn’t take long
2)	Open the ‘Camera’ App (It’s bundled on every chromebook) ...Something like this:
3)	Adjust your laptop so your play-doh creation is going to be in the middle of the picture
4)	Keep hitting spacebar to take pictures and move your playdoh around just a little, make sure it’s different each frame.	Or hit this button
5)	When you’ve finished click here, on the bottom left
6)	Click on one picture you took
7)	Click this button, Save to disk
8)	Hit save (It’s easier to also just create a folder depending on how many shots you take)
9)	Repeat Step 7 and 8 for the rest of your shots	You can’t multi select, I tried that already many times...Unless you know how to do so then go ahead.
10)	Get it ready to insert into your Google Presentation by clicking Insert then Image and choosing it from the folder you made.

FAQ:

- No, you can’t multi-select to save Photos, I tried that already, unless you know how then go ahead…

+Phoenix Lemalu 

Tamaki College

9PEm (Migrated)

(C) Phoenix L (phoenix2dcr9sz@tamaki.ac.nz)