Week 5

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: ONE! Largely because Kurt headed in there to see a client, so I toddled along too and amused myself for an hour, trying to copy instagram fitness model workouts.

• McDonald's eaten: alas, a new high score of 2. One BLT bagel combo at 6.15am before work, and one Ham and Cheese pocket and coffee - again WAY too early in the morning.

• Casual sports games played this week: 2 games of touch, tag has finished :( 

• Books read: I've started on Mud, Sweat and Tears by Bear Grylls. I've been looking for this book in Op shops for YEARS - since a friend told me that it was the book (recommended to him by his high school English teacher) that kick-started his love of reading at age 16. 

• Teaching highlights: 
• Giving a Year 9 student feedback across multiple days with her creative writing in Science. Granted, she hasn't reached the science part yet.. but it was nice to help with her writing.
• You can read it at the bottom of the post if you're interested :) 
• I also received an email from another student in the class to remind me to send him the creative writing blog instructions so he could do it as homework!
• Helping my Year 11 tutor class (also with their creative writing), after talking to their English teacher about their first internal and.. 
• Trying to get students to "show" not "tell" in their writing.
• Christie's blog from tutor here
• Paula's blog from tutor here

• CoL things: Added in data analysis of writing and maths as well, so staff can identify their top Year 9 students. Sat with Marc a while to work out how the Staff Briefing will work next week. This week I'll have to sit with Russell to send principals emails, and then book time to attend Staff Briefings after school across the cluster.

• HSA things: This week we had our first guest visitor - the lovely Dr Susan Reed - to speak to students on Tuesday after school about being a female Polynesian in the Health field. I also had another meeting about the HSA opening fono for whānau, and called home to all the parent's about next Tuesday evening at 6pm. 
• Fusi's very short blog of Dr Susan's visit here.

• Teacher well-being support: organised backyard cricket on Friday after school. 17 staff members turned up to have a go! In case you can't read the scoreboard, Doris won by approximately 412 runs. 

• Gratitude emails sent: none BUT I gave out a RISE voucher to two students who I overheard have this responsible conversation: 
• "Can we get a basketball out please?" they asked a PE staff member.
• "No, sorry boys, there's only one minute left before the bell," replied the PE guy.
• "Oh only one minute! Ok I guess we'll go to class now, then" said one of the boys, while the other nodded his head - and off they went. 

Here's the creative writing story for those who want to read! I think it's great. 

This is a story about a superhero whose name was “Captain Kindness.” He loved helping other people and giving back to his community. On a sunny Saturday morning by 9am, the young superhero had completed all his tasks; visiting a resting home, reading a story to kindergarten children and lastly helping those in need of a healthy breakfast.

Once he had completed all his jobs he sat down in his “lucky chair” and searched for anyone in need, but - strangely - no one was in danger. His tally-phone and chart alarm weren’t beeping either. Captain Kindness gazed strongly towards his soft-screen and wondered why nothing strange was happening. He then came to the conclusion that all burglars, graffiti artists and wedgie-givers were on a break and didn’t need to disrupt the “Town of oz”!

He pulled out his journey book and searched for an activity he could do in his free time. The first thing that came up on his list was “search the Earth.” He thought to himself “what could I search, I’m a superhero and I’ve already seen the majority of the Earth!” On top of his adventures, he had also done some quick research on Google and had found some amazing things about his “Planet Earth”.

The Captain then came to the decision of going to visit the center of the Earth. He packed some fuel and jumped in his auto-invisible car. He wasn’t too sure how to get to the middle of the Earth so he called up a few of his friends, “Dr. Wolf”. It turned out Dr. Wolf wasn’t the best person to turn to for advice about the Earth - Dr. Wolf was actually a magician and not a scientist!

Luckily Captain Kindness knew two more friends who he was certain could help out. He searched his tally-phone looking for his long lost friend Professor Stanley.

Once again Captain Kindness was let down - it turned out Professor Stanley worked in a laboratory with chemicals and sadly he wasn’t able to help out with Captain Kindness’s adventure to the center of the Earth.

Captain Kindness almost gave up until he remembered his very close but distant best friend. Now I say best friend because Captain Kindness and Captain Red had done many activities together when they were young, until they set off to high school - they hadn’t seen each other in a while. His favorite color was red and he was exactly who Captain Kindness was looking for. Captain Kindness hit ‘dial’ and rang his old close friend.

As the phone rang, Captain Kindness was as nervous as a child receiving a big present; his arms down to his fingertips were shaking as fast as a cheetah on a hunt, and his palms were sweating so much they would have been able to fill a large glass cup! As much as Captain Kindness was afraid to talk to his long lost friend he built the courage to stay on the phone and speak to his long lost friend.

After four rings on the phone, someone answered the phone… “Hello, Captain Red here. How can I help?”

“Um... Hello, this is Captain Kindness” Captain Kindness replied with a silent and calm yet loud enough voice.

Captain Kindness was shocked to hear his friends voice after so many years. Captain Kindness slowly started speaking with more confidence into the tally-phone.

“Yes this is… Captain Kindness, but you may know me as Joshua Bandshell!” Captain Kindness knew his best friend as Kyle Maximus

“Is this you JoJo?” Captain Red replied “I’d recognise that squeaky voice anywhere!”

After a 45 minute phone call ‘JoJo’ had all the answers he’d been looking for and an extra 20 he hadn’t asked for! In his car her packed Magma Repulsors, his Super Cooling Suit, night vision goggles, an in-car air Pressuriser (vanilla flavoured, of course).

By 1.15pm he was ready to go, and backed his auto-invisible car down the gravelly driveway. Within minutes he was circling over Mt Etna in Italy, preparing to nose-dive down through the lava in the volcanic vent.

Down, down he went, passing through the magma chamber and into the crust of the Earth.

Now you can continue with:

Describe what they saw and touched, and how they used superpowers to survive the journey!

Include lots of scientific vocabulary such as mantle, dense, continental crust, iron, degrees celsius, solid, iron, inner core, magnetic, oceanic crust, convection.

The Shape of a Story

I just thought this article was fascinating..

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/shape-story-christina-wodtke

And I absolutely loved Pixar's 22 Rules of Storytelling..

http://www.aerogrammestudio.com/2013/03/07/pixars-22-rules-of-storytelling/

CoL Data Crunching

When I began my year as a CoL teacher I thought that each week I would be able to create and share resources and/or videos of bright ideas about literacy from almost any primary teacher in our cluster to the secondary teachers of my school, as I regarded them all as literacy specialists in comparison to me, (and probably all secondary teachers like me), who always try our best but didn't receive the same formal literacy training during our PGDips as the Primary trained teachers did. 

However, I've had my reigns pulled in. And that's not a bad thing at all, because what it means is that I'll be more targeted and scientific in my approach to sharing literacy strategies, instead of charging around like a bull in a china shop. On the other hand, it does mean I have less tangible help to deliver to my secondary colleagues each week in return for my time out of class each week. I'm very conscious of this. Everything I do this year will be through the lens of sharing what I learn to help others, and with a focus on literacy and science. 

So here is the outcome of the first four weeks of my year: 

• I've had three meetings about the steps that I must take to walk the best path into schools of the cluster, and also to shape and focus my inquiry. 

• I've been working with Aaron and Kenichi from Woolf Fisher to access the past data of the Year 9's who arrived at Tamaki College this year. 

• I conducted data analysis and creating a presentation to share at the first CoL meeting of the year. 

• I presented the start of my inquiry to the CoL meeting and have asked Kathryn for time to present at the next big staff meeting, to try and share more than just via this blog. 

Here are the findings around Writing and Reading Comprehension of students who arrive at Tamaki College from schools in the Manaiakalani cluster:

• I have identified that Writing is a great strength of the Primaries. 
• Reading Comprehension is an area that all Manaiakalani schools can improve. 
• 111 of the 149 Year 9's who arrived at Tamaki College did not make accelerated progress in Reading Comprehension towards the norm during Year 8. 
• Only 7 of our new arrivals are working above the norm for NZ in Reading Comprehension - meaning that acceleration in this area is vital across ALL years, as we're all playing catch-up together. 
• 38 students arriving at Tamaki College DID make accelerated progress in Reading Comprehension! 
• Some of that progress was really significant - Trent made 17.9 points of improvement in his PAT scale score for Reading Comprehension, and the norm improvement was 5.28! 

End of Week 4

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. 

Prepare yourself for a lot of data-heavy blog posts in the next few days as I complete my background data analysis on the Year 9's who arrived at Tamaki from our Manaiakalani feeder schools!

• Visits to the gym this week: still 0. I left a meeting at 5.30 on Thursday keen to go to the gym, but by the time I reached it at 6.30 after a frustrating hour in traffic I just wanted to go home. So I kept on driving.
• McDonald's eaten: 1 Happy Meal combo and McFlurry (mostly because I wanted the Roald Dahl book they were giving away in place of a toy).
• Casual sports games played this week: 4 games of touch throughout the week.
• Books read: Firewall by Andy McNab after talking to Staff Cairns about his favourite books. I can see why armed service-people enjoy this book! It was a little too heavy on operational details for me, but the story was interesting. 

• Teaching highlights: 
• Printing and cutting up this Excellence answer to review (and help learn) the third section of the Human Evolution exam, which students had to shuffle into the correct order using colour first, then semantic clues such as topic sentences and clues like "firstly," "the second piece of evidence" or links between sentences, and then finally order the paragraphs into an essay using the bullet points in the question to structure it.
• Next, students read through the full answer and wrote down words that they didn't know the meaning of onto big whiteboards. As I moved around I noticed these included both biological and just general English words. Some frequent ones written were: 
• Concurrently (con- means with or thoroughly, current relates to time or now.. with each other in time)
• Vaguely (sort of, kind of, slightly)
• Simultaneously (at the same time)
• Cohabitation (co- means together, habitat is a living space... living together)
• mtDNA 
• y-Chromosome
• Carbon dating
• I moved around the room explaining the words, and then went and created this doc that we'll come back to today.
• Year 13's took the initiative to write down notes about the evidence to support each of the two theories of human dispersal, half of Year 12 asked more questions while the other half tried to avoid any further learning.
• In response to that, I think it would be useful to get the Year 12 students to un-shuffle the answer a second time and record a quick summary of information from it. I'm hoping the second run at the activity will build more confidence.

• CoL things: I presented my data at the first CoL meeting of the year and received positive feedback and interest. That was nice. I'm going to ask Kathryn if I can present at the next staff meeting too.

• HSA things: Went to a meeting on Thursday morning with other Academy Directors and finally found out what other HSA are doing, and left feeling much more calm. We have our first guest coming to speak with students on Tuesday, and the fono with whānau next week :)

• Teacher well-being support: nothing this week because of the rain on Friday :( although Vaughn was ready to take people for a walk up Maungarei while I was busy flying to Nelson for my mother-in-law's 60th birthday!

• Gratitude emails sent: more this week, 4 I think. And 4 RISE cards too. 

Week 3..

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. 

These posts don't relate to my CoL role by the way, which is ticking away in the background. When my data analysis is complete it will deserve it's own blog post!

• Visits to the gym this week: still 0. Why am I paying for a membership!?
• McDonald's eaten: 1 - BLT bagel and a coffee when I needed to work right up until 8.28am.
• Casual sports games played this week: 3 games of touch, 3 games of tag and 9 Rounds with a friend on Saturday morning.
• Books read: Past Tense by Lee Child. It got skim read because half of the plot was boring. 

• Teaching highlights: 
• Going to the zoo with Year 13!

Everyone up and looking at skeletons and skulls

Tauola, Gloria, Maia and Paige trying to determine the species of their skull.

Keti, Loma and Alisi also puzzling.

Giant Galapagos tortoise! He was out and about while his buddy slept in the mud.

The elephant was an exciting find because she was feeding!

The mark of a good trip - 18 people out of 32 fell asleep on the ride home! It was very hot.

• CoL things: I ran data for about 4 and a half hours on just one cohort, across one year, on only Reading Comprehension. Not Vocab, not Writing, not Maths... just Reading Comprehension. Stay tuned for findings soon!
• Teacher wellbeing support: organised the "Great Tamaki Bakeoff" which only Shirly and Karen baked cookies for. Trina ran the voting at interval. While only 2 baked, definitely more people than that enjoyed the cookies :)
• Gratitude emails sent: only 2 again.

Snapshot Week 2

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. 

Here is the snapshot update on how week 2 went:

• Visits to the gym this week: 0
• McDonald's eaten: no McDonalds! Improvement.
• Casual sports games played this week: 2 games of touch, 2 games of tag, a run up a volcano with another teacher, Kalesha, and a fitness class on Saturday with friends.
• Books read: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (given to me by Vaughn at last weeks book swap).

• Teaching highlights: 
• This week in Y9 science we conducted a few investigations, and my favourite was one that I didn't know the answer to. Science is all about wondering and then trying to find an answer.
• I wondered if commentators speak about male and female 7's players in different ways.
• To try and make the science valid I picked both games from 2017, and both games were finals. I thought the games were also from the same tournament but Taniela (a boy in 9PKr) informed me they were not, which makes results slightly less reliable! 
• In class we watched 7 minutes of a women's final, and 7 minutes of a men's final.
• We wrote down words the commentators used to describe the players, the team, or the play.
• Unfortunately, the men's game was a little hard to hear over our speakers, so it wasn't the most successful classroom activity BUT the results were interesting. 
• We found that commentators were more likely to offer extra information about women players, e.g. "the flyer from Taranaki," "basketball convert," "Mother-of-Two" or "from a touch background" or "loves surfing." 
• Wouldn't it be hilarious to hear a commentator say "And he scores! Father-of-two Sonny Bill Williams touches down for his third try of the season!"
• Women were called "big" once and "strong" twice, but also had their legs described as "little pistons." 
• The theme of car-related analogies continued stronger in the men's commentary; "red-lining it" and "firing on all cylinders."
• Men were more likely to be called "powerful," "monster" and the words "lethal" and "outstanding" were both used twice.
• Some of the women's play was described as "beautiful," and the kicker as "class" and a play as "classy" while the men's play was "frenetic," "unstoppable" and had "flare".
• Both teams' players were described in terms of their positions, e.g. captain or winger, and also their stats, such as "top try-scorer if the season" or "Gold-medalists."

• CoL things: I spent an hour manually writing down the NSN numbers for all of Year 9 off KAMAR and another 30 minutes typing them into a spreadsheet to share to Woolf Fisher, so we can have data on only the Year 9's who have arrived at Tamaki College (as opposed to the results of all year 8's in the cluster, many of whom head off to other schools). This will help give an indication of the abilities of our current students.
• Teacher wellbeing support: organised Karen to run "Colouring In With Karen" in the staffroom on Friday afternoon. 10 people came along this week, up 3 from last week! 
• Gratitude emails sent: only 2 :( Must pick up my game!

Quick Summary from Week 1

We're back into it again for the year!

It's Saturday morning at 4.24am and I couldn't sleep because there were too many emails left unsent. Usually I'm good at switching off but.. apparently not tonight.

This year my goals are:

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. 

Here is the snapshot update on how that is going:

• Visits to the gym this week: 0
• McDonald's eaten: 2 kiwiburger combos.
• Casual sports games played this week: 2 games of tag.
• Books read: finished the third Orphan X on Tuesday night. 
• Teaching highlights: 
• Building and using a 'reading corner' with a large mat for Year 9 to gather on at the start of lessons. I'm trying to give an introduction, set expectations and have discussions with them there at the start of the lesson. There's a lot of them though. They overflow.
• Creating a booklet for 'introduction to science' for the Year 9's which they appear to have thoroughly enjoyed so far!
• Marking that booklet and using the small amount of evidence in it to create literacy groups named after ancestral waka. 
• Creating 5 different versions of the same reading for those literacy groups.
• Getting feedback from the three (of 10, the rest were at a spontaneous leadership course) Year 13s present during Thursday and Friday: "this makes sense Miss, this is all good." 
• Running a 'pads and tampons' investigation using a very poor-quality fake blood that I whipped up with gelatin, cornflour, water and red food colouring on the very first day of biology with my Year 12 class, which is a class of 25 girls! 
• Results: tauira were engaged, surprised, and thoughtful - they learnt that super pads absorb a lot more (about 20mL more) than super tampons.
• One group created a striking visual of tampon absorbancy as the tampon expanded and blocked an upside-down measuring cylinder full of fake blood.
• Another group tested different brands of liners stuck on paper towels, and found out which brands would leak first. The thickness of the best liner seemed to also be assisted in preventing leakage by imprints of flowers in the pad. 
• I wish I had taken photos!!
• Had a CoL meeting and came out knowing what data I need to track down to begin with, and knowing I have to think of a project and inquiry outline before the next meeting (Valentines Day). 
• Teacher wellbeing support: ran a "Holiday Book Swap" in the staffroom on Friday afternoon.
• Gratitude emails sent: 4, subject line is simply :)