A word from our Scottish colleague:

International Akoranga o Naenae...

Thinking back to when I arrived in New Zealand 7 months ago,  education was the last thing on my mind. Having taught for nearly 16 years in the same school, my sole focus was to find my two children a fabulous school for 12 months, and luckily, have a year to myself! I was off the education treadmill as it had become, a time to refresh and recharge and hopefully find the original passion I used to feel for teaching. As the weeks went on and my kids came home with numerous stories about how different their school, classmates and teachers were, I became intrigued: What was so different? My shy, reserved children had settled really quickly and were highly motivated about their learning.

I inquired about volunteering to get a taste of Kiwi education and met Kelly Layton who, over a cup of tea,  gave me a quick overview of Akoranga o Naenae; even the name of the school had me fascinated. So I turned up that first Friday expecting to help out in a regular class. Instead I was thrown into something completely different! I had so many questions: how could one whole day (20% of a child’s week) be devoted to learning about one thing? What about accountability? How would they measure the impact of their teaching? What about literacy and numeracy?

My first visit was really scary, but exciting. I hadn’t taught or been in a school for months and this wasn’t the environment I was used to! ‘Active Learning’ – I knew all about that didn’t I? I had been planning lessons for years encouraging my students to be active learners. I quickly realised I had a lot to learn! Google Drive, Infinity Learning Maps – I hadn’t used any of these tools before. Bring it on!

After a few hours observing the students and the slick collaboration of the team,  I just thought WOW! Lots of thoughts and ideas were running through my brain. I had been inspired beyond words, which hadn’t happened in a long time. What Kelly, Clare and Natasha were doing was truly incredible. They totally believed in their school and approached it with so much positive energy that I couldn’t wait for the next week!

I’ve now been volunteering every Friday for months and have experienced both rounds of AoN. I have seen the teachers reflect on their own practice and evolve their programme for round 2 with Kerry now part of the team; I have seen how much more confident they are second time around and how much quicker the children seem to lead their own learning. I have learned so much…. about myself, my teaching, even the way I act around my own children.

Although I knew what Active Learning was and hoped my lessons were active, having it broken down into the 6 traits and their success criteria was totally enlightening. I was good at questioning my students, I gave them learning intentions, teased success criteria from them, helped them reflect on their learning, my lessons were fun but I still had some lethargic, unmotivated kids. Then it hit me… I still controlled the content, the pace and how challenging it was. The children at AoN were really motivated and engaged – why? THEY had a choice and they made the decisions. They knew the success criteria and were able to lead their project in their own time and way.   

As with a lot of teachers I like control; I like things to be organised and I have an almost compulsive desire to be in ‘the driving seat’. I now understand how detrimental that can be. It’s all about balance. As a teacher it’s about giving them a purpose to their learning; making life connections in every lesson and providing them with the skills of ‘how’ to learn, make decisions and solve problems!

An important lesson I have learned is to focus on the journey, how they’ve got there is more important than using the product as an indicator of their success. They use questions to connect their learning. What do they already know? How can they connect this learning to other contexts? Link the purpose of the other things they’ve learned and reflect, reflect, reflect. The team continually refer to themselves as learners, continually making links to the traits  and showing the students how they reflect and make connections. Reiterating the ‘common language’.

Creativity and the use of technology features hugely in their day. I liked how the planning for the next week was emailed to the students giving them opportunity to prepare and be focused. Nothing was a surprise. I noticed as the weeks went on more children seemed to access and view the daily planning. Was attending AoN changing behaviours?

The students are encouraged to use their IT skills to develop their project, whether exploring the web, emailing, blogging or creating a slide show. They are given the freedom and TIME to use technology for independent inquiry. I started to see the connections between different areas of learning, the interdisciplinary links; communication on the telephone, spelling, grammar and punctuation in emails inviting or thanking people, organising times to visit experts. I loved how the day was split up and planned, and breaking from the traditional method of time slots took away any barriers.  Using alliterative words, Activate, Action, Analyse and Afterwards made it easy for the students to remember and summed up exactly what being achieved!

Okay… with all thoughts of having a year away from education, I am more inspired than ever to get back into the classroom. I am really curious to see how this approach would work in a Scottish primary school and how I would go about implementing it.

Involving learners in their own learning seems pretty straightforward and is at the heart of Scottish Education and our ‘Journey to Excellence’. HMiE declares that a school will be rated excellent, where among many things -

•         their learners have choices
•         can demonstrate links with previous learning
•         solve problems
•         question
•         show perseverance
•         can use their learning out of the classroom
•         are supported in their reflection
•         are leaders in their own learning

Isn’t this exactly what AoN is all about? Where the teachers are role models reflecting on their own practice AND feedback from their students about how successful their lessons have been.

I am really excited to share this experience with my colleagues and our cluster network of schools and hopefully start identifying children who would really benefit from an AoN type approach, being able to make their own choices and control their learning, but with a guided framework. Letting them explore their passions and possibly finding some experts we didn’t know about!

Reflecting on my own classroom practice has made me think, I need to

·         give more ownership of learning to my students

·         make learning more challenging

·         including more creative and investigative opportunities

·         give the students the freedom to use technology to learn

·         make sure I fully demonstrate links with other areas of the curriculum

·         think about the questioning of my students and how this will lead to their own inquiry

·         give lots of time for reflection and not just use it as a plenary tool

·         allow my students some time to decide what and how they want to learn, but with responsibility of how they will demonstrate it

·         use my community more, tap into all the experts we are sure to have around our school and surrounding area, teachers don’t know everything!

Clearly there will be barriers, but I am an active learner and I will show resilience. I’ll let you know how it goes!!

The chance to try again...The AoN satellite school By Natasha

How often do we give our students the chance to try again? How often do we give ourselves the chance to try again? We often talk about reflection being an incredibly powerful component to learning but how often do we create an environment where reflections can be acted upon? 

Source: http://adultrunaway.tumblr.com/post/77406653992

Having worked with Kelly and Clare at Akoranga o Naenae in Term 1 and Term 2, this term I was excited to take my new learning back into class and act upon my reflections. In the AoN 'satellite school' there would be some differences and some things would stay the same. 

The differences: 

• We would be based at a school, rather than in the community.
• A new collaboration - this time I would learn alongside my fellow year 4 teacher.
• The students would all be from the same school but it would give 2 classes the chance to collaborate with each other.

What would stay the same: 

• The thinking that sat behind AoN i.e. students exploring their passions around a framework of active learning. 
• The framework - students being exposed the interests they may not have considered --> selecting a passion to focus on --> planning their project: what do they want to find out? What tools, people and places will be useful? How will they share their learning? --> sharing their learning in a way that positively impacts on others. 
• The involvement of experts: so far we have a parent who is supporting the cooking group and next week an explorer who just returned from an expedition to Antarctica. 

Reflections in action: 

Following a similar framework has provided the chance for refinement. One example of this is around the questioning phase of the projects. Jane and I decided that the questioning phase was an important part of the research process and that having well thought out questions would provide purposeful signposts for students to keep referring back to. Students came up with a whole range of questions, some of them related to the research process e.g. Who can I contact to help me with this? How will I know if I have been successful? Other questions were around their actual passion e.g. What are some really important inventions in history? We spent some time discussing what might be the most useful way to sort these questions, torn between process-and-passion and beginning-during-end. Through talking with the students it was clear to see they had an understanding of the difference between those questions which would help them to find out information and those that were about their passion so we went with beginning, during, end. The students found this grid (tweeted by Mr Yale‏@Mr_YalePE ) to be a useful tool for developing their questioning skills...

We also recognised that you don't always know what you want to find out at the start. Questioning is an ongoing part of finding out and new questions arise as you find out more. We want to encourage students to document their pivotal questions throughout the process. 

Giving our students the chance to act on their reflections: 

Going through the process again made me reflect on the value of allowing students to go through a process for a second time (even a third or forth). 

At the start of the year my class had a go at Mr e's line art. The complexity of the task meant they had to go again and again and again. More recently we did the star challenge. Again the high level of challenge meant that students made 6 or 7 attempts reflecting, adapting and modifying as they went along. Collaborative and reflective discussions were happening all around the room...

Student 1 - I think that line looks too long

Student 2 - Can you go back to the instructions and find where you made the mistake? Then have another go. 

Making the most the chance to try again...

In situations where this has had the most impact there have been some commonalities:

In both of the above cases, students had the chance to act on their reflections almost instantly. Does this mean it always needs to be instant? Perhaps not... but then we would need to help them make the connections so they can use their reflections. 

Collaboration: Working alongside somebody with a common purpose. 

I think the same could be said for students? 

High level of challenge: if the task is something that can be completed easily surely this removes the motivation to try again? 

Having the chance to use my learning from AoN, by going through a similar process; allowing the students to lead their learning, whilst explicitly teaching the skills of being an active learner, has given me the chance to put reflections into action! It's also got me thinking about how I make sure my students get the chance to use their reflections too!