Open for Learning

https://twitter.com/Mrsmeganpete/status/791565250742984704

It's one of those topics that seems to be on everyone's radar right now: appraisal.

Not just because of teacher registration and the Practising Teacher Criteria.
Not just because it is one of ERO's foci.
But because we are all aware that teacher professional knowledge and pedagogy needs to keep improving and we want to do it the best way possible for all the parties involved.

Like other schools, we are trialing, reviewing and refining how it's done at "ours".

I missed a very good Twitter chat last Thursday, that thanks to Storify, I could capture to enjoy today (see below).  The educators who shared did so with honesty and generosity; there is a wealth of ideas and resources to read and mull over.

Not least, Chief Executive of Evaluation associates, Anna Sullivan's blog post, How To Make the Most of Teacher Appraisal (also printed in the current issue of the NZ Education Gazette.)

The key points I gleaned from the discussion between some very thoughtful educators are good ideas to measure your system against:

• It can't be tokenism
• It must be robust
• It should be vision and values based
• It needs to be warm and demanding at the same time
• There needs to be a climate of trust
• There must be open to learning conversations
• There must be clarity at the onset
• There need to be courageous conversations
• The basis should be student learning, not achievement
• Learning includes something more holistic than achievement; being a good citizen or growing in the Key Competencies
• Critical friends and peer appraisal feature rather than a hierarchical system

And what about senior leaders? What are they appraised against and who appraises them?

For a number of years I've kept this blog, tagging my posts against the Registered, now Practising Teacher Criteria.  

I've just filled in a document I created, based on the PTCs, the criteria for APs and DPs in the Collective Agreement and our own annual plan.  I used a simple Google doc as I didn't want to put all my time into creating the tool.  It also fitted Anna's criteria of being owned by me, using media I was comfortable with (online) and not within the school domain. 

What do you do? I'd love to continue the conversation...

Ungeeking the Geekery - #EducampRotovegas 21 February 2015

I love educamps. I loved this one the most. And not because I was one of the hosts and the convenor.

Several aspects stood out for me as we went through the agenda for the day: the welcome, introductions, smackdown and workshops.

Among the people who arrived were a lot of unfamiliar faces.

I love my tweep colleagues and many of us are now educamp groupies. We enjoy seeing each other

again. It's our tribe and it's like coming home.  It's also amazing to meet online friends face to face for the first time (hey there, Justine Hughes @cossie29 and Leonie Bennett @leonie_hastings).

One of our aims when Marnel van der Spuy @1MvdS and I thought we could do this three years ago, was to bring a professional learning opportunity to Rotorua that was available to all local teachers for no cost except their time. What struck us at the 2013 day was the lack of local teachers.  But it was so much fun and learning, with great connections made from around the compass.

So even more exciting were these new faces; newbies to educamp who came from as far away as Auckland, Hawkes Bay, Tauranga, Hamilton, Tirau, Tokoroa and south Waikato. And Rotorua. A lot of Rotorua teachers.  Hallelujah!

Everyone looked as if they were having a great time.

I'm conscious of that celebrity status that well known presenters get; the in people, the ones who have a reputation for having a lot of knowledge and are far too super geek to talk to. It's easy to feel like an imposter who doesn't know enough to share.  But the room embraced everyone.  It was made quite clear that nothing was dumb, everyone had something to offer and it was okay to sit back and absorb. When someone said she was only a BT, the crowd loudly disagreed with her label; similarly when some one else said she was "only a teacher aide".  Everyone had a place in the room.  And it showed as the smackdown extended through many slides as people gained confidence to share.

The range of workshops appealed to everyone.  Newbies joined Twitter. What was once pure geek is becoming mainstream. Hooray!

Thanks to Kimberly Baars @MissesArtech from Taupaki School for talking about Maker Culture; Diana Wilkes @DianaWilkes for her workshop on Teacher Dashboard at Ormiston School and Jo Makinson @JoMakinson for leading the group through Literacy Evolution which she started at Richmond School..

Now an established event that drew fifty people, Network for Learning through  Andy Schick @Andy_Schick stumped up for refreshments. Thanks folks!

And thanks to Juliet Revell @Juliet_Revell who demonstrated that it was possible to attend by GHO from Napier and Leanne Stubbing @fivefoot3 who watched from afar in Wellington and completed a Storify of the day.

The geekery was well and truly ungeeked. Good on you all. Welcome to twenty first century learning at last!

Trekking to the Tron

I love unconferences.
The right people come...and in this case I had @ariaporo22 and @kasseylee11 with me.
The latest ideas are offered.
The most popular ideas are elaborated.
Educators share and connect.  They know who to ask for help.

Replying to Reid...the #edchatnz Blogging Meme

If you get included in the blogging meme: copy/paste the questions and instructions into your own blog then fill out your own answers. Share on twitter tagging 5 friends.

1. How did you attend the #Edchatnz Conference? (Face 2 Face, followed online or didn’t)

It was a MUST attend for me. I'm one of the early #edchatnz crowd – and well, the “queen” it would appear – so one must make an effort! I love @MissDtheTeacher and what she has done to BITS and wouldn’t have missed it.

I told my team, leapt in the car after a meeting on Thursday afternoon, and drove the three hours to Auckland where my lovely tweep friend @CaroBush was hosting “the girls”. We went to #Educafe with @EmmaWinder25 and @andrewcowie and had the most marvellous think tank time…but I digress; that’s another post.

Next morning it was on the road to HPSS with @CaroBush, @digitallearnin and @annagerrit – and I think we were first there!



2. How many others attended from your school or organisation?

Just me.



3. How many #Edchatnz challenges did you complete?

Hmmm – certainly #selfies, #grelfies, #melfies and #twofies.

Also assisted @digitallearnin with the dance challenge in @andrewcowie’s digital literacy breakout.  She held the camera while I yelled at everyone, “Get up! Dance! It’s a challenge! DO IT!”



4. Who are 3 people that you connected with and what did you learn from them?

@boonman who is a well-known advertising face (had to ask him if he really was himself) but did his best work on our Twitter video. Funny guy! Smarter looking in real life. (He he.)
@AKeenReader who reminded me that we all have an influence on each other and it’s so important to make those connections and have that support.
@mattynicholl whose whole face lights up when he greets someone.

But I want to say EVERYONE!  I really get pleasure from meeting all the tweeps I talk to online, reconnecting with people I now regard as friends, new tweeps I didn’t already know and anyone who shares my passion for learning and sharing. So I could just add my “following” list!



5. What session are you gutted that you missed?

I would have liked to see @geomouldy in action, @nanogirl, and @rosmaceachern, who was talking about being a learning coach in this different school environment.



6. Who is one person that you would like to have taken to Edchatnz and what key thing would they have learned?

I can’t choose one. The people who should go might not be ready to go.  The teachers at school who would love to go but have small children or Saturday sport commitments and put their kids first.  The people who don’t get the whole connected, collaborative, online environment and being a global citizen.

I’d love people to see what an amazing network is forming through Twitter: my staffroom of choice, where hierarchies don’t exist, people share the same vision for learning and get each other.



6. Is there a person you didn't get to meet/chat with (F2F/online) that you wished you had? Why?

Yes – some names that constantly pop up on my feed like @DanceWellNZ, @nanogirl and the Ngatea lot who I promised @Neil_NPS I would look for.

I love putting the faces to the names. @nanogirl has been an inspiration in science and with her handling of the media.

I have to say though, that I met a huge bunch of tweeps! Yay! Lots of #grelfies and #huggingandshrieking to prove it.



7. What is the next book you are going to read and why?

I need to finish “Boy Writers” by Ralph Fletcher, which is inspirational and down to earth. He is a father of boys and a teacher of writing; Gail Loane recommended the book to me.

Next will be the #edubookchatnz choice, “Key Competencies for the Future” by Rosemary Hipkins et al.



8. What is one thing you plan to do to continue the Education Revolution you learnt about at #EdchatNZ?

Lots of things were reinforced.  I think that not being worried about being the lone nut is the most important thing. We aren't lone nuts and I'm already spreading the good salt.  The NZ Curriculum document is a good one, and I need to keep reminding folk what it says.

I'll continue to look at gaming with Minecraft and coding.



9. Will you take a risk and hand your students a blank canvas?

I try to now. My NAPP inquiry was about boys and writing and I am fascinated by the “feminisation” of education; some say it doesn’t exist. I think it does. One thing is less teacher talk, more discovery.



Who do I tag with this meme:

@CaroBush
@digitallearnin
@annagerrit
@LaSampsonater
@Belchick1

Yes, We Can Get Our Boys to Write!

My last post was about dyslexia and why some students, who love words, did not find their school writing experiences positive. This post on being an effective teacher of writing, looks at how we can address some of the problems for writers. 

It's great when you come away from a course excited.  It's even better when you feel like that even though you should still be on holiday. And it's "fantabulous," when your colleagues feel the same way.

Like many others, we've identified that our students, as a group, are weakest in writing achievement. Our qualified hunch is that this is because our teachers could be better teachers of writing.  But how do you address this?

When I first arrived at the school three and a half years ago, the focus was writing.  Our first step was to introduce a more robust assessment tool and we chose e-asTTle.  The last three years have been about unpacking the tool and looking at how we unpack a piece of writing.  The new e-asTTle writing rubric came out, so we spent time adapting to that.  We knew moderation was important, so we hosted interschool moderation workshops and had a lot of practice and discussion within our own staff.

But we all know that testing and being better at testing, does not make a writer who is passionate about writing! I am very aware of this need.  I can see that not everyone on the staff shares my passion for crafting words into word pictures; word pictures that engage readers and take them away on a magical video in the cinema of our imaginations.

We identified and talked about this need with our change team; it was suggested that Gail Loane might be available before the school year started.  Our principal shared our needs with Gail , on the phone.  Some of us had attended her two hour seminar on Boy Writers last year. Like our students, we wanted a workshop that would be interactive.

I set myself the goal of reading "I've Got Something to Say," Gail Loane's book on writing, in collaboration with Sally Muir.  It had sat on my shelf for two years. Recommended by other colleagues, it was always superseded by the best pulp fiction I could find to take my brain on holiday over the Christmas break.

As expected, I'm embarrassed I didn't open it earlier. Gail and Sally have created a primer for effective writing practice that embraces effective pedagogy, samples of writing, how to present and unpack them and surrounds them with real experiences with students.  Interwoven is Gail's obvious passion for writing and unrelenting belief that every child can write, has a story to write and has a story he or she wants to share.

And that's how she ran the workshop.  I enjoyed recognising pieces I had discovered in the book and knowing that the ideas I wanted to revisit - and that's all of them - were all in the book.

She asked us to question whether we believed that some students' lives were not rich enough to have their own starters and bemoaned the fact that so many draft books were short on work and short on completion. We read the poem "That Was Summer" by Marci Ridlon.

We clarified meaning; not everyone comes to a piece with the same set of experiences and understandings. We used topics that students can relate to: summer, playing hide and seek, building huts and playing a sport. We unpacked and co-constructed criteria that everyone can use.

We wrote our stanza in about ten minutes. We shared and read it as a group poem. We were all writers.

(I've attached my full notes from the day on a Google doc as well as the storified tweets from teacher Kassey Downard @kasseylee11 and myself @mrs_hyde.)

Further note - I was excited when I read, at the start of the book, that Gail had attended a workshop run by Ruie Pritchard in the late 1980's. So had I. I was blown away to discover that we were on the same week-long inservice at Waikato. How marvelous that she has carried it further, so that I may again pick up the threads so many years later.