MIT2020 - Final Meetup/Reflections

Today my MIT journey for 2020 wrapped up as our crew gathered at KPMG for the last time. Given the year we have had, it was actually the first and only time that we were all present in person in Auckland. We took time to reflect on our projects, share next steps and offered up words of support and advice to each other. 

It seems a mighty long time since we are first gathered at Kuaotuna in late February that is 9 months and 2 lockdowns ago!

My next steps:

- Update content (videos, site pages) on Get Ready site for 2021 using feedback from colleagues and students
- Continue to reach out to the local high school and leverage the learning I have gained from designing Get Ready! site and attempt to bring my original achievement objective to fruition i.e. develop a digital tool to assist with Year 8 transition to high school

What could I have done differently?

Woulda (With 20/20 hindsight)

• Identified AND met with a larger group of key stakeholders at local high school from start of 2020;
• Done thorough inventory of the resources/programmes the local high school currently uses for Year 9 transition 
• Focused on Year 8s exclusively from the start of the year - for feedback
• Identify gaps/opportunities to develop resources further or create new tool from scratch

Shoulda (Woulda but circumstances made it challenging to do)

• Had better lead times for student surveys to get as much feedback as possible, 

Coulda (Should have but didn't!)

• Met with/interviewed Year 9 deans at other Manaiakalani High Schools  to find out how they handle Year 9 transition.

Thank you to Dorothy, Matt and Jenny for supporting us all through this MIT experience - what a journey for us especially in a year that COVID threw a spanner in the works many times over! Thanks for the opportunity to explore digital solutions to a range of issues that are impacting student achievement.

Remote Learning: Go Live for Team 5!

As a team, we met informally after school last Friday for a quick debrief of the week that was. There was a definite vibe that schools were very likely to be shutdown at some point in the near future. Our talk soon turned into a constructive brainstorming session where we thrashed out how to  LIMIT THE LINKS  on our learning site so that access to learning at home in lockdown would be as streamlined and straightforward as possible.

Today, we reaped the benefits of this forward planning. While, we had started the week thinking we would have a good couple more days to trial and tweak things we quite simply ran out of time! So,  six of us took the plunge with our very first Google Meets and experienced our first taste of teaching and learning remotely in real time!

What a buzz! Lots of excitement as I met with my students as a group online. Students quickly learnt how to mute their microphones while I got to grips with the technical skills like finding the correct 'view' to see all of my students at once and remembering how to click RECORD for the session. Thank you for Dorothy for capturing the moment as members of our SMT came through the block to see us in action.

MIT 2020 - Revisiting our Project

Dorothy encouraged us to revisit our MIT projects in light of pending lock down due to COVID19 framing it as a time of opportunity rather than a setback to the work we had already done.There was an acceptance/acknowledgement in the group that yes, things may need to change as the ideas that had been swirling and starting to take form during/since our weekend at Kuaotunu were more than likely no longer workable or relevant. 

My initial concern was centred around getting access to former Year 8 students. I hadn't really factored in that they were 'no longer my kids' and even with 'inside' help at one of the local colleges it was always going to be tricky to negotiate parental permission as well.

So gifted with time out from the main session, I literally had a meeting with myself to thrash out what direction I wanted to take my project - do I stick with figuring out a way to help Year 8s make confident transitions to secondary school/Year 9 OR do I find another path?

I went back to basics, trawled through notes and readings. The Key Competency of managing self still made sense. So too did the section on connectedness and inclusion in the ERO publication, Transition from Primary to Secondary
    

One of the most influential aspects of school environments is the extent to which students feel connected while they are at school (Jose and Pryor, 2010). Connectedness was defined in terms of students feeling that they: belonged, felt included (regardless of their ethnicity, ability, gender or sexual orientation), had a contribution to make to the school, were cared for by their teachers, were accepted by their friends, were physically and emotionally safe and were learning (Adolescent Health Research Group, 2009).


BING! BING! My epiphany:

1) Why not focus on my current cohort of students (both Year 7 & 8)?

2) What would they need to manage themselves/stay connected during an extended period of home lockdown and a switch to distance learning online?

3) How could I help keep the kids engaged with and connected to each other through this time?

What did I land on? I decided that my new project challenge will be to design:

an app/site page that provides a 'one stop' shop for students, teachers and whanau to access a toolkit for self-management and staying connected that is
based on Te Whare Tapa Wha*.

OK! Well, now to embrace the mantra: Fail Fast, Fail Forward! - time to get a prototype up and running!
*Te Whare Tapa Wha is a Māori model of health developed by Dr. Mason Drurie in 1982 that the students are familiar with.

MIT 2020 - A note of appreciation!

The past couple of days has been a gift - time out from the usual hustle and bustle of our daily routines to meet in person as MITers of 2020. We've used the time to put into practice a range of design thinking tools to unpack our proposals and get them into shape for the year head. 

Thanks to Dorothy and Russell for being gracious hosts in Kuaotunu, to Matt for being an able navigator and sounding board and to my fellow MITers for sharing your ideas, generous feedback and collaborative spirit! Looking forward to catching up with you all again later this month!

MIT 2020 - Step 6: How Might We...? - Bringing multiple optimistic viewpoints to the challenge

Following on from feedback from my 5 WHYs buddy and the School Hall scenario, the sharing of the EMPATHY role plays, we switched gears. The focus was no longer on breaking down the problem but on providing POSITIVE suggestions for new ways of framing our individual challenges.

We updated a poster to show our tweaked challenge statement  and put them on the walls around us. Armed with post it notes and a felt-tip marker, we moved from poster to poster and left prompts for each other, using the question starter, HOW MIGHT WE...? 

Thank you fellow MITers for the valuable feedback! Thank you to Dorothy for helping me resolve the conflict I had in my original moonshot proposal between whether it was the teacher or the students with the problem! (FYI: It's the students!)

UPDATED CHALLENGE STATEMENT

I feel excited by my new and improved challenge statement - it defines a more specific skill set for Year 8s to acquire and develop and also shifts the focus of responsibility from teachers to students to build their own capacity as self-managers.

MIT 2020 - Step 3: School Hall Scenario

With my moonshot proposal and 5 WHYs completed, the next part of the design thinking process came unexpectedly!

Matt and Dorothy took us through a role play centred around a fictitious School Hall scenario. Each of the MIT 2020 group were given parent personas  from the local community to act out (e.g a pizza maker, a lawyer, a bach cleaner).  The gathering was led by a senior staff member (Matt) with a representative from ERO (Dorothy) in attendance. Parents were asked to prioritise a series of issues impacting the school. There was a tangible sense of frustration as we progressed from one issue to another. Indeed, comments from 'the floor' got quite heated at times:

               "We need more information! 

                What do you mean my kid can't listen!

                Are you telling me my kid is dumb? 

                It's not my problem? 

                What are the teachers doing to fix this?  

                Why are we only hearing about this now?

The senior staff member (Matt - heroically sticking to character!) pretty quickly came under the pump. Due to circumstances out of 'his control', he could not provide any of the details requested by parents to help clarify each issue and figure out which were the most pressing.

At some point, the penny dropped. It turned out that the 'issues' we were hotly debating were in fact the achievement challenge statements from each MIT member.

GENIUS! 

Having each MITer in character as part of an audience dialled down any potential awkwardness or defensiveness that might have come up had we been asked instead to present our ideas in front a group of relative strangers.The role play was a way for us to hear an upfront critique of our initial musings and prompted each of us to go back and re-examine our initial problem statement.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT:- was the issue expressed in concise language? was the issue actually worthy of investigation as a design thinking project?

MIT 2020 - Step 2: The 5 Whys

Step 2: Use THE 5 WHYS methodology to identify the root cause of a challenge/problem

The 5 WHYS in action: Paired up with Tina Takimoana from Ahipara School, I found it humbling to trade WHY questions with her in an effort to unpack the root cause of our respective challenges or problems.

The process was thought provoking because it forced me to unpack and then consolidate my thinking around the challenge I had identified. In our responses to each WHY question, the crux of the problem was slowly revealed and the 'real' challenge we needed to solve started to take shape.

Below is a slideshow (THANK YOU DOROTHY!) that shows the questioning and answering of Tina and I had with each other as we went through the 5 WHY process.

Slide 1: Managing Change: Navigating the transition of students from primary to
secondary school (KIRIWAI)

Slide 2: Accelerating students learning to reach the norm in mathematical understanding (TINA)

MIT 2020 - Step 1: Moonshot Proposal

To kickstart my Manaiakalani Innovative Teacher (MIT) 2020 project, I needed to prepare a moonshot proposal. This is a working document which essentially lays the groundwork for my design thinking project.

Step 1: Identify the challenge impacting achievement that I want to focus on in 2020 through the MIT design thinking process?

As a Year 7 & 8 teacher, one of main areas of concern is around those Year 8 students who leave ill-equipped to adapt and cope with the move to secondary school, and so are at greater risk of dropping out of school before they have the qualifications (NCEA Level 2) that will allow them to build better life outcomes for themselves.

Keeping this in mind, I developed an initial CHALLENGE STATEMENT is shown below:

All ten of the MIT 2020 cohort gathered at Kuaotuna at the end of February and with guidance from Dorothy and Matt, there were plenty of opportunities to re-evaluate our initial statement (more posts to follow!) and craft it into challenge that would be worthy of exploring over the coming year.

How do you RATE your teaching practice?

Today's staff PD session led by Dorothy Burt was a timely reminder that effective teachers are THE key component in achieving success in the classroom.  The world of digital learning offers many bells and whistles but nothing can replace what a competent teacher body can bring to the classroom.

Dorothy introduced us to the RATE framework. I found it very useful to breakdown how I can access EFFECTIVE TEACHING PRACTISE and continue my own personal journey to develop my teaching skillset.

R = RECOGNISE Effective Practice by seeking out out teaching practices that work. We got to see this in action at the end of our PD session with staff split into groups, role playing a guided reading session with a focus on a specific element of the NZ Curriculum (Reading, Level 2) with a 'teacher'  supporting 'students' to overcome decoding challenges. Lots of great ideas on display!

A = AMPLIFY Effective Practise by using the Learn-Create-Share pedagogy. Staying connected to other educators through our networks, keeping good practice visible, feeling empowered to get out and put different ideas into practise and taking advantage of colleagues skills and experiences at at time and place that suits (ubiquitous) e.g. online toolkits

T = TURBOCHARGE Effective Practise by using digital technologies to provide learning experiences that were previously not possible (SAMR model) or were not available 

E = EFFECTIVE PRACTICE 

Google Exam - Success at last!

Google Exam Post Script: After a disappointing first effort, I was keen to take another shot at the Level 1 Google Exam.

I lined up a test date with others from the course on the second week of the holidays but unfortunately, a slight hiccup with the retake process from Google foiled my plans! Not to be defeated, I finally took the test again on the last weekend of the holidays - no pressure!

Well, I am pleased to say the wait was worth it - I passed! This success has really made me appreciate just how much I learnt on the DFI course last term - again a huge thank you to Dorothy, Gerhard and Matt! Hmmm, is it time to think about Level 2? Watch this space...