A Change of Tack - Inquiry Update - Term 3, 2019

Term 3 Inquiry Update: Rich Learning Activities

In Term 3, my priority students changed and I revamped my inquiry focus question to investigate the extent to which the format of maths problems will influence the problem solving abilities of my target students.

My latest hunch was that the format of the questions I gave to the students was impacting on their ability to be successful in problem solving.
A PD session with Jo Knox highlighted the benefits of using open ended, rich learning tasks (like the 'Giant's Hand' activity to the right) as a way to engage and challenge students. She explained a resource bank is available on the nzmaths site. 
I chose rich learning activities that matched the term topic of Geometry & Measurement. To explore the concept of perimeter further, I chose the Parking Cars task for my priority group. Students needed to work out a new car park layout for a specific number of vehicles.

First we unpacked the problem in our group session and clarified key details e.g the dimensions of the parking lot and the required car spaces. I was explicit in telling them that there may be more than one possible result. Despite some initial hesitation to this 'new' kind of problem after the discussion, the students were all super keen to head off and be the first to work out a possible solution. Working with a buddy or on their own, some made a screencastify recording to explain their 'solution'.Samples of student work are below:

Click here for Junior's full blog post

Click here for Kerstein's full blog post

The open ended and real-life nature of the rich tasks totally engaged the students and without any prompting from me. They willingly took longer to work through different options and were less focused on finding the 'right' answer. Their end solutions highlighted how students had interpreted (or misinterpreted) a problem and so provided me with a useful starting point for a discussion to find out more about their thinking process.

I was really pleased with the students' positive response to the 'rich' task and would like to use them with all the groups. The challenge will be to find tasks that are appropriate - not too hard or not too easy - and linked to the given maths topic being reviewed.

As Term 4 kicks off, the next hunch I would like to explore is how modelling books can be used to effectively scaffold my priority students in problem solving strategies.

Digital Fluency Intensive 3 - Getting Creative, Google Hangouts

Week 3 of our DF Intensive series of workshops is almost over with more great - today we have learned how to fine tune settings in GOOGLE Mail and GOOGLE Calendar which will make organising emails and events/schedules so much easier.

Our main learning was on GOOGLE Hangouts - a tool that allows you to remotely connect with others for discussions and share online. To demonstrate this tool in a real world context, Dorothy joined us from Adelaide with Matt, Gerhard and Kelsey Morgan (Education Programme Leader visiting from Christchurch) to guide our group from the Manaiakalani Trust training room in Glen Innes, Auckland.  Despite a couple of technical glitches, we got to share our favourite restaurants and streetview images from GOOGLE Maps.

Today's task was to create a GOOGLE Hangout and discuss the creative content of blog post of student learning. Together with Jocelyn and Kelsey, we used three questions to guide our conversation.

1. What learner empowerment is demonstrated? Do you detect signs of learner agency post? Did they have any room to make choices?

2. What supports / scaffolds might the teacher have set up to get this creative activity to occur? e.g. scaffolds, rubrics, templates etc etc

3. Explain/reflect/demonstrate learning, through creation - How has creation given more opportunities for deep learning and cognitive engagement?

Check out our GOOGLE Hangout  below.  Looking forward to Week 4!

Digital Fluency Intensive 2 - Collecting and Analysing Information

Session 2 of our Digital Fluency Intensive brought a better understanding of the LEARN component of the Manaiakalani pedagogy. It was sobering to hear of how many students from the Tamaki community were leaving high school in the 1990s with no qualifications. This dire situation became a huge driver for change as continued underachieving was unacceptable. 

Research shows that students in Decile 1 'land' at school, well behind their peers in higher decile schools. To interrupt this cycle of underperforming, schools started to challenge existing teaching methodologies. From humble beginnings, a handful of teachers rose to the challenge and the starting point was knock convention on the head by using podcasting to target improvements in literacy.

Our trainers also shared with us how to work with GOOGLE FORMS  and GOOGLE SHEETS.   FORMS is a great tool for gathering information using a variety of question options and it automatically collates the data on a separate sheet - genuis! SHEETS are a tool to record, analyse and format information.

The illustration above was produced using FORMS (specific location of favourite holiday destinations) and SHEETS (collated information to merge into map).

I am looking forward to putting my newly acquired SHEET skills to smarten up the content and appearance of my existing spreadsheets for Turn in Sheets and Assessment data.

Thanks for another informative day Dorothy, Gerhard and Matt!

Digital Fluency Intensive 1 - Living local, learning global

The first day of the Digital Fluency (DF) Intensive for Term 3 has been jammed pack full of useful content. Our group of 11 teachers from 6 different schools across the Manaiakalani cluster have spent the day learning practical tips including how to better organise our GOOGLE Drive and exploring different formatting options within GOOGLE Docs.

We also had an opportunity to put our new found skills to the test with a poster based on the Manaiakalani kaupapa. Looking forward to spending each Friday for the next 8 weeks at DF sessions to learn more from our expert trainers and the other participants.