You're my favourite class, too

Agency is one of those terms often bandied about in school and I admit that it is one that I struggle to define. Reflecting on the term, though, it seems to me that student agency is something that I encourage - albeit intermittently, perhaps - in my classroom. For me, agency is about student taking ownership of their learning. By developing their capacity to do things, giving them choices and control over their learning. There are different ways that I try to do this with my students, and I can certainly see even more ways to be effective in empowering it. I want my students to be more self-directed in their learning. In the past, when I've given students the opportunity to work collaboratively to construct knowledge of a text, for example, I have had concerns about the amount of work some students did, as well as the quality of their work output. I think that this concern has become an obstacle for me, too, because it makes me reluctant to transfer further control for their ...

As teachers, we dream of students engaged in their learning, exploring their passions in a myriad of ways. The reality is more often students doing work that is dictated by assessment needs. As part of our Mindlab session this evening, we were asked in small groups to discuss assessment practices. As three high school teachers, there are aspects of our assessment practice that we would like to change. One of the primary reasons is that we think that changes in assessment would benefit our students by increasing agency of their learning. Among the issues with assessment that we identified are: standard /assessment is driving the teaching and learning rather than teaching and learning driving assessment. NCEA and National Standards pressures 'exam' based assessment tasks assessments predominantly individually assessed where work could be submitted as group - how to manage this? over-testing within school reliance on written assessments Overall, we would prefer an i...

As a teacher in a school which is incrementally introducing BYOD, I am increasingly exploring ways of blending learning between traditional and digital platforms. I encourage my students to manage themselves so that they complete homework and in-class activities to an appropriate standard. However, unfortunately, there are still some ways to go towards my students taking full responsibility for their learning and I have been reluctant to implement a flipped classroom environment. I do, though, love the idea of getting students to watch videos in their own time and giving them the opportunity to apply the knowledge attained from the video in class time, where I can work with students and give them more individualised attention. There are so many exciting tools that I can utilise to engage my students in a flipped learning process. I've utlised TED-Ed lessons in the past to encourage students to reflect on an issue that we've studied in class - see for example, the TED-Ed les...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFdzz26g-EE This interesting and short video by DML research hub explores connected learning. Teachers in the video identify that there is no defined future, which leads to a need for students to be flexible, adaptive and creative. We need to ignite learning through sites of engagement, interest, and passion. The video identifies issues with fundamental questions that focus on outcomes -  what we want them to learn - and how the goals, content and everything else is defined by that. They argue that the core question should be what is the experience we want students to have, thereby focusing on engagement, and the needs of students.  Education is now 'whole village'. It is not just school that educates students. Learning is everywhere. Imagine concentric circles: connecting with interests, parents, communities, online. How do we bring people together to create greater 'connectedness'? I think that this is a key question: how ...

My junior classes (Year 9 and 10) have been doing creative writing the past week or so. The focus for both classes has been to start with describing a place and then put a person into the scene, describing how he or she got there and feels about where they are. It's the first formal (as in assessed) piece of writing that the Year 9 class have done, but the second time round for this Year 10 class. Their first efforts were mixed, and I really wanted to lift their use of language techniques to create a more authentic-sounding and evocative piece of writing. The structured and tiered writing response has worked really well, and I can see a significant lift in the sophistication of language and sentence structures. The Mindlab sessions using Scratch have had me thinking more about how I can incorporate digital storytelling into my classes, so doing creative writing has been excellent timing. Students will be recreating their written description as a visual text, using Scratch. I...

Do you think of yourself as someone who can programme a computer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jRREn6ifEQ In this TED Talk, Linda Liukas discusses the poetry of programming.  A couple of years ago I had a go at the Python coding challenge through Grok, alongside several students in the school.  I didn't see poetry in the programming. I saw lots and lots of numbers and symbols that I had to arrange in a very precise way in order to make things work and on top of that I had to use mathematical formulas to solve problems and that really threw me. Thinking about it now, of course, I can see the parallels. There is a synchonicity and precision required to write both programmes and poetry and there As frustrating as the process was, though, it was exciting when those algorithms worked and I could make the computer do something that I had instructed. It's been the same when I've experimented with Scratch - but probably more exciting because of it's visual na...

I've seen growth mindset discussed at various times in forums such as Twitter. The concept interested me so I had done a wee bit of research on what it was, although that was admittedly as far as I went. The traditional view of intelligence was that it is innate and there is nothing you can do about it, no matter how hard you work. I see this attitude reflected at various times in my classroom by students who think that they, for example, find creative writing difficult and so put little effort into producing finished work, or they struggle with aspects of grammar but don't try to figure out the rules and apply them to their work. I have been guilty of a similar attitude towards Maths, and have caught myself making comments along the lines of I suck at it, therefore someone else solve the problem for me. With the Maths thing, though, I've become more conscious of what I say because I have a daughter who I want to encourage into STEM and I realise that how I role mod...

Of late I have been reflecting more on my learning and applying it to my practices via this blog. I set it up a couple of years ago but had been sporadic in adding entries to it. My motivation for having a blog was to try to encourage me to reflect of on my teaching practice more regularly. I guess in theory it was good but although it gave me an avenue to think about my teaching it didn't really encourage more writing. I also felt a bit uncomfortable putting my ideas out there to the big wide world, which is kind of the purpose of a blog! With the Mindlab course, though, I'm going out of my comfort zone in all kinds of ways, and sharing my ideas and thoughts publicly is one of them. I have been making regular updates after each session, focusing on the aspect of the class that I found interesting and can apply to myself, my students or my school. I have found this a useful avenue to make me think about and clarify the ideas from the course rather than forgetting about them a...