The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

This year, 2020, started differently for me. I didn’t have a class to prepare for. I didn’t have staff days to attend. I didn’t have the noise in my head as my holiday began to creep towards its natural end. Sure, I still had the excitement of what was to come. The nerves of starting. But I had the added nerves of starting something new. A new journey, a new job.

Almost three months later I feel I am finding my feet. As Term 1 drew to an end I was feeling more comfortable in this new skin as an Education Programme Leader. I had spent time getting to know the people I am working with, getting to know their context and their students. Getting to understand how each school functions and how they relate to each other. I’ve watched for the unspoken culture and felt my way with different parts of the job.

This job is kind of like walking into a room blindfolded. You know there are walls and doors even though you can’t see them initially and while you trust that the people around you aren’t there to trip you up or push you over, you still feel very much in the dark.

I’ve been lucky though. I’ve had Mark with me, holding my hand as I feel my way forward. Guiding and supporting me, cheering me on and gently reminding me not to try and run just yet. I’ve also had Kesley to my side. I’ve watched her navigate this role for a few years now, so she has given me a blueprint with which I can follow. What an imprint too! Again, I feel so blessed.  To have an amazing whāhine around me, showing me what great humble leadership looks like.

I have been struck by what I’ve missed though. And what I haven’t missed.

I knew that I would miss my work-wife Angela. And I have. Badly. It is hard to know how much you become in tune with each other when working in a close environment. It is a pretty powerful thing, a good partnership in a classroom. We have weathered many a storm together, professionally and personally. I know that I am a better teacher because of this relationship. And a better person. Thankfully, we can still catch up, even in this weird bubble time, we meet and laugh and groan together.

I knew I’d miss my classroom and in particular, the students. There have been a few tears shed over what I haven’t been able to do with them. Over the end of the journey, especially for the Year 8’s. 3+ years is a long time to journey with students, you really get to know them well.

I know I’ve also grieved what we (Angela and I) could have done with them this year. We had that class humming by the end of 2019 and this year would have been a gift of exploring and extending with those amazing learners into things we hadn’t been able to do before.

I’ve missed the staff team too. There are great, passionate people that work at my former school. They love every kid that walks through the gate each morning, even when it is hard and challenging and they aren’t so lovable. It’s weird not walking through the same gate every day. (It’s also strange knowing that if I do get to walk through that gate again this year that I will be met with change and with people who won’t know me or care why I’m there.)

I haven’t missed the stress though. The drama. The frustrations. The difficult bits. The unending lists of stuff that you have to do but have no time for. And let’s not forget the behaviour management. I really don’t miss that. Mostly I don’t miss the feeling that it doesn’t matter what you do because it won’t make a bit of difference fo that kid or their situation because what it really needs is money and 1:1 support and … (insert list here), sigh.

I see that struggle though, in every school and class, I enter now. I see the strength, the determination, the tenacity and the beauty that exists in every teacher as they fight daily for the best space for each student to learn. Sure, it isn’t perfect all the time. It is messy and sometimes things go wrong, failure happens. But, it is as real as it gets.

So I feel glad and blessed, afraid and happy, excited and nervous. But I know that this new journey I’m on is the right one. I have a new team, a new set of people who I can engage in this journey of educating and the chance to grow in new ways. What a gift.

I started this blog thinking I would share some learnings but as I’ve written I realise that in this weird, bubble space we currently exist opens itself for reflection. So this is a reflection blog on what was. Tomorrow I might write about the learnings and the current things. But today I reflect and I remember. I wonder if you are taking some time for reflecting too?

Empowering our learning ... with maps, sheets and forms.

Empower!

Empowered                  

Used to use an agency but now use empowered. Empowered means to empower our learners… shock horror.

80% of the community in Manaiakalani live with an income of $19,000 per annum. And they make it work, but they are the working poor. We are not just talking about whanau on benefits these families are working and trying to juggle childcare, bills and life. However, it is quite disempowering.

5+ a day back and forth conversations make a difference to the oral language and blogging also strengthens this (5+ a blogasation).

If you want to EMPOWER our children then you can’t cherry-pick which you do. All of the following need to be part of the journey:

It has been really great having Dorothy Burt with us in person. She has a wealth of knowledge and she was able to download some of it to us. It was especially helpful in having the tips and tricks for our exam next week. Some people are feeling pretty worried about it but I am going into it with a positive attitude (assuming I can get on because I did have some technical difficulties with signing up today).

The rest of the day was exploring My Maps, Forms and Sheets. On the surface, these don't sound too thrilling but in actual fact we had a number of 'WOW' moments. There are a number of ways to use all of them, in life and in the classroom (which is also life but you know what I mean). 

For My Maps, I've started creating a My Map of our trip to Wellington for our Year 7/8 Camp. This I'll be able to share with whanau so they can see what we are doing (and how much walking they will be doing).

We did create this one with data from a Google Form.

In Forms, we created something for people to fill in. It was pretty fun. I had a go creating something for students to give feedback. This is the table that all the DFI team shared their Forms, you could always have a play if you wanted. The Block NZ is an important social question at present. 

Share your name and link your form below! Have a go at completing each other’s forms
Dorothy
Mel Raisin	Would you rather
Kelsey	Do You Wanna Taco 'bout It?
Alethea D	The Call of the Wilderness
Kathy L	Weekends
Rebecca	How do you take your coffee?
Melissa	All about me sandpit student form
Paula	Finding out about you
Helen	PBL choice for my hub student form
Angela	The Block NZ
Harry Romana	DFI Practice Form
Jess	Animals
Angela	Pets
Kellen	Softball form (students)
Nicole	Colours
Sharon	Thumbs up or Thumbs down?
Bernard Adams	Inquiry Term 4:  Student form
Kimberley	Genius Hour
Sharon T	Personal reading
Lucy	Breakfast eating habits
Tracey	Which Gymnastics leotard do you prefer for our Belfast Gym Team?

Finally, we spent some time pulling data out of our student blogs. I'm not entirely convinced I've harnessed the power of the data yet. I pulled all the date from our Year 7&8 students blogs. Below you can see the data that I have to work with. I have managed to use Sparkline to create the little graphs so you can see the tracking of their blog posting. I have also worked out the averages across the years, they are at the bottom of each column. 

I made this graph to show the totals for each student. It is quite visual and shows the tracking for each individual student.

Do you have any suggestions for what I could do with the data? Ideally, I want it to motivate the students. I know that Angela was looking at individual blogs for data, which is also a powerful motivator. You could check out her blog .

It is sad to think that next week is our last week. I have loved this learning and networking. What a shame it will all be over next week. 

How many tabs can a teacher have open at one time?

Following on from last week's learning we continued the journey of working smarter, not harder.

Our main focus was on learning how to use Google Hangouts, plus a few extra tips and tricks.

Google Hangouts:

Today we experienced Google Hangouts, firstly 'hanging out' with Dorothy, where she spoke about LEARN and we listened and followed on a shared screen. Following this, we then 'hung out' in small groups learning how to share our screens and speak about our favourite place. You can see below some screenshots of our first conversation as a group and what it looks like. It is amazing how something simple like turning a microphone on and off and sharing a screen seems so complicated for the first time.

Later on in the day, we had a go discussion a students blog post from the Summer Learning Journey and having it recorded at the same time. I don't think it was truly successful, for a number of reasons; lack of understanding around the task, tech issues (the recording didn't do the sound initially), nerves around most of us not wanting to 'fail' or 'look stupid' ... or maybe that was just me. But it could be a great thing to try with students and for staff to use at different times. 

Workflow:

We continue to be given skills/extensions/apps/ideas to make our workflow better. We focussed on three things; emails, calendars and Keep. Many of the things in email and calendar I had already explored so it didn't feel so helpful, though I did get to change my email background to a personal photo so that was nice.

Keep, however, was a different story. This seems to have many uses - list-making, note-taking, a place to keep ideas and lists and the ultimate hack ... turning text from a picture into text! That is mindblowing and we can't wait to try it out with our Sharp Reading sheets. We have already started to make a list of comments or pictures that we want to use often. Another member of our group uses it to drop digital stickers into their students work because the children missed the stickers. You can share lists between others so that is helpful for Angela and I and our workflow. 

In terms of thinking about the pedagogy that sits behind all of this, I would like to take some time to reflect on what Dorothy talked about. 

Learn is the sticky idea that most people struggle with. We are all, always learning but Learn is the bit where we access what we already know. Dorothy spent some time breaking the idea of Learn down a bit more. 

Exploring the idea of RATE was a good reminder.

R - recognising effective practise

A - when we have recognised it then amplifying that effective practice. This does include understanding the data and then amplifying that across other classes

T -  Turbocharge is where technology clicks in and allows us to amplify our effective practice

E = Effective Practise

What do we do that does this in our class? Do I do this? Having some time to explore this would have been helpful. I also wonder if it is something that we should be exploring as a school? What does YMS see as Learn? 

Hmmmmm, more to process around some of this but the tables are being packed up and my brains stopped working.

And the answer to the screen title is .... Many, many, many tabs (though One Tab or Toby Mini will help you to control the many).