Manaiakalani TOD Workshop 1 & 2

Workshop 1

Surfing Semantic Waves 
Dr Jannie van Hawes

Semantic - meaning-making

We want to take students from text simple to text complex.

Newsela Max - you can change the level of complexity of the texts to fit with your students.

We want to surf our students down and then up again in the complexity of text. 

When we put together the 'learning' we need to start with the nugget of the learning, the key to what we want the students to walk away with and then moving onto what we need to do to create support in order to help them get to the complex. 

The workshop did leave me with some questions around how taking texts, rewriting it for the learners supports the high leverage practise of authentic texts? I also wonder if we as educators set glass ceilings for our students because we 'know' where they are at? Finally, I wondered about how, with many of these things being focussed on ESOL, this concept sits after our morning session looking at valuing the first languages of our learners?

Many questions to ponder and discuss with others that attended this session. 

Workshop 2

Engage the high school reader with Multimodal Resources

Maria Krausse and Kerry Boyde-Preece from MET

Presentation Link

When using Multi-Modal are looking at two types of engagement - behavioural (the hook) and cognitive (T-shaped/text sets).

Many different places you can find content. 

There are some practical suggestions for high school teachers to make it more engaging.

I really liked the idea of using a snapshot from a student's blog and then linking to the actual blog. 

The presentation was really practical and allowed for teachers to see many examples of how they could take multi-modal and fit it within a high school context. 

Learn Create Share

Today I attended another fantastic Leaders of Learning session. I feel very lucky to be part of a group of people from my cluster who are diverse, supportive, thoughtful, caring and pretty funny. The thinking from many of them challenges me and I always come away feeling very privileged (and having learnt a lot) to be part of this group.

Today was no different, however, it was a day that I was especially looking forward to because I had missed out on 'The Day' (as we are calling it) where the group spent 7 hours unpacking the Learn Create Share pedagogy.

I had begun to grow my understanding through conversations with some of the members of the group and because of my involvement in the Delving Deeper presentation but I need more.

Prior to this session my understanding was:

Learn - what we know (prior knowledge) and what we need to know.
Create - All the things we create to share our learning.
Share - How we put our 'creation' out into the world.

But I knew it to be a little more than this, not linear but circular, all interconnected and intertwined.

This is now my current understanding (and I still don't think I have it embedded yet) based on our conversations and discussions:

Create = using and combining prior knowledge and new knowledge to synthesize the learning. It involves learners proving their understanding, creating brand new knowledge and learning skills as they create.

Share = connecting and collaborating with the purpose to gain feedback/feedforward and it is done on the learners' own terms. It's about the connections with others, their own agency and feedback/feedforward.

I believe I witnessed this in action today when two Year 8 girls worked near me putting together a video to explain bedmas to others. They came up with a plan, asked for permission to use a cell phone to create the video, worked on the video by discussing, correcting, editing as they clarified each part of bedmas until they had a finished product. Is this not a great example of Create & Share in action?

And finally, Learn.

Learn created a lot of discussion amongst the group, as those of us that hadn't been at 'The Day' had a different understanding of it. Learn isn't learning, learning is embedded in the whole process. Learn really should be called knowledge because it is about the prior knowledge the learners have.

For example when you take a guided reading session and you start the lesson with "What do you know about ..." you are at the Learn part of the pedagogy. Everyone shares and the group has then a shared knowledge. As soon as you pick up the text and start reading you are in create. Basically, 10% of a lesson sits in Learn. As educators, we provide access to Learn when we provide resources for children to access.

Now I'm thinking about Learn Create Share in terms of time spent to help me with the thinking around this. 10% for Learn, 70/80% on Create and 20/30% on Share.

Therefore my next step in my own learning and understanding is to begin to think about this as I work to improve the work the students are accessing. I also need to be able to explain it to my teaching partner and further to this help the whole staff have a shared understanding of this. The journey continues.

So School Leaders out there, have I got this right, or what thinking do I need to tweak?