TAI2020 'Say And Do Activities' In An Online Learning Environment

How does 'saying and doing' look learning online?

My inquiry over the last two years has been to grow student's oral language through an intensive oral language programme implemented across our junior school. 

One of the main changes to our teaching has been 'hands-on tasks' whereby the students talk about what they are doing as they do it, using vocabulary and phrases modelled by the teacher.

Moving into lockdown has made me and my team think about how this could look using a digital platform.

Some other challenges we were facing:

• Engaging students in their learning, with feedback from parents that they were finding it hard to get their children to focus on their learning at home.  
• The age of the students as they are too young to follow written instructions, we needed learning activities to be easy for them to understand, independently, without needing help from an adult.
• Not knowing if students were connecting with the leaning site at home as it has been hard to contact some families.

Evidence of Learning

• Videos shared with me via email, often through older siblings show engagement and connecting with learning online.
• Videos show children talking about what they are doing.
• They have understood the instructions and learning about concepts and contexts outside of their daily worlds.
• Use of correct sentence structures as they teach others how to do the activity.

Here are some examples of moving our intensive oral language acquisition programme online...

TAI2020 Tools, Measures And Approaches Used In My Teaching As Inquiry

This blog post identifies the tools, measures and approaches used In my inquiry to gain a detailed profile of student achievement.

How am I going to get an accurate profile of students' learning in relation to the challenge?

I will be using the combi list developed by Dr Jannie Van Hees to measure language development factors of all students within my class and a focus group from the other 3 junior classes. This assessment tool measures factors important in language development using the scale of Yes/Sometimes/No.  
The tool measures

• Willingness to communicate
• Communication with teacher/adults
• Participation in discourse
• Contribution to the discussion or discourse
• Benefits from feedback

Initially, I was going to gather data at the end of Term 1 however, because of lockdown I will now collect data term two. this will give me data collection points evenly spaced out over the two years.

I will also use running record data to show student achievement in reading. This will also be taken in Term 2. running record data over time shows the rate of progress as well as shows oral reading accuracy, analysis of errors made and reading comprehension. However, for the purpose of this specific data gathering, I will focus on the rate of progress over time.

PELP data was helpful to see the growth in language development in both first language and English, although this is time-consuming to do across the whole school I will do it within my class and like the combi list, for the target students in the other junior classes. I will gain data in the number of words spoken in heritage language and English to see if teaching in culturally responsive ways has an impact on language development.

All the above assessments will have to be put on hold during the lockdown. Although initially disappointed that I am unable to collect this data at present during the lockdown. As mentioned above, collecting it Term 2 will show data collection at evenly spaced out intervals. Data points over the two year period will thereby be Term 2 2019, Term 4 2019, Term 2 2020 and Term 4 2020.

One source of data that I can collect from some students at present is student voice. Some of my students with low oral language levels are not connecting but I am going to take this opportunity to gain student voice from those students that are. It will also be a great opportunity to gain whanau voice as well.

Why do I choose these approaches?

I'm choosing these approaches to show patterns of achievement and effects of changes of practice over a period of two years. Consistency in data gathering will hopefully give me an understanding of the effectiveness of my change in practice, however, a change I want to make this year to my inquiry is sampling throughout Term 2 and 3 to see if desired change is happening. If it isn't then I can fail fast and change what I am doing. 

Moving Into Lockdown

I wanted to write a post regarding my own experiences as an educator this week as we quickly moved from Level 3 to Level 4 in the fight against Covid-19.

In this unprecedented time, we have all seen changes that only a few months ago we couldn't have dreamed of happening. After seeing the heartbreaking news stories from countries like China, Italy and Iran and the insanely quick spread of the virus it still felt unreal until the borders closed. Then with the announcement on Monday of preparing to move into lockdown... we suddenly needed to move into top gear to prepare for schools to close and us all to go into isolation.

Monday: Sitting in our MIT PLG via hangouts at home, many of us trying out hangouts for the first time we were excited about the opportunities this tool could provide students and teachers. We were inspired by Matt's class site and shown how he would teach if (when) we went into lockdown. For me I was super excited.... how would hangouts look for a junior class where the little ones can't yet read and need that face to face contact, lots of modelling and oral instructions? I envisioned my phonics lessons being continued over hangouts and the connection students could still have with each other.

We left the hangout at 1pm to listen to the Priministers announcement that on Wednesday at 12pm we would be in lockdown and to prepare.

I think everyone processed that news in different ways. For me I felt emotional, my instant reaction was a concern for my little students who I love dearly.... my second response was to buy hair dye and my third response was that I needed to buy wood so I could work on my house while in isolation. It is funny the thoughts you have in times like this.

I also felt very far away from my school, working from home (I live 100kms away from my school and commute each day) and felt like I needed to be there.

Tuesday: Arriving at school it was suddenly all on.... how do we prepare our students for learning at home when they aren't with us to hear it. How can little ones access their learning without devices or wifi at home? What do we need to give them so they can continue to write and read and explore the world outside their four walls during this time?
For us junior teachers it looked different than the senior teachers. They could print out worksheets that they could read. Anything like that would need parent help with for our little ones and we can not rely on that happening for some of our children.
We put together packs with writing books, stationary books, ready to read books that we could attach the audio to our class site, plus these are free books provided by the ministry. We also included whiteboards and a ball, ballons and Engage activity cards for them to play at home.
Tensions were heightened as we were stepping into the unknown.

Wednesday: Getting ready for shut down day. Getting the go-ahead that we could deliver the school iPads to our families was a huge relief. This meant equity for some of our junior students. Unfortunately, we didn't have enough iPads for the whole of the Junior school so the decision was made that they would just be for Year 2 and Year 3. We also had out IT technician coming in at 3pm to try and connect them to the cluster wifi. What a crazy afternoon! I started delivering learning packs and iPads to whānau at 5:30pm and dropped off the last of them around 8pm. Whanau were so thankful. We still have 8 that need to be delivered by courier.....but this means our little ones have a way of connecting yippee!

Thursday: First day of lockdown. My Acting Principal who is leading us through this time has been amazing. He prioritised what we need to know and do during the next few weeks. Amongst all the admin involved with closing down a school, on the top of the list was ensuring support systems were set up for our vulnerable families, we also needed upskilling our staff so we can use hangouts via our class sites. I feel so lucky that we are already a digital school within the Manaiakalani cluster, therefore, we have been preparing for something like this for years without knowing. However, hangouts was a frontier that we had not needed to explore until now. How exciting that this tool is going to allow us to teach in new and exciting ways during this time.


Friday: the realities of the difficulties our families are going to face during his time became real as our first case that required agency support occurred. Having agencies working remotely is going to be difficult. As a whole staff, we connected over hangouts and I felt very proud of all my colleagues as they worked hard to quickly upskill and think outside of the box in terms of their new teaching practice.


My personal reflection as I took a walk around my 'block', which consists of a beautiful beach and bush track, was a vastly different reality of lockdown for many of my students and their families. My school is within a community that battles social, economic, housing and health issues. There are some things I can't impact however there are things I can... and that is what I'm going to do. Watch this space as I delve into the world of distance teaching.

TAI2020 How might my inquiry make a powerful contribution to school wide goals and cluster goals?

Collaboration With Senior Management and Colleagues 

Main Points

1) Is my current inquiry still relevant and current in regards to school-wide goals and cluster goals?

• Yes, it aligns with our school-wide focus of developing students oral language across the Junior school and across our school.
• Yes, it fits within our localised curriculum focus on oral language acquisition to address the needs of our school community.

2) How might it make a powerful contribution to these goals?

• Students acquiring oral language within their early schooling will create foundations to build on as they move through their schooling.
• We may not see expected results within their first few years as students acquire oral language but it is hoped that putting in the mahi at this level will show better results in student achievement as students move through their schooling.

3) Other points of discussion

• The inquiry needs to be shared more effectively across the school. Feedback from senior school teachers was that better communication of changes in our curriculum and teacher practice is needed so that effective practice can be better shared across the whole school.

TAI2020 Stocktake Of My Inquiry

As I move into the second year of my CoL inquiry into creating an intensive oral language acquisition programme across our Junior school, my first task is to do a stocktake of my inquiry so far.

Aspects of inquiry	What worked well	Challenges	Additional support that would be helpful
Utilising the student's strengths in their first language, working in bilingual and multilingual ways, creating Talanoa, and working in partnership with families will help build students English language and literacy.	Taking part in the Pasifika Early Literacy Programme (PELP) has changed my own practice as well as my teams practice in how to teach in culturally responsive ways. Students are extremely engaged and empowered when we use heritage languages within the classroom.	-Continuing to develop an understanding of the diverse Pasifika cultures within our classrooms. -Connecting with Pasifika families to create strong home-school partnerships	Connecting with Pasifika teachers within our CoL to gain a stronger understanding of the Pasifika cultures of our students.
Developing oral language through short high-interest topics and real-life experiences, with a focus on intensive oral language acquisition, will create an environment of language in abundance.	-Do and say oral language activities, using and reusing new vocabulary. -Recycling vocabulary many times and across contexts over a few days. -Insisting students try, and creating an environment where talking is cherished and important. -Students that participated in this programme, as well as PELP, showed increased progress compared to peers that only did PELP.	-Students ability to listen, many students don't have the self-regulation skills to listen and this affects their ability to uptake new vocabulary. -Funding for trips to experience opportunities outside of their daily world.	ENGAGE Programme Active listening activities
A collaborative inquiry across the junior school (Years 1-3) will grow professional capital across the school. The shared inquiry will allow all students across the junior school to benefit from the effectiveness of changed practice and allow teachers to learn from and with each other. It will hopefully also enable an effective changed practice to become sustainable.	-Growing professional practice across my team instead of only within my classroom. -Working through the inquiry process together has allowed them to better understand the teaching as inquiry process.	-Staff changeover -Beginning Teachers within the team who are learning the foundation skills of teaching may have felt overwhelmed by the PLD. -Team members different levels of uptake. -Ensuring the whole school is aware of the inquiry taking place and sharing of new learning across the school.	-More staff meetings to share inquiry -Planning time with Teacher Aides to collaboratively plan our practice.

MIT2020 Crazy 8's - IDEATE

Session 6: The Crazy 8's

After spending one and a half days unpacking the problem it was now time to come up with possible solutions. 

We had to come up with eight possible digital solutions. After we had written these down we read our colleagues crazy 8's and put stickers on the ones we liked. 

This was followed up with a googly eye for our very favourite. 
It was interesting to see what solutions people prefer and some great conversations were had around the 'why'.

My ultimate 'crazy eight' solution was ...

Creating a digital portal for whanau to connect with the ENGAGE programme with games, exemplars and information in Te Reo Maori and Pasifika Languages.

This was the solution that I had envisioned so it affirmed my decision to explore this solution to my challenge of partnering with whanau to implement the ENGAGE programme at school and at home.

MIT2020 Connections & Resource people (who)

Session 5: The Who

This session was aimed at us to think about who might possibly be involved in the project. 

Who does this Moonshot project involve?

Colleagues- Engage teachers within my school and the MIT team

Whānau- They are at the centre of this project

Students- Those participating in the ENGAGE Programme to develop self-regulation skills.

Who am I collaborating with on this project?

Whānau

Sonali- also designing a digital tool for implementing ENGAGE in our schools

Who are my team?

Whānau

Dorothy and Matt

The MIT Teachers

Experts that may help me with the digital side of things (unsure who this may be yet)

My school colleagues including the support of my principal and DP

Lee- Cultural perspective; how to address this challenge through a Māori perspective

Luti- Cultural perspective; how to address this challenge through a Pasifika perspective

Who has a voice in this project?

Whānau

What will work for them? What will work for Whānau that are least engaged?

MIT

Who: 

• Learners - All students participating in the ENGAGE Programme
• Colleagues: co-designers, collaborators, sounding boards etc
• Experts: The ENGAGE Team; People to help me learn to create a digital tool

MIT2020 How Might We- bringing multiple optimistic viewpoints to the challenge

Session 4: How Might We Turn This Problem Into An Opportunity...

Gifting each other ways to turn our challenges into opportunities. We wrote our perspectives onto post-it notes and stuck them to each others MIT challenges.

Here are my colleague's questions

How might we...

• assess home engagement
• keep whānau engaged in learning in the long term
• encourage siblings to participate in ENGAGE at home
• foster an understanding with whānau around why their input/involvement is important and valued
• support the cultural difference in your community
• get whānau buy-in?
• engage wider whānau to be involved? Do they have time to help?
• think about what parents want
• make a non-organisational space to get together and talk
• help whānau understand the benefit they will experience in the home if their child develops the self-regulation skills through the ENGAGE programme
• model Engage to non-English speaking families

MIT2020 Empathy session - using role play and a poster do gain deeper understanding of the needs of the people involved

Session 3

Understanding the needs of whanau is going to be instrumental when it comes to creating a home/school partnership to implement ENGAGE both at school and at home. The following activity allowed us to show empathy to those at the centre of our challenge. 

Activity: Role Play

In pairs, each person demonstrates what this problem looks like when it is happening in the classroom.

For me, it was important to roleplay the challenge parents may have, understanding what is happening at school and the role we are asking them to play at home.

The scenario I acted out was a scene I have experienced during whanau conferences (a student lead meeting whereby the student, parent and teacher discuss learning goals for the year ahead).

Alethea played the teacher and I played a Tongan Parent with very limited English language.

Communication between teacher and parent was difficult and both parties had a different understanding of roles regarding education at school and at home. It showed how difficult it must be to understand what the school is asking of them and for them to know how to best support their students at home. It also showed the value our parents put in the education of their children.

The outcome of this activity was the importance of finding another way to communicate and connect with whanau in a way that they will understand. It also indicates that what we are currently doing to connect with parents isn't working.

For my design to be successful I am going to have to communicate with whanau through their own languages to find out how they perceive the challenge and what their needs are. I need to see this challenge through the eyes of the parents within our school community.

MIT2020 Tweaking and Redefining the Challenge

Session 2

Dorothy, Sonali and I came together over coffee and cake to relook at our challenges.

There were two main challenges we had identified relating to implementing the ENGAGE programme within our school. Both Sonali and I had already started implementing the programme and had similar experiences regarding the challenges. However, we were individually leaning towards separate problems.

Sonali was steering towards the digital collection of data and the practical side of teaching and formative assessing the programme within the classroom setting whereas I was steering towards home/school partnership and the challenges we have faced in this regard to date.

Therefore my challenge has been redefined as

Partnering with Whanau to implement the school-based ENGAGE programme at home.