MIT 19 Beach Side Hui

The Hui has been challenging and awesome. Lovely location, nice people, fierce card playing!

Session 1 - Here we learnt what is Manaiakalani, and what came before. Specifically, we learnt about Russell Burt, Andrea Tele'a, Sandy Lagitupu and Helen Squires. They are educators who found opportunities to enrich their learning communities and innovate how they taught. Andrea and Sandy developed a reading podcast that accelerated their students progress. Helen developed a programme of blogging giving her writers an authentic audience and leading to acceleration.

Then following this we did a roleplay where each MIT 19 teacher was given the role of someone who has an investment in education, such as parents, students, teachers, MOE, researchers or Google. During the roleplay, we were given statements about current education and had to respond as our character.

Session 2 - In this session, we looked at our reworded problem from two weeks ago. This was another roleplaying session, with Anne and Jenny playing the part of a principal and BOT head from a local area school presenting their 2019 target goals to the local community. We played the part of that parent community. Each problem was presented on the screen and the community could discuss it. I say discuss, but what really happened is we tore each statement apart. Every statement was full of flaws and waffly language. This was a particularly brutal process for me as my statement was the first to be displayed! To be honest, I was left a bit shell shocked. Only one statement was concise and to the point.

The question was raised What is your actual problem? As part of the design process, we needed to have a clear problem that we wanted to address. We were given time to think about our problem and make it well defined.

In my initial moonshot google presentation, I had stated that I wanted to improve Year 6 boy engagement in reading. After the 5 Whys task, I had changed my problem statement into Many students in my studio are reluctant or struggling readers who see reading as a challenge and a chore. They have reading habits and attitudes that show a lack of book accessibility and reading role-modelling. My challenge is to improve the enthusiasm for reading among my Year 6 students, especially the boys. 

I looked closely at my class reading data, my school reading data and the cluster reading data that had been provided by Woolf Fisher. After some consideration, and a bit of help from Amber, I finally came up with a new concise problem statement:
       "Reading progress for Year 6 boys is lower than the national expectation"
This is the problem I hope to address with my new proposal.

Session 3 - Initial Cohort support. In this session, we were given the opportunity to provide support to our peers. Each problem and proposal was stuck to the wall and we were given post-it notes. We then had to go around the room and write How might we questions to turn the problem into opportunities. Then we took the post-its and grouped or ranked them based on themes we noticed.

The themes I noticed were around student motivation to read, the mindset of my reluctant readers, the purpose of reading and involvement with the community and my readers.

 The statements that struck me the most was create a way for reading to occur when they may not engage and change the ways the boys think about reading. 

Then we got to refine our thinking based on post-it notes. What sticks out from our suggestions? What could we adapt or change in our problem or proposal?

Session 4 - Who will help us solve our problem? We made a list of everyone we thought might have a part to play during our inquiry. For me, this included the students, my team in Tåwhirimåtea and Rawhiti School, my fellow MIT cohort, Manaiakalani support (Dorothy, Anne and Mark M), whanau, RTLit, research from Woolf Fisher, as well as research from NZCER, University of Canterbury or Auckland University. These last ones will be the most difficult for me to access so I know I will need to ask for help from my senior management.

We were also asked to add a moonshot person, the person who we admired or thought could give a special insight into our problem, but probably would not get the chance to talk to. I put down Sheena Cameron and Donalyn Miller given their backgrounds in reading education and engaging students.

Session 5 - Ideation (Crazy 8): In this session, we were asked to come up with 8 different possible solutions for our problem. The ideas could be as random and crazy as we could think of. I put my original idea which centred on running classroom literacy circles and an online book club. To this I added these ideas:

• An online resource for teachers of questions for popular children's books
• 10 book per term challenge which is blogged
• Online reading log with students, teachers and parents site texts they read
• Vocational reading with texts based on possible student career choices
• A buddy reading challenge
• A site that offers visual stimulation to invite reading, followed by a creative or technical challenge for students
• A collaborative "art" project based on a shared reading

Following this, we were given stickers. These we placed on the pages of our peers to show which ideas we thought had the most potential. On my Ideation poster, my final idea had the most endorsement. 

This idea was the collaborative art project. While I like the idea, I came away feeling like I had only offered a reading follow-up activity as opposed to an acceleration strategy. I needed to take the events of the day away and think about my proposal.

That was the end of Monday's work. 

Session 6 - Consolidating our Proposal: In this session, we were given time to think carefully about the direction of our proposal and what our digital tool would look like. As I stated above I was not particularly enthusiastic about the Crazy 8 idea that was most popular. I had a walk before the session and considered what message had come out from the previous days. 

My original proposal did not spark the interest of my peers, and it seemed to me upon reflection to not be the engaging tool that I had hoped it would be. However, I still believe that the central premise of student-led literacy circles that encouraged discussion and peer support for reading had to be my focus to accelerate my Year 6 boys. So what now?

I started to think about using video as a means of students sharing their literacy circle discussions and host these in a site where other teachers and students can view and comment on them. Could I develop a Google site that hosted videos of students summarising their literacy circles? How would this work? Would this be engaging enough for my students? Was this idea too similar to the work done by Andrea Tele'a, Sandy Lagitupu and Helen Squires? With these questions in mind, I approached the morning's work in a new direction.

I discussed the idea with Anne and Amber. They were receptive it. Anne reminded me that whatever I do, there needs to be deliberate acts of teaching and that it can transferable to other schools or classes across NZ. Amber suggested I contact Mark Lorenzo from Belfast School as he runs the Chapter Chat Twitter programme. 

My new proposal now looks like this:

• Teach Year 6 students to run literacy circles based on the texts they are engaged with
• Focus on the Key Competencies needed for a successful literacy circle, critical thinking about texts (reading comprehension strategies) and deep questioning
• Create a Google site that has two sections - one for students and one for teachers
• The student section has a place to upload videos with a Google Form and Sheet comment section
• The teacher section has the hows and whys  for both literacy circles and creating videos (why use literacy circles and videos, how to set these up in the class
• Teach my Year 6 students how to make and embed short videos following this process - read your text, hold a literacy circle, create a short script, record 2-3 minute video, embed on the site

While writing up my revised proposal, Santi pointed out that I will want to talk to my students about what they know about literacy circles and their thoughts on videos. This is my next step. I also need to gather their reading data into one place. We are doing the PAT Reading Comprehension test this week, but I will also create an e-asttle reading assessment for them to do. This will act as my baseline data for the year.

Then the Hui wrapped up. After the morning's work, I felt more positive about the direction I was heading in, and that I could accelerate my Year 6's in their reading progress. 

Bring on the next session on the 25th March!