Rich Seam Thoughts…
The surface
I really enjoyed this reading. For one, it was actually
quite lovely to find myself reading a report that venerated and quoted so many
of my favourite educational thinkers and leaders and reinforced my own belief
that rich learning tasks or quality learning over quantity and breadth of
content is essential for our students.
Personally, To know
that I must be somehow on the right path with my own explorations and
development of my understanding of 21st Century pedagogies- if the
authors were referencing John Hattie and Ken Robinson, then perhaps when I am
met with blank stares when doing the same it is only a sign of how far we have
to go in not only raising awareness of new research and thinking but valuing
discussions whether formal or informal.
Whilst considering this I am also taking into account my
survey results which highlight that to improve my current practice I need to
encourage staff to access the latest research, encourage lead and participate
in discourse and enable/support professional learning networks.
Whilst professional reading and research has always been
something I have found invaluable and invigorating personally, it has always
been something that I have done of my own volition. Well, at least since Uni. I
know that in my school setting the daily emotional and mental demands on
teachers to manage and plan for some very challenging behaviours as well as
meet the individual learning needs of their students is often maxing out their
cognitive load already. We do expect all of our teachers to be part of a
professional learning team and to complete additional tasks in relation to leading
aspects of those team priorities. I feel that as a leader it is important to
not overwhelm staff with additional requirements but inspire and support them
to explore the areas they see as professionally beneficial. As we all know an intrinsically motivated
learner is always more receptive. When I started sending articles about ways to
use digital technology in rich and engaging ways such as using gaming across
the curriculum I had people look at me like I was an alien for at least a week.
As a relatively new member of the leadership team, that is,
this being my second year in the position I feel like raising the status of
best practice teaching and learning with technology and inspiring others to
jump aboard the train is still foremost in my mind. This role has also given me
the opportunity to see our school from the big picture view. A vision that I
could never of fully had as a classroom teacher. When teaching day to day, I
went about my work discussing with my colleagues from time to time what we were
doing and getting the impression that generally everyone was pretty much on the
same page as me and with similar practices. However, actually having the
opportunity to go from class to class coaching others it quickly became
apparent that this was not the case.
To raise the professional bar of 180 staff and has teachers
in particular engaging in professional discourse about research etc. and in
turn influence their capacity as dynamic practitioners is something to which I
aspire. However, whilst inroads are made and setting this as an ARP target
would surely help I strongly believe that a cultural change is required that
cannot be achieved in a short time frame.
Rich Learning and
Project Based learning
I love to think that education globally is moving rapidly
towards increasingly student centred, student driven learning, where rich tasks
or project based learning is valued over traditional teacher set breadth and standalone
skill set teaching.
So what would this look like in our setting? And how would
our teacher ensure that they are able to cover all of their class ILP goals,
which are very specific when the success criteria is often ‘at least 80% of the
time X will independently and accurately complete N’
I know the idea that our students with ASD be able to
actively engage in setting their own learning goals and complete project based
tasks is seemingly absurd to a large amount of our teachers.
However, I disagree.
One common thread with students with ASD is their inability
to be able to generalise. This becomes very apparent in subjects like maths,
where a student may have learnt to complete drill and practice tasks or work
through the addition subtraction division and multiplication processes at
reasonable complexity but if presented with a simple real life or word based
problem have no idea how to solve the problem, which process is required or
perhaps if that they should draw upon their math skills. For example, when considering
a cooking task the teacher may say this recipe says that it should make 24
cupcakes, we have eight students in the class to share them between. How many
cupcakes will each student get if we share them evenly? Now, the problem
here is twofold as students with ASD also have pronounced difficulty with
language. So assume that, the problem is also represented visually. 24 little
cupcakes and 8 student photos. In my experience this is where the gaps in
thinking and misconceptions really begin to show. I would not assume that these
students understand the idea of fair sharing, how to sort objects
systematically, which key words should identify the type of mathematical
process required, that the problem relates to number sentences which they may
have used and successfully completed in the past.
I would expect that addressing these misconceptions and
developing the skills to be able to consistently be able to solve these types
of authentic problems, will require regular and rich tasks. For example, in the
past I have used a graphic organiser which requires one problem to be
represented in variety of ways; a word problem, drawing, manipulatives/symbolic
representations and number sentence. This process whilst taking considerably
longer that traditional tasks, allows for students to experience how we not
only use math to solve real problems but also represent these ideas in a range
of ways. Whilst not as many problems can be worked through in one session the
aim is to develop deeper connections.
I have also always enjoyed weekly ‘Golden Time’ sessions
with groups of students with ASD. Where
students can work on a personal project of their choosing. Another common
thread with students with ASD is they often have very select and particular
interests and motivations. So for instance a student may come in to class on
day and say they want a car just like their favourite TV character has. I might
say something like that’s fantastic we can work on that during
your golden time. Lets’ talk about what we would need to do at lunch. We
would then make a time for a student teacher conference and set out what would
need to be done e.g; draw a design, label the parts, brainstorm ideas for
materials for the parts, along with how they would be sourced, collect
materials, build test and trial whilst building. This task on the surface may
seem very trivial but the learning that can be built into this is extensive. I
have worked with students who make animations, cooking videos, movie intros,
books, art works, games etc. all of which have led to some amazing learning
opportunities.
Of course, there are many of our students who are working at
a capacity, where this level of student directed learning is not possible.
While I find this topic an interesting one for further
exploration I don’t think this fits within the scope of what is achievable for
a LSDA action research project.
Assessment & Accountability
When I originally applying for the Bastow course LSDA. I had
thought that one focus for an ARP that would be beneficial for us as leaders
would be to develop an assessment tools with measures which would evidence the
benefit of increased digital technologies and learning tools across the school
and justify the importance of investing in embedding these across the
curriculum and building the capacity of teachers. Whilst as leaders the
benefits and reasons as to why we want to create this cultural change is clear,
we are also aware that sharing this vision with the whole school community is
vital. Whilst we have created a comprehensive eLearning plan and have covered a
range of key improvement areas success measures could be weightier if backed by
data.
Indeed, my e-confidence results show;
However, when reading ‘Rich Seam’ one of the things that
stood out to me was the authors’ assertion that;
“But
whole-system change still faces significant barriers in most places. These
barriers reside primarily in the student assessment, teacher evaluation and
school accountability regimes that currently define success for our education
systems. Until we find new ways to define and measure success – ways that
measure schools’ adoption of new pedagogies and students’ achievement of deep
learning outcomes – crucial system factors will stand in opposition to
innovation. New measures are urgently needed to give students, teachers,
parents and leaders a clear picture of what deep learning really means in
practice and how it can concretely and positively affect the futures of our
young people.” (A Rich Seam, p.iii)
This is, on one hand, comforting; that revered
leaders in the field also find this issue problematic; whilst on the other,
sobering to know that there may not be any easy solution. I expect considerable
time and much more research will be required before I am able to develop
measures to demonstrate the positive impacts that digital technologies has and
will have on our students learning and futures. Perhaps a bigger research
project is required.
From Chalkboards to
Tablets
It is
encouraging to know that the attitudes of teachers is changing. Four years
seems to be a reasonable period of time by which to be able to expect changes
in attitudes and culture. A clear Coaching action plan and continued promotion
by the eLearning Professional Learning Team, fit with the recommendations for
increasing teacher capacity to adopt new technologies to personalise student
learning.
“They have three primary recommendations on the types of professional
development experiences that would be most effective for changing their
teachers’ attitudes and capabilities:
Mentoring
by an instructional coach who is resident at the school (50 percent)
Teacher
participation in a professional learning community for collegial support (45
percent)
Support
of a library media specialist who can help with the identification of
appropriate digital content and tool identification, and support implementation
with students (45 percent)” (p.15)
