WOW - we have come a long way already

This year has been crazy busy already!

We have developed an action plan and have hit it full on.

This term is our first trial of the new model, we have made it our goal to ensure the language is common throughout the school as are the thinking strategies we a focussing on.

We are having a meeting shortly, once everyone has completed the 'organise' stage, to discuss successed and troubles and to ensure everyone knows exactly where they are and what to do for the next stage.

This trial has really opened up the lines of communication, and we are constantly discussing our own learning and the skill development of the children.

We have already discovered that the use of the thinking tool 'question map' has made the inquiry more focussed than before, children are learning how to ask quality questions, learning how to ask questions that will support their inquiry, really thinking about how they have to structure their questioning to make their inquiry a success. We have yet to develop rubrics but already the children are seeing their own development and are support eachothers learning journey.

Children discuss their inquiry in the playground, with the common language throughout the school, this has ensured that children from various levels in the school can make valuable contributions to these discussions, it also opens the pathway for leadership and peer support.

One of the ideas that I saw a Jan-Marie Kellows workshop, the visual tracking of the childrens journey has been used in my class. The children created it, and get a buzz when they can manipulate their little person along the road - a really simple idea - but I guess it just promotes ownership of the inquiry process - I do believe it has achieved this. Although we are on our first tiral I can already see the excitement and forward thinking developing in some of the children.

It is really exciting to hear this in and out of the classrooms, we are showing more unity on our journey and really creating a leanring community.

Coley Street - inquiry journey

Firstly, thank you to the team at Coley Street for opening their doors to use and sharing their journey, it was a valuable and impressive day. :-)

Time
Giving ourselves time to change and develop was one of the key ideas for me, this also backed up my own thoughts. Change does not happen over night, especially not quality change, we have to allow time for thought and mistakes, reflection and further modifications. The idea that we can try something new and not fully succeed instantly is a sigh of relief for many of us out there. We always want what is best for the children, and when things don't go according to plan, it can be frustrating. But with positive change there is always going to be the battles, the resistance and those challenges, we need to be constantly thinking of the outcome, knowing that we will get there eventually, but it is a journey to be taken.
Consistency of language
It was fantastic to see the consistency throughout the school, the model, the rubric, the language. This is one thing that we are trying hard to do at our school, I think it has a massive impact ont he students. If we expose them to the language of inquiry and thinking form a very young age, it will become second nature, as was seen at Coley Street. Junior we using the language of thinking, students knew how to use the tools, great scaffolding for learning!
All staff on board
The expectation that all staff were to be 'on board' with inquiry was huge. Of course you will get the resistance from some, but it has to be easier when the expectation is there, the staff know what is required and the support is there to back them up. This would have a positive impact on consistency,, collegual duscussion and support etc. I do feel the our school is much better at this than before. It was like Ross said 'the movement from classroom as islands', I do believe that this journey has to be a team trip.

Other thoughts from the day
* Language throughout the school, consistency, exposure to language at a young age, not using ‘juniors’ as an excuse for modification
* HoM repeatedly mention throughout conferences and course
* Quality learning environments impact on learning, can’t really succeed with a ‘make do’ mentality
* Budgets change due to the way we access information, lessens that need to buy resource packs
* Teachers must buy into it, have to own it otherwise it wont work
* Different levels of inquiry – some staff still have the idea that inquiry means 50 topics happening in one class
* Not to rush, not to be afraid to experiment, to be innovative, have the expectation that there will be support for those that want to ‘fly’ but also willing to share
* Children motivate themselves with the ownership of the topic – if they don’t have an emotional hook into the inquiry, it will fall apart, the power of inquiry is the power of the learner
* Children could articulate the process, the tools they were using, their next step, how they have to analyse the information, rate it, use different learning strategies

College Street Normal - thinking skills
Firstly, WOW - what an amazingly dynamic leader Ross is, it was inspiring to see him bounce round with excitement about their journey and staff. A huge wealth of knowledge and I would be really interested in visiting his school to further explore habit of the mind.
This session was we useful to show practical applications for thinking skills and tools.
We have alread set to trial our think scope and this reaffirmed the need for scaffolding for our learners and well as not overwhelming them with a multitude of tools. As part of our inquiry, we a trialling a selection of strategies and tools in the hope to refine them into a schoolwide tool box. Teachers are not onlky trialling them in inquiry but also throughtout other learning areas, which inturn reinforces the strategy and using the tools in meaninful context.

Teacher Only Day - Developing our new vision

A teacher only day to continue our vision development was a fantastic day.......

1: What is LEARNING?
This was a great start, staff came with no preconceived ideas and didn’t really know what angle I was coming from. Some staff did misinterpret the task, but to their credit quickly modified their response to suit. We came up with an extensive list of attributes, already some staff were making connections between the attributes and key ideas for our learning community.
Next we looked at the thinking curriculum framework and converted our ideas into verbs for learning. At times this proved to be rather tricky so we decided to use our knowledge of the virtues to become descriptors of these attributes.
We categorised ideas and grouped them into similar areas. Next we discussed and decided which of these verbs fir into the following:
skills/knowledge
skills/behaviours
attitudes and values
This provided a great point for in depth discussion, it was great to listen to the justifications for decisions, staff challenging each others ideas, but also willing to listen and being confident enough to express their point of view. The whole day was really non threatening and definitely a team effort.

2: Attributes
Next I suggested that we could further group these ideas into the following categories.
Foundations of learning
Participating with learning
Life long learners
This was aimed to further clarify our beliefs as to what learning is and what aspects of that are important to our school.. This also provided a great avenue for discussion, really challenging our existing belief systems and requiring us to provide supporting evidence to show why we believe this, or not. We ended up with a fantastic list of skills, attitudes, behaviours, values and knowledge requirements. We also came to the conclusion, that in most cases:
· the foundation was the knowledge – the literacy, numeracy, digital literacies, all the knowledge that is needed to successfully participate in learning.
· Participating with learning – inquiry, thinking, interacting, justifying, challenging, questioning etc – really engagement with the learning experiences
· Life long learners mainly expressed the attitudes and values that the children take with them, the tools needed to contribute to the wider community, the notion of having the means to make decisions, take risks, knowing how to make adaptations in life. These skills taught through their schooling life that remain with them, that foster continuous learning, that develop the student into an active life long learner.

Previously we had our initial vision meeting, we came up with a list of knowledge, skills and attitudes that we thought were important. It was the aim of this exercise to reinforce our belief systems. Without knowing where I was going, we came up with a list that was similar to our original, it included the same content, it was just further refined. Once I brought out the original list, there was great satisfaction from all to see that we were all on the same page, we were forming our belief system, it may have been hidden behind ‘attributes’, but in the end, the same ideas/beliefs were exposed.

This was fantastic, all went according to plan, although if the ideas didn’t match up, it would have been a great starting point for an intense discussion.

It was very satisfying for me to see, that our team worked so well together, we supported each other, shared ideas with confidence, spoke up, challenged, discussed further, basically owned the whole process, rather than looking to me for all the answers. This is really exciting for me.

We then used a fishbone diagram, the reason why I am using thinking tools is to ensure exposure and show versatility of these strategies, so the staff can make connections with our inquiry tools.

We used the fish bone to collate ideas about what is important for our learning community. The headings were:

For the learner
Skills & knowledge
Attitudes & behaviours
Values
Life long learner
Scaffolding for the Learner
Classroom environment
Learning community environment
Wider community

Visual representation of our vision
The final task of the day is to create a visual representation of our thoughts of the day.
Took the staff into the ICT suite and looked at digital stories of schools in developing their curriculum, from the NZ Curriculum website. We experienced a few difficulties but eventually the short digital story was a great tools to culminate our work of the day. I asked the staff to create a visual representation of what they see as our vision, amazing results! This ended the session on a high note, the motivation was sparked, not exhausted, we are already forward planning as to our next workshop. It is very satisfying for me that all the hard work is paying off. It was interesting how the staff interpreted the task, images of key ideas, symbolism, analogies, environment was represented, unique things to our learning community were created in some amazing scribbles.

We discussed the key question:
Does our school have a vision, how widely known and shared is it?
I deliberately asked that question, simply to gage how many knew what our current mission statement was, how old it was, and where it was promoting the school, what do those children walking up the road mean to our school?
One staff member could give a vague definition, but that was better than not knowing. This has to change, we have to get our belief system out to the wider community.

The connections that I was leading to were seen, everything linked. It reaffirmed the opportunity we have to create our vision, create a learning community that best suits our children, to provide opportunities that inspire children to become lifelong learners. It reaffirmed the importance of our belief system that is the foundation of our new vision.
Opportunities

The idea is to make statements about these areas, confirming our beliefs. These statements will be sent to our community for consultation, the community will state their opinion and also rank these statements in order of importance.
I think this is extremely important, without a supportive community, there are barriers to development and change, ultimately change and progress is what we are aiming for. It may require education of our community, to get past the nostalgic mindset of education, but consultation is needed if we are to encourage support and create a partnership.

I was extremely proud of our small staff. Everyone was engaged and motivated. We discussed ideas freely and are all working towards a common goal, a really exciting start to our journey.

We have scheduled further vison meeting for the remainder of the term, the motivation is high so we want to keep the momentum going. We have plastered the staffroom with all our work we did on this day, teacher aides and parents are commenting on the great ideas they can see on display.

We are all reflecting on our thought and coming back to the next meeting with a vision in mind. I do feel it is important to give timefor reflection because if we rush into it, them a solid belief system wont be behind it. We ned to be able to challenge our own thoughts and ideas, and be able to justfiy out beliefs.

I would like to congratulate our team for their dedication and support - You guys ROCK!

Inquiry Learning - Jan-Marie Kellow

INQUIRY LEARNING is asking questions about authentic contexts…student-centred learning about contexts that are relevant to them…the process of finding out stuff…developing skills to assist in investigating authentic issues, to gain a deeper understanding of the ‘real world’ and the society that we live in.
For me, the most powerful idea that will have lasting impact on our inquiry model, is the real world context. This will completely change curriculum development and in turn our delivery. We have to think hard about the topics selected, so they can actually provide real context rather than being restricted to research topic (traditional thinking). We will need to educate our community aswell as ourselves, as we have heard many times this year, often our communities have nostalgic views of education. I do also think that for our staff, getting outside the boundaries of our own school will open pathways to deeper thinking, we need to get out and see inquiry in action, so we can change our thinking.
DISCUSSION POINT – Are ‘Inquiry based learning’ and ‘Information literacy’ the same thing?
Information literacy is really just the tools…just a part of…they go together…you cannot do inquiry learning without the tools and skills…many confuse information literacy as inquiry learning…consider the HOTS as inquiry…RICH Q?s as inquiry…low-level questioning does not fit as well, except that it may be considered ‘low level’ inquiry…
This is my worry for our inquiry topic, the rich question is not so rich - but I guess we have to start somewhere - hopefully connections with this can be seen through further discussions at the reflection stage
LOOK LIKE? *School-wide Pictorial Model displayed, rubric displayed for students referral, other models as prompts, Key question clearly displayed, displayed progress (not always beautiful), levels of organisation = organised chaos, related resources (ICT and other), creative tangents, , groups doing different things, focused activity
For me this is about consistency throughout the school - we need to saturate the children with 'inquiry language', we have developed a visual aide, which is now visible in all classrooms. Teachers are more aware of using the language of thinking and inquiry to support the childrens journey. I think it is important to hav this consistency, so children moving throughout the school can see our mission, our goals, our learning intentions etc. This will have to be a major focus as we move along our journey, something that will be continually refined. we have started to look at our assessments, however, one step at a time huh, we are still developing mode for these.

Tides are turning - Yey!

Two teachers came to me and queried our topic question:
They were finding it difficult for them to find an angle for their classes.
I was so excited that they are thinking about our topic, challenging it and making their own pathways.
My response: Make it your own, create the changes, we are in trial but make sure you reflect on it!
I can sense a change in the staff, we are all working for improvements in our thinking and teaching to increase the achievement of our students!

Thinking Skills

As scaffolding to our new inquiry model, taken form feedback of the first trial, also from research that I have completed, I decided to create a list of specific thinking tools to trial at various stages of the inquiry.

It is aimed that eventually we will have a standard set of tools that students can use in not only inquiry but other areas of their learning.

It has meant some up skilling of teachers in how to use these tools, however it has been accepted with great motiovation. All templates and resources are available for student and teachers on our network.

The reflection upon the use of these tools would be very valuable for our curriculum development.

New Inquiry Model

I took our new model to the staff. It was accepted with quiet nods and murmers. I explained the changes, due to our feedback at the end of the last trial. I had tried to develop a visual model, one that we can use in the classroom, I also wanted to show more reflection and the fact that while still linear of sorts, there is more scope to move throughout the model.
One of the most important additions is the "SO WHAT" at the end, really giving some power to the model, taking action, developing global citizenship (well, thats the aim anyway)
We decided to start with a whole school trial, in the second term. We also decided to focus on the inquiry and not the assessment outcomes. We thought it was more important to focus on getting the model in our heads and as a tool for ICT and key competencies than any knowledge outcomes.
It was hard at first to get the staff to discuss any issues about the model, I suppose we need to trial it first, but there was no challenge, no resistance either, but no challenge from the staff, was accepted as the way we will do it.
Our main question - "How/Why do animals adapt to change"
This raised issues for me, we are still thinking that inquiry is information gathering, which it is, but we are still in the 'traditional' way of tackling a topic - I couldn't really see how we could get our teeth into this, but I guess that this will come out in reflection. It is a very low end question, but wanted to start somewhere, once we have the model in our heads then we can go back and discuss the delivery. Before this discussion can happen, we need to trial and everyone needs to take ownership of inquiry. Looking forward to a great time sorting it in our heads.