Creativity Empowers Learning

Today the wonderful Dorothy Burt came to our staff meeting to share with use about how we can inspire creativity in our classrooms.

We need to remember that creating helps learners to embed the things they learner. We need to Hook learners into learning. We want our kids to be "Creators of content, not merely consumers."

When teaching movie making, normally the main focus is the teaching of Key Competencies. This type of learning provides an opportunity for learners to shine.

Sharing work in progress of not even finished work to inspire and celebrate what we have created so far.

Looking back at the creations of the past is inspiring. It was nice celebrating the teacher of the past and they things their classes created. There were so many great reminders of thing that week can do.

Creating is Not just done in the mind. It is the actions of doing multiple things and involves the whole body. Consumers are excited and enticed by: Sight, Sound and Motion.

We need sight, sound and motion to remember things. If we really want to get our kids remembering things and really engaging in learning then we need to think about how we include sight, sound and motion.

Thank you so much to Dorothy and the other teachers who have shared with us their create from the past. 

Term 2 Inquiry

Fluency

Much research suggest that there is a strong link between fluency and comprehension in reading. The literature explains that while this link could be present for a number of reasons. One is that when reader read fluently drawing on sight word knowledge and context to make meaning less mental energy is spent on decoding which allows mental processing to focus on comprehension. The other come from phrasing. Often the meaning in more challenging texts is aided by the phrasing of the text. By reading the punctuation correctly and using expression while reading readers gain more from the text.

This term I will focus my inquiry around how my teacher action can support the development of fluency for my class and how video modelling and self review can support these learners to become fluent readers. This inquiry also links to the research that I am doing for my Honours degree at Auckland University.

This week I am developing the self review criteria with the class and building their knowledge of fluency so that by the end of the week we can create and review our first videos.

I am excited to engage in this study of my practice as I think that an understanding of fluency has the potential to support many of my students to develop their reading even futher.

Forming OTJs in Maths-Jo Knox

An OTJ draws on multiple source of data to make a judgement about their ability in comparison to national standard.  You can't just use one piece of evidence as this is hazardous to forming a true picture.

Type of evidence you will include are:
-observations
-conversations
-test data
and other group work.

To make a judgment you will need to use the The New Zealand Curriculum Mathematics standards poster, the standards books and additional illustration.

We also need to remember that just having the answer it is not enough it is about how they explain how they know it.

While the number is the most critical requirement, strand include geometry, measurement and statistics.

We also must remember that number knowledge is used to facilitate problem solving. Knowledge is important but it is there to help you with strategies.

When forming our OJT we need to think about are they able to do it independently and most of the time. 

We need to think about how we are tracking all of this data overtime so that we don't have to go back to each individual sources each time. This can be done in many ways.

Maths Professional Learning

The maths discussion we had today started by looking at how the curriculum, standards and numeracy framework line up.

Here is the cut up poster we put together.





Gloss
We look at a gloss problems and worked in teams to mark these and identify the stages.

Some important things to remember:
-Gloss is a mental test. Students who can do gloss questions in a their head are working at a higher level. If students have given you the correct answer but are struggling to explain this is when you might use water.
-You can reword the problem to change the context if it is not relevant to the learners but not the change integrity of the question.

IKAN-Aims at Testing number knowledge
The benefits of  this test is that it is quick, however we must remember that it has added pressures of time and recording pressure.

The box on the right in IKAN tell you more that the totals at bottom. Jo said that for her learners she gave them a chance to self correct the problems that they just made silly mistakes on so that they could focus their learning goals around real areas they need to work on.

Spider Graph
Help students to see exactly where they are in a visual format. This means that can see their areas of strengths are areas that they may need to work on. By highlighting the standard and the students results by the second set of testing they can see their progress.

Todays workshop really helped me to understand the assessments better and discuss these with other teachers.