Manaiakalani Outreach

Manaiakalani is more than just us!

There are many outreach clusters that follow the Manaiakalani pedagogy throughout New Zealand.

The outreach cluster provide us the a wider network of people facing the same challenges, ideas and pedagogy. There are 5 outreach clusters with the outreach there are 50+ school 10,000+ learners and a huge community of whaunu.

These clusters knew they wanted to be involved they just wanted A Recipe to do this....
They see these as the Outreach actions outlined at joining Manaiakalani outreach. The Manaiakalani outreach PLD the support people and the resource they provide to the schools and clusters over there three year PLD. They also look to the Manaiakalani website and the Manaiakalani schools what are the schools and the teachers doing, exploring the learners blogs and professional blogs.

In the outreach the first year is about having pilot teacher who are excited volunteers who want to try new things. In year two all teachers move into a 1:1 environment and learn from the things learnt in the pilot. Year 3 is a time to continue growing and help new teachers to gain the skills they need.

There is also a blog that is used to collect examples of effective teaching that outreach clusters can explore. Check it out Sharing the Hook.

It is exciting that these communities are out there and I look forward to connecting more with them more.

Have a core purpose that is shared draws us together.

The Holiday Blogging Program

Rachel Williamson is a researcher with the Wolf Fisher research centre, she leads the summer learning journey to engage learners in continuing learning over the holiday period.

The Summer learning journey runs over two year. At this stage two pilots have been run, the summer and winter learning journey programs.

A key part of these programs was that learners received comments from Rachel as well as in the summer learning journey they also received comments from learners in the countries they were studying.  At the end of January there were over 600 post and comments. Learner who engaged in the program saw a much smaller drop in writing scores compared to the a match sample who did not take part.

The Winter learning journey saw more learners from more schools engaging over the holiday period. In this journey the total activity blog posts and comments of 2651.

Rachel shared her excitement and enjoyment in engaging with this program. Learners who join in were celebrated received certificates, badges on their blogs and the top bloggers from each school received prizes.

What next:
Rachel wants to get into every school and class to build relationships with the children.
Giving learners choose in the programs, they have shown that they enjoy rating thing and sharing their option.
Who to we engage more people in commenting and engaging with learners.
How can we make sure there is access and learners who don't have devices at home they can use the library.

Next summer holiday, Summer learning Journey 2.0 is coming. It will have a similar topic of travel and culture. Learners will again be connected with Rachel this time over 4 weeks. Rachel, to University students as well as past summer learning blogs will engage in commenting.

Innovative Teacher at the Manaiakalani Hui

The Spark Manaiakalani Innovative Teachers are teachers who are focusing on in-depth innovative inquiries  aiming to engage learners and community in learning.

They are using one idea to spark more and more ideas that lead to change. 

Meet the Teacher and explore their inquiry focuses...

Sandy

Is a Pt England Teacher who teachers ICT to learners of all ages. Her inquiry is focused on Extension Learners who are learners identified as achieving above that of their peers. She identified that these learners were not achieve as well as they could in writing. She is using film with these learners to gain more depth in their writing. She used short films to support learners to develop knowledge of Character setting and plot. One of the things she noticed was that learners struggled with the structure of a narrative.

Here is a link to Sandy's blog so you can see more about her innovative inquiry.

Nicola

Is a Biology teacher at Tamaki College. She is noticing that year 13 learners are not achieving the grades needed to get into university.
She found last year that when she provided all resources learners found this overwhelming.
Nicola's inquiry is focusing on making her planning visible to the learners. She uses Solo taxonomy in her planning which allows her to plan to extend learners thinking. She want all learners to have the ability and desire to catch up using planning and blog posts for other learners.

To see what else Nicola is doing check out her blog.

Karen

Found that the learners in her class felt that they couldn't write and had no reason to do so. Her aim was to help learners to gain an audience that mattered to the learners, their family.
She started by giving learner family access to the blog by sending home a bookmark. Some family did comment but this stopped quickly and didn't motivate learner to write more.
She then provided the learners family with a more detailed poster about how to comment and a link again. Then she implemented a challenge for learners to get the most comments making them encouraged the their family to comment. This has changed the attitude of the learner who now want to write and enjoy.

Check out Karen's blog and you may want to provide some comments for her learners.

Matt

This inquiry is around the boys not achieving in writing. When Matt asked the boys what they needed they said peace and quiet he provided headphones which learners use when they need them. He also used timers to break the writing in to parts and put on the pressure a bit. He also thought about the SHARE part of our pedagogy, stating that the way we share writing can be boring so he found way to share that are different.

To see what else Matt is doing check out his blog.

Maryanne

Is focusing on partnering with learners and their family to strength the CyberSmart curriculum. She found the learners in year 8 had forgotten most of the key points in CyberSmart. So learners needed ownership so they felt connected to these ideas. When learners had an understand they had created they decided to share this through movies so their families and community could connect with these ideas as well. This class decided what was important to share from the CyberSmart curriculum, these videos also help new learner to catch up on the skills they need.

To see what else Maryanne is doing check out her blog.

Jackie

This focusing on rising read achievement using the digital affordances. She is engaging family through a family blog that supports family to understand the benefits using their chromebooks at home. They also had a Hui for learners to share more with their family. Student ownership has increased when learners can take up their devices, sharing for home and engaging with reading.


To see what else Jackie is doing check out her blog.

Cognitive and social skills

Wolf Fisher are not only looking at solely the academic needs of the learners to considering the develop of learners cognitive and social skills.

Consider if you will how we develop these skills?
The cognitive skills of critical literacy, argumentation and so on.
The social skills, such as self control, consider other perspective, communication and so on.

It was suggest that these skills can and have been mapped to achievement.

These skills can be taught in a specific outside of context program or within an authentic task, this may look like reflective prompts and school values that learners are taught to use and value.

These prompts might be:
Why do you think your friend thinks that way?
How can you judge the best evidence?
What can you do to make sure you don't get distracted?

There is evidence that these skill develop over time and online communication can support this.

Argumentation and taking a point of view is one key way to develop learners critical thinking and empathy.

A recent piece of research asked learners to take a position an article about the Taylor Swift coming to NZ and what effect that this might have had on the native birds.

Here are some examples of there answers:

What was learnt is that learners arguments are more emotive than anything else. There is skill a long way to go but we can develop these skills within our classroom program.