sharing our professional inquiries

Teachers only day today and we kicked off with getting into break out groups and sharing our teaching as inquiry cycles for 2015

it was such a beneficial experience to be able to sit together and share our adaptations to our practice...I am hugely proud of the teachers at MBS and the community of learners we have become

Check out our inquires on our MBS professional learning blog

http://mbsteachers.blogspot.co.nz/

Plg- what is collaboration ?

Alma Harris  Disciplined collaboration

The concepts that are delved into are very similar to many other researchers findings I have read and also the day spent recently with Roween Higgie at the EAAPA leadership day Leading from within

The 3 key ideas are

Implementation

Innovation

Impact

They promote 7 tests for evaluating how disciplined your collaboration is.. I wonder how well we rate against these as a team? and across teams as a school?

7 tests

Clarity of focus

Consistent and creative use of data

Collaboration with purpose

Communication of intent and outcomes

Capacity building through engagement and involvement of others

Coherent action

Change in practice


Distributed Leadership

Weaving evidence, inquiry and standards to build better schools

Professional reading focus for our SLT this term.

Having left the UK specifically because of my 7 year old having to sit standards tests and the trauma this caused him, I am wary of the implementation of standards in NZ.  I'm hoping that reflecting on the contents of this book, specifically with a lens on our particular schools' context, will enable me to find positives in the integration of the standards.

Chapter 1 reflection

On page 9, Timperley and Parr state that the approach most likely to have the highest impact on student learning has 3 strands:

• use a range of evidence to inquire into the effectiveness of current practices
• decide what should stay because it is working
• decide what needs to change, and how it needs to change

Thankfully they then go on to state that  'the processes involved are not as simple as this description makes them appear'. At this point in my leadership practice and also within the context of our teachers practice and our school situation, this statement is very true. I know both evidentially and also from that 'hunch' we have as teachers that the 3 strands to raising achievement are a solid base from which to evince change. However I am also very conscious of the range of complexities hidden within attempting change. 

For these strands to all pull together in order to make the changes required, we need certain states to be in situ. Such as:

• Strong relationships within and across our school
• Collegiality and collaboration based on shared understanding of our purpose for change
• Trust- exactly the same trust that we strive for in our classes. That empowers people to open themselves up to risk of failure, knowing that it is ok to fail, that we never achieve success until we are aware of what we need to do, personally to change and raise our practice
• An agreed direction, aligned with differentiated levels of supportive PLD to facilitate pedagogical growth

page 11 sees Timperley and Parr addressing the very issues I have with standards in our wonderful NZ curriculum 

"Part of our motivation for putting this book together is to try to avert the kinds of negative consequences experienced in many other countries and to optimise the chances that standards will be used to promote the kinds of learning that are valued in the curriculum through using the rich descriptions that accompany the standards as a source of information for advancing teaching and learning."

The rich layers of resources that surround our standards have huge potential to support and advance learning, to create ownership of learning between teachers and learners, through the development of deep understanding of what success looks like at any given point in a child's education. However to create the optimum learning environment for this integration of standards, curriculum and teacher inquiry, we again come back to the states we need in situ before this can happen. As Timperley and Parr put it " This will only happen, however, if professional and community learning- rather than punitive accountability- remain to the fore."

Within our context, reaching this point is our biggest challenge on the road ahead....

CAAP plan and the difficulty of reliable OTJ's

Recently whilst constructing the mid-year mathematics report to the board, I discovered a blip in the data from a cohort group. It seemed fairly anomalous and investigation found that it was based on the difficulty for teachers and leaders to ensure consistency of OTJ's schoolwide.
Despite a reasonable start on how to gather evidence for making OTJ's, we still have a long way to go as a community of educators to ensure that this most abstract and tricky process can be made as authentic and valid as possible.
Our journey at MBS began with supporting teachers to understand how to analyse the schoolwide data and how this is only one part of the overall puzzle we have to put together in order to see where a students levels lie.
This year we are running both an ALiM and an ALL contract and an off shoot of these very valuable programs, has been the need for me to develop a CAAP plan ( Curriculum Action and Achievement Plan).
This is still an ongoing process of revision, feedback and more revision. However it has started to generate a document which aims to support all stakeholders within our school and wider community, see what a child achieving at a certain level, will 'look' like. Using the National Standards and also the ELLP, and numeracy progressions in order to build up a big picture of the skills and abilities a child will display. This is the start to building  a deeper understanding of what a child who isn't achieving will look like, and also the structures we have in place for the different tiers of intervention.
As a school, we have spent a lot of time looking at moderation within writing and have constructed a more shared understanding of what each level of writing will look like. We have also focused a lot on the collection and analysis of mathematical assessment in order to feed this into effective planning.
However we now need to use all these areas we have been working in and start to feed what we know around maths and reading in order to see how we can deepen our understanding of how to make valid OTJ's within these areas. In order to align our abilities as a staff so that by the end of the year we are able to make reliable OTJ's on a students work, in any of the 3 areas and for students at all levels in our school.

Appraisal process

So my first appraisal meeting with external facilitator is set for next Thursday. I am setting up my Myportfolio to have a subset page which can be shared directly with my appraiser. As this is a tool I use anyway it makes sense to utilise it for as many purposes as possible. With that in mind I learnt a new trick today while at the ELN sessions, courtesy of @mosbourne01, which I have already utilised. It's sad how excited I get by a new trick in ICT use. But all these tricks streamline the amount of effort that is required in order to provide evidence of goals achieved.