There just ISN’T enough TIME!!!!!

I think the most difficult thing about teaching is the TIME conflict! Teachers’ feel so much pressure from so many different places: children, parents, team members, school management, BOT, ERO, the community, the media, themselves. It becomes a real juggling act, keeping all your clients and supervisors happy and up-to-date, and still achieve your priorities. If you can get it balanced, then those priorities should mesh, and achieving your own priorities, should be the same as the other demands on you, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to always be the case.

What does this mean in terms of implementing Learning Pathways?

1. Get smart with your initial planning – when you’re setting up your planning for the term, make sure the skills teaching that you want to do in writing and reading are linked with probable directions in your Learning Pathways. In this way you will be able to kill two birds with one stone. eg If your topic is going to need report writing, then make this is the designated  writing skill for the term.

2. Daily Focus Points – Use the opportunity of times of whole class focus to keep the topic in front of the students. Don’t have your Inquiry as a separate subject that only pops up for two hours a week. Keep it in front of the children every day.  Have a daily current events session related to your topic - there are different ways of doing this, one child a day, one group a week, a monitor who checks the Internet before school for a news item related to your topic newsboards. Wall map with pins with related news items etc At Shared Reading time – use material related to the topic. You can tailor your teaching points to work with this material. Journalling and Reflection – I think I’ll make this a topic for a whole other post – the role of reflection in your Inquiry is so important with much research showing the importance and success of this technique in children’s learning, and in your knowledge about each student. Make this a regular occurrence, whether a quick verbal round-up of progress at the end of a session of what was achieved that day, or a written journal, or a weekly sharing session where the children share and support each other in their projects.

3. Flexibility – recognize that the way you go about teaching subjects such as Reading will vary at different stages of your Inquiry, and that your planning for Reading should reflect this. eg In the Immersion phase, give the students material in their guided lessons that will teach them about the topic. When groups are researching, give them time in your programme, such as in their group rotation to carry out their research. Where your lower achievers need greater support, small group work is an ideal opportunity to teach them skills as well as to enable them to gain the information that they need. When it is time to present work, use your writing time for them to write up their reports. At ICT time, choose a meaningful task related to what they need to do for their Inquiry, rather than doing something separate. At the research phase, use it for research, at the presentation phase, use it for presentation.

4. Observe/Reflect/Respond – You cannot completely plan the term ahead in terms of the children’s needs. Neither can you ignore the children’s needs. You can however, predict what the children MAY need, and plan to teach to these needs as they arrise. You have a hugely important role when the students are working “independently” on their projects. You need to keep close tabs on what each group is doing, think about their future directions, and whether what they are doing is taking them in the right direction, diagnose their needs and MEET those needs. This may simply be on-the-spot guidance, or it may be recognizing that individuals, groups or the whole class have particular needs which you will need to plan and teach for. 

5. Prioritise – Don’t let yourself get sidetracked by side issues. Stick to your inquiry as your main focus. Don’t forget to use homework for the Inquiries, OR for the students to do rote work, that then doesn’t have to take time away from your Inquiry work.

6.Have fun with it!!! IF YOU ARE PASSIONATE ABOUT IT, THE CHILDREN WILL BE TOO!

 

“I don’t think the kids are learning much from this Learning Pathways stuff…?

I didn’t say it! No. A reliever in our school said it in the staffroom.

Am I concerned? Yes!

Do I believe it? Hmmm….. Do I believe the children are currently learning as much as they CAN from “this Learning Pathways stuff” yet? No.

Are they learning much?

YES!

When I questioned the relieving teacher further about her concerns, she talked about one group in particular who were having a lot of trouble working together, who were continuously fighting and not getting much work done. 

Groups working together is a very significant issue and part of the cooperative nature of the Inquiry process. I personally have a strong belief in the cooperative classrooms process, and the enhanced learning that takes place. I believe there were a few things that needs to happen for this group and others like it to be successful.

a) Teacher input at the time of groups being set up. 

eg  Is the class ready for group research -this can be a tricky activity for some students. The teacher needs to make decisions about the size of the group – maybe pairs are a good way to start as it doesn’t require as much expertise from the students in terms of group dynamics, it allows easier allocation and sharing of tasks, and ensures greater individual accountability. The teacher needs to look at who the children are who are working together – is this a workable group? Is there a leader in the group? The teacher needs to think about where the children sit on the developmental continuum for Information Literacy Skills – those children who are at the lower levels need greater teacher support, and these children could be grouped together. In the cooperative classrooms model, these children can be supported by other children in a group working at a higher developmental level, however, the success of this will depend on the group dynamics. Students who are at a lower level will often hang around the edges of a group with more capable peers and not actually do any real research themselves and therefore learn very little.

b) Teaching around cooperative work.

This is on-going, and a necessary part of classrooms working in a cooperative way. It might include class discussions, T or Y charts about aspects of cooperative work, games which practice cooperative skills etc. There are a lot of resources around about cooperative classrooms and the types of activities which facilitate this sort of learning. Here is one link http://host401.ipowerweb.com/~teachers/mcc.pdf There are many more!

c) Learning about planning a research project and individual accountability.

It is important to make the preparation for the project a structured part of the process. Students need to learn the process and think about the steps they are going to take. Tasks need to be allocated to individual students, otherwise a hard-working enthusiast may take over the entire project, which means the other group members don’t take part in the important information gathering, processing and synthesising tasks. Part of the teacher’s role, is ensuring that all students are participating fully, and that may mean group checklists showing who is carrying out which areas of the research and presentation.

d) Monitoring the progress of the groups, and teaching to on-going needs. (Formative Assessment)

This is the “on the hoof” stuff that is totally essential to ensure that the children are learning what they need to. This may take the form of some sort of weekly sharing, where the children talk about the progress they have made, discuss any problems they are having. Some things can be cleared up on the spot in this way, other children can offer help and solutions, and the teacher can also identify learning needs that they can focus on during the following week’s work with specific groups, or in class teaching.

LEARNING PATHWAYS does NOT mean the teacher stands back and watches the children fail! 

I don’t agree with the relieving teacher who muttered, “I don’t think the kids are learning much from this Learning Pathways stuff…” but I do think that we need to continue to work on doing it better! It’s not easy, but it IS worth it!

What’s New?

Yes folks, despite our deep involvement in Push, Play, Why Bother? It is time to start thinking about Term 3, and our Music focussed unit, What’s New?

I’ve started up a Web page with some ideas and links about the topic, but would love it if you would put any ideas in comments on here, or email them to me.

Literacy – how does it fit in?

We were having one of those before school discussions in our Teacher Workroom the other morning, about how we fit the literacy programme to Learning Pathways.

Great to hear the discussion! This is a really important issue for us.

Previously, schools would have a plan showing which genre (don’t you hate that word?) should be covered in which weeks of each term, and off we’d go. Literacy in it’s block, and Social Studies, or Science and Technology in ITs block, and never the twain should meet.

My view is that the teaching of literacy should be a really close fit with what is happening in the Inquiry Process.  This means, that the literacy teaching will change throughout the term, matching what is happening with the class, with groups and with individuals.

During the Immersion phase, I would focus on teaching a genre which is a close fit with a topic the question might relate to. For example – if the topic lends itself to a lot of debate, then these might be the skills you focus on, both orally, and in written form. Thus the children may learn the skills of debating, and of writing arguments. This of course will vary across the school according to the age of the students.

Later, as the students are investigating and finding answers to their questions, you may note that they need to improve the quality of their note-taking, and focus on this.

At the same time, you may be working with small groups in reading, working on skills of reading informational texts, and how to get information from text. The texts may well support the student in finding answers to their questions. This is a way of supporting students who are less able to do this task independently as well. In this way, the LP programme finds its way into the Literacy programme.

LP doesn’t just have to happen in one or two blocks a week, but can happen across the Literacy programme. If students are needing to write a report, or plan a story-board for a movie, this can happen in the writing part of the programme, and the teacher can work with groups according to their needs for this. How this happens in the classroom may vary according to the age level.

To me, the important aspect about Literacy and Learning Pathways, is that it needs to be a close fit, with the Literacy programme reflecting and supporting the students in their Inquiry process.

Juxtaposition

Don’t you think that’s an awesome word?

Even just as a word even without considering its meaning!

Juxta position, Jux ta pos i tion, Juxtaposition.

I first came across the word in an educational sense when I was introduced to Jamie McKenzie, as an ICT Guru, in 1996. This was before we had the glorious disaster of Netday in our school, before one could get on the net and chat to a journalist in Israel and a writer in New York about what they had for dinner, before we could send each other fascinating and silly wriggling emails and share a laugh in our separate but similar four-walled rats cages!

Juxtaposition in the educational sense according to Jamie, was putting two things next to each other which would then trigger a different way of thinking about the two things, or shock us into recognition of the significance of the juxtaposition.

Welcome Green Bay Bloggers!

Green Bay School uses an Inquiry Learning Pedagogy called Learning Pathways.

Learning Pathways aims to create independent, motivated, skilled learners with well developed critical thinking skills.

The sequence we use at Green Bay initiates with the staff deciding on the context and a Fertile Question, which will be worked on for a whole term. This is followed by  an Immersion phase, because we believe that the students need some knowledge before they begin to form questions. When the immersion phase is complete, the students form sub-questions which will enable them to answer “The Big Question” and proceed to investigate and discover answers to their questions. Whilst the school is currently loosely following Gwen Gawith’s “Action Learning” as this is an Information Literacy Model that is familiar to many NZ teachers, staff are free to use whichever IL Model they feel best suits the needs of their children.

Term 2, 2007, our big question is: Push, Play, Why bother?

Push, Play refers to a SPARC programme which encourages people to participate in at least 30 minutes exercise a day.