Life as a Learning Coach

October of this year marked my 10 year anniversary at Hobsonville Point Secondary School (HPSS) where I started as a foundation staff member. Much has changed since those early days before we had any students and we dreamed up a school that would be better at meeting student needs. A lot will keep changing, particularly with an all-new senior leadership now at the helm in 2024.  With so much change on the horizon, I have found myself thinking a lot about the areas of our school where I am reluctant to see major change, as well as the areas in our school where I would like to see more change. 

One area that I hope will stay strong in our school as we go forward is Learning Hubs. Learning Hubs are our pastoral care system at HPSS, replacing the role of form teacher. While we do all the admin things a form teacher might do, we also have extra time with our learning hub students so that we have time to develop life skills such as self-reflection, leadership, emotional intelligence, etc. 

Daniells' Donkeys - My Learning Hub

Without a doubt, being a hub coach is one of the most rewarding aspects of my job. Students keep the same hub and hub coach for their entire time at our school. This means that I see these students at the start of every day. Over time, this allows us to build really strong relationships where students and their parents trust us to discuss challenges in their education. Over the years this has involved supporting students and their families with everything from academic goals, behaviour expectations, bullies, gender transitions, parents with terminal illness, disabilities, etc. When families trust us, they are able to be much more transparent with us about the support that young people need. And as a result, we can meet their needs much more effectively. 

One of the aspects of my practice that I am really proud of is how I am able to help my hublings develop as a hub family. We know that when students experience a sense of belonging, they are more likely to succeed at school. Hence, I work very hard to create a sense of belonging for my students. This is done through lots of things but in particular:

• CHECK-INS: For a check-in, we sit in a circle. Each student answers a question about themselves. For example, what was the best part of your weekend, in what class are you having a lot of success right now, etc. There are a few reasons why I have embraced this practice so thoroughly including:
• Ensuring that every student has had an adult and their peers listen to them, everyday. How can any student feel like they belong if they can go through an entire day without anyone actually talking to them? 
• Ensures that the hub group members hear what is going on for their peers. This allows them to make connections with each other and build their relationship with each other.
• Doing this regularly means that I can stay connected to my students and what is going on for them in an effective way. 
  
  
• THANKFUL THURSDAYS: If you are not familiar with the neuroscience of gratitude, I suggest it is time you get caught up. Every Thursday morning during hub time, we each get a chance to share some of the things we are grateful for that week. This helps students start their day in a better frame of mind, while also giving me a little insight about what is on top for the students. 
  
  
  
  
  
• TRADITIONS: Few things make a person feel like they belong as much as being part of a tradition. For our hub, we have had a long tradition of playing werewolf. Our older students enjoy teaching the new ones and the young students enjoy having fun with the older kids. Other traditions in my hub include silly photos, and can collections for the annual can drive. We are working on some more traditions however these are best when co-created with students.
  
  
  
• LEARNING GAMES: There are lots of learning benefits to games, and this becomes particularly evident in hub. Over the years I have created many games for my hublings. Sometimes it is something like Whanaungtanga eels and ladders that help students learn and make connections with each other. Other times it might be role-playing games that help them learn about career pathways. I've made games to help them develop critical thinking and games to help them with their communication skills. The great thing about using games for learning in a hub context is that as well as students learning and practising new skills, the games also help create shared memories that contribute to the students' sense of belonging and engagement. 

Another aspect of Learning Hubs that I feel is really successful is the academic coaching. Sometimes in school students who just get on and do the work rarely ever get one-on-one attention. We also have students who with the right encouragement could do much better. We have students who struggle to make sense of their work and those who need more challenge. The benefit of hubs and keeping them relatively small is that we can have fairly regular conversations with every student individually about how they are going in their learning, what the challenges the are encountering, and what needs to be done about this. I believe that learning hubs are a key aspect of what allows us to have high expectations of our students at HPSS. 

While academic coaching conversations can be helpful in communicating high expectations, it can also be helpful in helping identify where students need additional support. One area where this is often the case is advocating for students, particularly those with disabilities. As a learning coach, I have spent a great amount of time ensuring that students are getting the support that they need. More often than not, the areas where students needed support or someone to champion them were identified through a one-on-one coaching conversation. 

In summary, hub is one of the areas in my practice where I feel that I get the balance of warm and demanding right. There are systems and structures in place that allow an inclusive approach where every student has their own pathway, yet enable us to have high expectations of every student. 

Where to next?

As our hubs have students from year 9 to year 13, every year we have new students who join our hubs. As a result, every year we need to bring new students on board into our hub and help them feel just as included. Hence, every year my 'where to next' is focussed on how I might continue to develop the warm and demanding in hub to extend to new students. 

Google Classroom grade book

Today's post is a screenshot from one of my Google Classroom's grade books (student names removed). This year I have really focused on using this function to help students track their progress in my courses more effectively. There are a number of ways I have done this:

• Using the grade book effectively makes it easier to see if a student is not turning in work on a consistent basis. Eg. at a glance you can see that student 5 has some major concerns below. 
  
  
• Any tasks that I use to make my overall judgment for their grade at the end of the term are signposted. This way students know which tasks to invest extra effort in, rather than just getting them done.  (I have found that it is important to teach students when to focus on 'good enough' and when to focus on 'perfect'). 
  
  
• By using a consistent grade allocation for tasks related to their report, I can use the overall grade function to track the 'level' they are working at more consistently and with less bias. 
  
  
• During class time students are regularly asked to look at their overall grade, and then take action to improve them. This looks like students finishing incomplete tasks, catching up with work from when they were absent, and most frequently, going back to past work and improving the quality of work that they produced. 

The major benefits of using this system this year have meant that reports have been SUPER FAST to complete. Students are much clearer about where their report grades come from and have devoted significantly more energy to 'improve'. 

 

 ("It's been a little while since I've blogged regularly so to get back in the habit, I thought I would share one photo every day for the remainder of the school year to capture some of my learning, reflections, and creations for 2022. Each photo is accompanied by a short caption. The idea is to keep it short, simple, and reflective. I would love for people to join me - if you do, make sure you include #edphoto22 on whatever platform you share it (Twitter, Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram, wherever...)."

Every kid needs a champion

Hobsonville Point Secondary School (HPSS) uses an advisory model for pastoral care (informed by the work of  Dennis Littky and Eliot Levine). We call these pastoral groups hubs. The young people in this photo are my responsibility for their time here at HPSS. I work to help them succeed in whatever goals they set. I work hard to help them feel like they have a place here at school where they feel they belong, and where there is an adult who will always have their back while having high expectations of them. Or in the words of Rita Pierson; "every kid needs a champion". And that is exactly what I work hard to be for these students. 

("It's been a little while since I've blogged regularly so to get back in the habit, I thought I would share one photo every day for the remainder of the school year to capture some of my learning, reflections, and creations for 2022. Each photo is accompanied by a short caption. The idea is to keep it short, simple, and reflective. I would love for people to join me - if you do, make sure you include #edphoto22 on whatever platform you share it (Twitter, Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram, wherever...)." 

Tiritiri Matangi Island

Today's photo is of a takahē on Tiritiri Matangi, the bird sanctuary which is located in the Hauraki Gulf of New Zealand, 3.4 km east of the Whangaparaoa Peninsula in the North Island and 30 km northeast of Auckland. Earlier this year I visited the island sanctuary with my level 2 biology class. This photo is a reminder that experiencing learning with all your sense is always powerful. But where the deep learning happens is where that experience is then used to inspire deeper inquiry. 

("It's been a little while since I've blogged regularly so to get back in the habit, I thought I would share one photo every day for the remainder of the school year to capture some of my learning, reflections, and creations for 2022. Each photo is accompanied by a short caption. The idea is to keep it short, simple, and reflective. I would love for people to join me - if you do, make sure you include #edphoto22 on whatever platform you share it (Twitter, Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram, wherever...)."

Photo essays

One of the things that frustrate me about our current education system is that it has a bias toward using writing as a means to represent learning. Students are asked to write essays, write reports, write an email, write a letter, write a story. In science, this is particularly evident through the prioritisation of exams, tests, and reports that remain fixed as one of the primary means to assess students (not in all contexts but in many). I have a hunch that this bias contributes to the lack of cultural and gender diversity represented in science fields. In response, I wanted to spend some time this year emphasising some other modes of communicating ideas in science. The photo above was taken by a student as part of their photo essay about climate change. Here is the task I used to scaffold students in their photo essays. 

("It's been a little while since I've blogged regularly so to get back in the habit, I thought I would share one photo every day for the remainder of the school year to capture some of my learning, reflections, and creations for 2022. Each photo is accompanied by a short caption. The idea is to keep it short, simple, and reflective. I would love for people to join me - if you do, make sure you include #edphoto22 on whatever platform you share it (Twitter, Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram, wherever...)."

Inquiry baskets of knowledge

It's been a little while since I've blogged regularly so to get back in the habit, I thought I would share one photo every day for the remainder of the school year to capture some of my learning, reflections, and creations for 2022. Each photo is accompanied by a short caption. The idea is to keep it short, simple, and reflective. I would love for people to join me - if you do, make sure you include #edphoto22 on whatever platform you share it (Twitter, Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram, wherever...). 

This is a photo of students' literal baskets of knowledge. Their key learning and questions from their inquiries were summarised on strips of paper that were then weaved into a kete (basket). Students also reflected on the purākau (story) of Tāne and the baskets of knowledge and what this could teach them about how to tackle their own pursuit of knowledge in their inquiry. Here is the full resource if you wish to repurpose or reuse it.

Reflecting on the practicing teacher criteria 2021

To have spent so many months working from home in a job that usually involves so much face to face time, has made 2021 feel like a bit of an odd year for msot Auckland based teachers. So many of my usual patterns and routines as a teacher was disturbed, and so many plans were disrupted. And while supporting student learning from home is certainly not the norm, it doesn't change the professional responsibilities we hold. In fact, as I reflected on the practicing teacher criteria for 2021, I was reminded once again of just how flexible we need to be if we are to support our learners effectively in such uncertain, and somewhat volatile times. 

What follows is a brief reflection about how I attempted to address the practising teacher criteria in 2021. I have included some examples of my practice, as well as a brief reflection on some of my next steps for 2022. 

Self-managing learners. Yeah right.

The New Zealand Curriculum demands that we develop 'self-managing' learners, yet how many of our students were unable to do so without our constant hovering, timekeeping and nagging in lockdown? How many students were 'missing in action' and just had an extended holiday instead of learning from home?

What does it take to help students become truly self-managing? What does it look, sound and feel like? I am of the opinion that it doesn't involve quiet compliance and meeting every deadline. Instead, I imagine something a bit more like Jimmy Neutron - creative, resilient, self-motivated, sets their own personally relevant goals and challenges, capable of complex problem-solving, empowered. The process involves a lot of trial and error, is usually quite messy, and takes a 'nuanced' view around deadlines. In other words, deadlines that work to the teacher's schedule take a back seat to authentic deadlines set by alien kidnappings and the like.

The Jimmy Neutron self-managing learner example raises some important questions:

• How might we develop learners that are confidently and competently self-managing, who will continue to learn successfully without us hovering over them?
• Once we have successfully developed more self-managing learners, how might we continue to engage and support them on their personal learning journey?

image source

So what does it take to turn an unmotivated Bart Simpson into a Jimmy Neutron? 

Well, for a start, you wouldn't. Bart Simpson is his own person and needs you to recognise and respect his mana and rangatiratanga (his spirit, his agency, his right to self-sovereignty). We should not be trying to turn Bart into anyone. Instead, we need to think about how our classrooms, schools and online environments, might create the conditions in which Bart Simpson wants to, and can find ways to engage in the learning on his own terms, in a positive way. How might we help Bart be his 'best self's so to speak, instead of asking Bart to be a Jimmy, and forever failing to do so because he is not Jimmy.

If we couldn't engage Bart Simpson in class, what are the chances that we engaged him during lockdown? What are the chances that Bart would have self-managed and continued his learning at home? Probably quite well if you are talking about skateboarding, but less so for algebra. So what do we need to do differently at school to help Bart realise his best self, capable of self-managing his learning around skateboarding and algebra?

To start with, Bart's teachers first need to overcome years of his mistrust in teachers who have profiled and distrusted him. They will need to overcome years of him feeling like his work is never good enough, that his teachers don't value him, want him in class or respect him. He will need teachers to see past his rebellion, to a child who is probably hurting because he is made to go to school every day - a place where he feels unwelcome and no sense of belonging. As it turns out, the first step to starting to build Bart's self-managing around algebra has very little to do with algebra. 

Power and art

Just three months ago I was hopping across Europe visiting museums and art galleries. It seems unthinkable that so much has changed as a result of covid-19 in such a short space of time. We are now on day three of lockdown in New Zealand. And all of a sudden, I find that I have time to finish a blog post I started in January!

This past holiday I had the pleasure of visiting numerous art galleries, listening to art history podcasts and completing Adobe Illustrator tutorials online. I also had a solid week of super intense practice while I prepared for a group aerial circus performance (that's me on the right!). While I am a science and sometimes maths teacher, I often find that the arts is where much of my inspiration comes from.

I have learned that taking the time to be creative and appreciate the creative arts, makes a huge positive difference to my personal wellbeing. It is also more often than not, a catalyst for deep thinking and reflection in my day to day practice within education. Recently for example, I learned about artist Lisa Brice from listening to a great podcast by art curator Katy Hessel. 

Source: Women in Art - Tate via Khan Academy

As some of you may know, female artists are remarkably absent in art history (go ahead, make a list of all the artists you know about and then see how many are women). Women are primarily present as the subject of paintings, and hence, are always represented through a male filter, or 'male gaze' as Hessel calls it. Lisa Brice, the artist mentioned above, recasts women from art history. This 'recasting' means that historic portraits of women where they are portrayed as weak, vulnerable, where they are in positions of disempowerment and hopelessness, are reinvented to give the women power. 

Take for example the famous "Parting at Morning" by Sir William Rothenstein (see below left). The women featured in the portrait was described in his journal as destitute. She attempted to sell him paintings. He could not afford them however instead, she posed for him to complete various drawings. He describes the women as "not without a certain cadaverous beauty" and included with her portrait a poem modified from Robert Browning:

Round the cliff on a sudden came the sea,
And the sun looked over the Mountain's rim:
And straight was a path of gold for him,
And the need of a world of men for me.

In essence, this painting casts this woman in a 'walk of shame'. The painting and the inclusion of the poem immortalised this woman in her state of destitution and shame. What's more, there is a more convoluted message about objectification captured here, about how this woman is still pretty even if she looks like death warmed up.

Photo on the left from Tate, and photo on the right included here without permission from Ennigaldi

On the right, however, Lisa Brice has recast this woman. Instead of the vulnerable, destitute, cadaverous women who Browinging implies is reliant on the men in her world, she is recast to have a certain "I don't give a f*%$# and don't mess with me look about her. Brice essentially attempts to restore some power to this woman.

So why does this matter in education? Well, the redistribution of power in these two artworks paint a stark contrast of how the same person can be represented. If we could hold up Lisa Brice's lense to education, would such a contrast be revealed there too? For example, almost every New Zealander would recognise Marcus King's famous representation of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi (below). How might this painting be different if Māori were recast to have more power. Would there by more Māori standing rather than sitting on the ground? What else might be different? 

Image form Archives New Zealand

There are those who would argue that yes, women, indigenous peoples, and other minority groups are represented in ways that diminish their power within education and academic contexts (Ann Milne re. Māori, and  Jane Gilbert re. women in science, being just two names that jump to mind). With this recasting in mind, I am wondering what education might look like if power distribution was fairer. Which aspects of my classroom practice and leadership would look completely different? What knowledge and skills would be prioritised in schools instead? And most important, what can we do to ensure that our own biases don't cloud our view when we consider power distribution in education? 

Rediscovering student agency

I realised with a shock yesterday how little I've blogged this year! So, I have set a personal challenge for myself, 10 posts in 10 days. It shouldn't be too hard to turn all of my draft posts into complete ones, right? Or post a quick vlog reflecting of my day? Or share a strategy that I have tried? Maybe you're keen to try too?

It seems that not too long ago, everyone was talking about student agency. Many a tweet talked about self managing students, blog posts were written, and there were probably multiple sessions about it at ULean. I know Claire Amos did a great talk about it, and Steve Mouldey did a great presentation. Lately, however, I have found myself looking at these resources in a new light. I have always believed that student agency is a key ingredient for success as it helps students to become self-managing, life-long learners. I still think this a worthy goal for success in a rapidly changing, fast-paced world. However, student agency has taken on a new sense of urgency and importance in my practice of late. Prompted by my Spiral of Inquiry in 2018, I wondered whether student agency might contribute in restoring some of the power to those students and families for whom colonisation and embedded system bias has led to feeling disempowerment?

In schools, command and control models dominate in so many ways. We tell our students where to be, when to be there, and how to act when they get there. We tell our students what to wear, what not to wear, and in some cases, what their hair can and cannot look like. We tell them when they can eat, when they may use the restroom. We tell our students what they should learn, and how they should learn it. Whether inadvertently or not, we decide what our students should value through deciding how they should spend their time, what we assess, and what qualifies as "justified" reasons for missing school. The trouble is, every decision that we make FOR students rather than WITH students is another instance where we are removing agency and power.

Once I began to notice all the ways that I remove agency from my students, I was alarmed to discover that in my own practice, despite priding myself on a student-centred philosophy’ I was constantly enacting my power over the students. I began feeling uncomfortable that 17 and 18-year-old students felt the need to ask permission to go to the toilet. If we cannot even trust young people with going to the toilet, then what kind of messages were we sending about trusting them with their learning? And while we might argue that some students misbehave and cannot be trusted to go and come back in a timely manner, why is it that we feel justified to mistrust the majority because of the actions of a minority?

Building on my learning from 2018, I started this year with a focus on rediscovering, revisiting, refining and kickstarting student agency in my classroom (again). I am hoping to move from the 'false choice' model (where I give students a choice between tasks I designed) to one where the power is truly shared. In framing this thinking, I found Hart's Ladder of Participation really helpful. Below is the description of one of the experiments I tried in my teaching this year in response.

The students and I started the term by unpacking the rubric that would be used to assess their learning in our module called Star Trek. Together, we identified the skills and knowledge we would need to gain by the end of the unit.

Students then split into small groups to design their own lesson (or a small series of lessons) around a learning objective they had written (I had to teach them how to write these first). They researched their chosen area of focus, designed and made activities, made and found resources, as well as identify success criteria, keywords and ideas. Once students had completed their planning, I worked with each group to 'quality assure' their lesson and to allocated badges for each lesson. From here, each lesson was loaded as a mission on our Starfleet Mission Tracker (see image below) aka. kanban board. If you are not familiar with kanban, it's a super simple project management tool that really helps visualise workflow, prioritisation, etc. I 100% recommend using this with team, students and yourself! I created the video below to help my students understand kanban.

Using Trello, we set up a kanban board where each card serves as a mission. A click on each mission reveals the instructions and resources for each lesson. As students completed the various parts of the lesson, they would mark items as done on the To-Do list also included on the mission card.

Expanded view of a mission.

Over the course of the term, students started each class by selecting from the AVAILABLE MISSIONS what they would complete that day and moving it into the TO DO column on their personal mission tracker. As they were completing the lesson, the mission would be in their DOING column, and finally, when they have completed all items on the checklist, they would move the card into the DONE column.

To help students make selections that would support them gaining all the skills towards the rubric, we also created specialisations using the badges that we allocated. Each student thus played an active role in designing the class' lessons, choosing their specialisation and choosing the lessons to help them achieve their specialisation.

So did it work?
It was great to see that students responded well to this teaching strategy. As the teacher of this class, it was remarkable how easy this class became to manage. Every student knew what they were doing and what their next steps were. My stress levels and planning time was significantly reduced! (This was an added bonus, I hadn't planned on this). Students' reported experience of this approach also showed that students really felt that their learning was personalised.

However, what was particularly interesting about this approach was that out of the five Maori and/or Pasifika students in this class who completed the in-class survey, three out of the five students gave themselves the highest possible score for the three indicators in the survey:

• I feel proud of the work that I did in this class.
• I feel confident that the work I did in this class is good quality.
• I did my best in this class.

Interestingly, the other two students still identified in the survey that the learning was new and free (Student A) and that they linked the learning (Student E). 

All in all, I think this was a pretty successful experiment and next step for my Spiral of Inquiry. This year I am continuing my focus on "How might we develop assessment that enables success for academically ‘at risk’ students?" I look forward to further experiment with this approach in senior classes next...