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. 

Manaakitanga

Post number 3 for my 10 posts in 10 days challenge...

PS: Whatever you do, don't read half of this post. Read the whole thing. 

 

Learning Hubs at Hobsonville Point Secondary School forms an important part of our curriculum. They use an advisory model to take pastoral care to the next level. In term 3, our learning in these advisories centred around the concept of manaakitanga.

I was very aware that building the term's learning around manaakitanga came with some challenges. Firstly, in New Zealand, we are often guilty of pretending to be culturally responsive by slapping a te Reo Māori name on anything. Calling a Community of Learning a Kāhui Ako is not what makes it culturally responsive, the same way that giving the unit, theme or topic that we are studying a te Reo Māori name would not make it culturally responsive either. This lands us in the treacherous territory of tokenism. 

A second risk I identified was around cultural misappropriation. This can be described as when "one culture, most often one that has a historical record of oppressing other cultures, engages in the unauthorised taking of some aspects of another, most often a minority culture" (Metcalfe, 2012). Our schools are saturated in Eurocentric thinking, systems and bias, and as a result, I can't help but wonder if our dominant culture has 'taken' this concept, potentially without authority. 

And finally, my biggest concern, without understanding of the genealogy of the concept we were studying, its cultural meaning, and significance, was I at risk of misrepresenting this culturally significant term to my students? In particular, it seemed to me that by misrepresenting the meaning of manaakitanga through my own Eurocentric bias and unintentional ignorance, I could surreptitiously be erasing the cultural significance and supplanting it with covert Eurocentric cultural ideas instead. 

So what did I do? Well, the only thing that seemed appropriate to do. Don't represent my view of manaakitanga, but instead seek out ways to represent the Māori view of manaakitanga. Inspired by the work of famous writer and psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés, and great NZ educators like Heemi McDonald, I looked to stories for help. 

I stared by reading students a story of Te Pura, the guardian taniwha of Wairoa as told in Pūrākau: Māori Myths Retold by Māori Writers. I then asked each of my students to look for a story connected to their family, culture, heritage or identity that somehow represented manaakitanga. I encouraged my students to speak to their parents, grandparents, aunties, uncles and more to help locate an appropriate story. I hoped that by encouraging students to seek out their own stories, that this might provide an opportunity for students to build their own cultural capital while ensuring that I don't just accidentally teach my own version of manaakitanga.  Finally, we also watched a movie, selected by the students for its portrayal of ideas related to manaakitanga. After examining these three stories, we then discussed what the shared attributes or themes were of the stories that in most cases, spanned multiple shared cultures. 

Student's sketchnotes of manaakitanga stories. 

Of course, it is early days in my journey towards culturally sustaining pedagogy and there is a lot about the approach above that needs improvement. Although the above shows an example of me 'trying', it is simply not enough that we try. If we are to truly restore the harm that has been done by two hundred years of colonisation and its effects, it is essential that we try, and then evaluate, learn more, iterate, seek feedback, repeat. Our efforts towards culturally sustaining pedagogy are like taking a step in the wrong way on a travellator. We need to take enough steps, and take them in fast enough succession if we hope to overcome the direction that history's travellator is sending us in.

Culturing culturally responsive pedagogy

Honouring New Zealand's bicultural partnership is important, but how do you find a way to include it authentically in the senior science classroom? I am sure that many science teachers would agree that it can be difficult to do this, and make their way through all the content and assessments. I know that I have certainly struggled! Many of us make small efforts, we might include a few token te reo words in our lessons like "e tū" and "tumeke". If you're lucky, you might see the Māori names for tripod or bunsen burners up around the room. But usually we get straight back to talking about old white men, Darwin, Newton, Rutherford, Mendel and Mendeleev.

Of course for many of us, our classrooms have become increasingly diverse too. In just one of my classes this year, I have students from China, Korea, Japan, Samoa, Phillipines, Indonesia, Samoa and Australia. There are also students born in New Zealand however many of their parents were born in other countries, so they bring cultural mixes like Italian, English, German and Turkish to the mix too. So while I am trying to honour New Zealand's bicultural partnership, I am also trying to accommodate a huge variety of cultural diversity in the classroom. And then, we haven't even talked about diversity and learning needs yet!

The challenge is of course not easily solved. While many schools have International days with cultural performances and students in their national costumes, this is not enough to help our young people feel that their cultures are valued at school. We have to shift from accommodating and tolerating cultural diversity (if we even do that...), to making this a critical resource for success in academic contexts. How else can you show that cultural knowledge matters?

Now, I am no expert where culturally responsive pedagogy is concerned. But, I have been thinking really hard about how I can design academic courses that create the space for students to leverage their cultural knowledge to improve their academic success. I have also thought carefully about "demonstrating a commitment to tangata whenuatanga and Te Tiriti o Waitangi partnership in the learning environment" (from the new Practicing Teacher Criteria). I have thought about this carefully not because I am obliged to as a professional, but because I believe it is necessary if I truly wish to see success for all my students.

So after all this thinking, what have I actually come up with? Well... A fermented food shared lunch. Let me explain...

I am teaching a microbiology course this semester. We kicked off the year by asking each student to write a report on a fermented food from a cultural heritage they identify with (task sheet). In a fortnight's time, they would then have to bring the food to our class fermented foods shared lunch.
Many students were really unsure about the cultural aspect on day one, so I encouraged them to talk to their families. A number of students called their grandparents to talk about their cultural heritages, while others called an aunt, uncle or parent. And incase you are wondering, yes I did let them make phone calls in class. Some students even arranged to go and visit grandparents so that they can learn how to make their fermented food.

Rewena bread -  traditional Māori sourdough potato bread (and absolutely DELICIOUS).

On the day of the shared lunch, each student had to make a name tag to accompany their food. This included details about country of origin, microbes used to produce the food, and allergy information (see template). They also had a task sheet to fill in as they tried the wild assortment of food we had.

We really had quite the selection!

The task sheet required them to try at least five foods, and to describe each one (see task sheet here). Finally, the students had to pair up with someone who focussed on a different microbe than the one their food was made from, and then had to complete a compare and contrast thinking map (see the template on the second part of the task sheet).

I asked a student what she thought about my rather crazy fermented foods party idea after our lunch. Her response: "I understood more about my culture and it made me understand more about my class". Others commented that they had "connected" with their culture.

As for me... I was really excited to see students using their cultural knowledge to access the science knowledge and vica versa. I was excited that students were not just learning from me, but that the knowledge from their families had a place in our classroom too. Of course, I am a huge foodie so I was excited about all the new foods I got to try too, but more importantly, we all got to share a little bit of our cultures with each other too.

While today may have been full of warm fuzzies as we talked about our families and food, there is an important question now circling in head. What next? Because a few thoughtfully designed lessons at the start of year is not enough to be culturally responsive.

7 new things I tried this term

1. I redesigned and adapted my favourite board game, Catan, in an attempt to engage some of my more passive learners in a more active way. It worked a treat, particularly for my Pasifika learners! Afterwards, I had the students evaluate their strategy from a mathematical perspective, and then plan a different strategy for the next time we played.
   



2. I decided that there was not enough ethics in addressed in our curriculum. So I have made an ethics section as part of all scientific investigations. As I expected, students have actually spent little to no time thinking about preventing harm in academic contexts. To be honest, this has me a little bit concerned given the state of the world.
   
3. I tried combining three achievement standards into one. This is a work in progress. I'll have to let you know how that goes. Essentially, the students are doing a scientific investigation and using the data gathering process and analysis as evidence towards two maths standards. My hope is that through combing the standards that students can gain an appreciation for the range of skills and knowledge that goes into the process of constructing new scientific knowledge. The standards are:
   

   • AS90925: Carry out a practical investigation in a biological context, with direction 

   • AS91026: Apply numeric reasoning in solving problems

   • AS91036: Investigate bivariate numerical data using the statistical enquiry cycle 

4. I have been trying to help students have deeper discussion with a more diverse range of students. To do this, I have experimented using question scripts that include a series of questions to interview each other about, question cards to have a bank of questions to help draw out each other's answer in more depth, and even setting complex tasks that required extended discussion and a range of perspectives to solve.
   
5. You may have already read about the Learning Hub Inquiry. The process of engaging students with actively developing a personal goal through a personal action research project. Again, a work in progress as this involves leading the HPSS staff through the process too.
   
6. I've been trying to engage students with the idea of cognitive bias. I am approaching this from the angle of why we have processes such as the scientific method and random sampling, and how this helps us overcome cognitive bias. This has been inspired through two books, Tomas Pernecky's Epistemology and Metaphysics for Qualitative Research and Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow.
   
7. I've been having a go at engaging students with futures thinking. By this I mean, getting students to engage with designing solutions for complex problems with no one right answer. Students have been designing a space city. They have been asked to make calculations about how much food, oxygen and water they will need. They have explored alternative food sources, energy sources and some even how to maintain genetic diversity in a reduced population in space. 

   

   Students planning their space city. 

The pedagogy of ice cream, skateboards and diversity.

Throughout the past three years, I have become reacquainted with the concept of diversity. I knew the definition of diversity, I knew that it was one of the major strands of the practicing teacher criteria. However, working at Hobsonville Point Secondary School has helped me convert my textbook understanding, to one of the heart. Not only do I now have a Pepeha that I have said proudly in front of hundreds of people, I genuinely know what it means and why I say it. And what's more, I want to say it, I don't just do it because I have to. That said, I am only at the start of this journey...

As well as cultural diversity, I have also developed a genuine appreciation for the role of diversity in other spaces too. Largely through my masters studies, I have become exposed to ideas such as those from David Weinberger in Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room (I also had the awesome privilege of interviewing him earlier this year, see here). 

They way I see it, there is so much knowledge in the world, (actually, I mean Knowledge with a capital K. I don't mean the meaningless shallow drivel or the endless information that clogs up the internet) that one person can not know it all. If we are dealing with complexity, uncertainty, volatility and so forth in our world, it becomes rather critical that we diversify because we don't know what knowledge, skills, expertise or capabilities we will need. Hence, making all learners learn the same thing seems silly, if not dangerous. It seems foolish removing all the redundancy from the system by making everyone learn the same thing and think in the same way? Hence, it becomes critical that we allow individuals to pursue their personal interests and passions. Perhaps we need to encourage diversity, not just acknowledge or manage it. This idea is also echoed in one of my current favourite readings from Keri Facer. Keri also argues for possibilities, rather than pushing all our students into STEM. Pushing all our students in one direction also removes redundancy from the system.

It was in 2014 that I read Key Competencies for the Future where I stumbled upon the idea of not just valuing diversity in the classroom, but rather making it a necessary component for success. This idea stuck and in 2016, it informed one of my professional learning goals for the year; How might I develop my and my students' capacity to leverage diversity for more effective problem solving? In 2016, I wanted to help my students view diversity as a critical resource, a strength. I wanted my students to seek out diversity rather than avoid it. I wanted them to recognise that there are challenges when working with diverse groups, but we learn to manage these in order to collaborate. 

So what does this look like? A whole bunch of experiments really...

Winning groups. Visit Wendy's Supa Sundaes in January to
try some of the products these students inspired!

• In one of my classes, Yu Ting my co-teacher and I made the students write CVs. We then chose team leaders who were put in a separate room. They worked through the class CVs to pick their teams. Each team had to recruit a design officer, human relations manager and a finance officer. Each team also had to contain at least one boy and girl. The teams then had to design a product for Wendy's Supa Sundaes, design the marketing campaign and calculate food costs. They also had to present these ideas on the last day of term to the brand manager of Wendy's. This particular experiment culminated with Wendy's acknowledging the winning teams on stage last week. I was stoked, because the incredibly diverse range of students being acknowledged on stage was incredible. There were a number of students who I had never seen on stage before. Additionally, the products inspired by these students will be available across the country in January!
• In another module, I collaborated with Tome my co-teacher, and OnBoard Skate to run a

  

  Showing my growth mindset in action.
  Learning to skate!

  module called Heaven is a Halfpipe. Often in schools, we see the same students shinning in multiple contexts. This module however saw some new students step into the foreground. Many of our students who are sometimes disengaged were suddenly the stars in the class. It's amazing what a change in attitude happens when individuals feel valued and like they have something to contribute. It has really made me wonder about whether the disengaged students in our school systems really feel valued and like they have something to contribute. 

The thing with diversity however, is that I am only at the very beginning of this journey. I have found that more and more, I see how we unconsciously discriminate against diversity. Even in #edchatNZ, diversity topics are usually the ones not picked. At our most recent conference, it was the strand with the fewest workshops proposals submitted. Even school uniforms discourage diversity. They often blatantly suggests that students should leave their culture, personality and gender at the door. If we do not differentiate or personalise in our lessons, what implicit messages do we send about diversity?

I believe that a good professional learning goal should lead on to a few paradigm shifts, some good books, trying new and different practices in my teaching that improve outcomes for students, and should lead to me becoming more aware of all that I don't know. I think my goal this year has certainly ticked that box...

The day we colonised another planet in class

This post is being jointly written by Danielle and Steve and cross-posted on both of our blogs. We are co-teaching a Science and Social Studies module called Post-Mortem for the first half of this year. This post is to share a learning experience that we designed to kick off the second term of our course. If you haven't yet, make sure follow Steve's blog. He shares great stuff!

Idea/Aim:

To Make Sense of the Treaty of Waitangi by developing empathy for the perspectives involved

Planning:

This term our Social Studies focus is on Responses to the Treaty of Waitangi and understanding Biculturalism. The premise for our module is that these historical responses have contributed to making NZ society the way it is today. To truly do this, I wanted students to understand why people felt the Treaty was needed and why people had responded to it differently over time.

Both of us had been unduly influenced by our time at KiwiFoo. We had many conversations about how Werewolf could be used educationally and had also both just read The Martian which was highly recommended at the Reading List workshop (about a man stranded on Mars and his attempt to survive).

Whilst discussing plans for Term 2, one of the ideas was “What if we ran a simulation of the British colonising NZ but had it as humans colonising another planet”. In this way we could attempt to develop empathy for the situation without students’ preconceived ideas about the Treaty blocking their view.

To have this close to reality we decided that there had to be communication issues (mistranslations etc.), the colonists needed a superior attitude (to match the civilised barbarians view of Maori held in the early 19th Century) and some differing attitudes towards resources.

The class (45 students) were split fairly evenly, with a mix of natural leaders in both groups and slightly more colonists than aliens.

Pre-Sim with students

Aliens:To begin preparing for the simulation, the aliens were divided into six groups. Each group contributed a different part of the planning by addressing one of the following questions:What are the distinguishing characteristics of your species? How might you ensure this is communicated (without speaking) in the simulation?How might you communicate to ensure we understand each other but the colonists do not?How do we live? e.g. niche, habitat. And how how will we set up the space (cafeteria) to reflect this?What are our resources and why are we so protective of them? Eg. food? What do our communities look like? Eg. social hierarchy, cultural norms.What are our most important values? Why?
The aliens decided on the following:They would operate in factions, each faction would dress similarly. Hence, we ended up with one faction in onesies. Their most valued resource was metal because this is what they ate. This worked well as it meant that I could represent this resource in the simulation with tinfoil!Each faction would live in their own ‘home’, a space constructed with two large tables turned on their side with legs facing each other to create a square area to sit in. In some cases it was a single table with legs turned towards the wall. There were also some free ‘homes’ set up. The students decided to communicate through a Facebook messaging group.

On the dayAliens set up the space. 

Satellite image of planet pre-colonisation 

Resource to utilise? Or sacred mountain?

I set up the sacred mountain where the food was located and told students that once every ten minutes, one person from each faction needed to go and collect a single piece of food and bring it back to their faction. Because it was a sacred mountain, students were not allowed to step on it.Students were told the pre-negotiated (negotiated between Steve and I, the teachers) hand signals. This included hand signals for friend, jail, food, trade, grow, land and person. We also included hand signals that had slightly different meanings for each group. For example, share meaning borrow and give back to one group vs. use long term together for the other group. There was also a gesture for referring to different groups. The aliens had a separate gesture for a faction and all the aliens. No distinction was made between signals for all the factions and one faction for the colonists.

ColonistsThe Colonists were told that Earth could no longer support life for all humans. This group had been selected to colonise the planet “Epic”.
It has lots of land for growing food and plenty of resources to be claimed to use for their needs. There are space creatures that live there who seem to have some form of intelligence but are not as advanced as we are. They seem capable of trade so are more civilised than creatures found on other planets but still act like barbarians at times.
In small groups, the students decided what their plan of action would be upon arriving at their destination: settle land first, source resources, seek out trade opportunities.
We had an opportunity to send 2 scouts to the aliens and ask questions that would help the group of colonists. They found out that there was plenty of metal available. The group decided this was a valuable resource and some groups started planning mining operations at this point.
On the Day:
Each group nominated 1 group member who became part of the police//military and was given a gun. We had a visiting student for the day so she became Governor as she had no pre-existing alliances with any of the students. She quickly selected 1 group to be her advisers.  
I taught the Colonists the pre-arranged hand signals that would allow some communication between the groups. I did however, purposefully mix up the signals for trade and share as miscommunication was vital for ensuring some authenticity in this simulation!
A photo was taken from the mezzanine showing how the area was set up. This “satellite image” was shared with the colonist groups so they could plan where they would head to on arrival at “Epic”.
One group of only 2 students were given a lot more resources so that we had some wealthy colonists as well as the rest.
The groups were sent down the elevator as our spaceship to Epic. They arrived in their groups of 4-5 students with the Governor and her advisors the 2nd group to arrive.

During the simulation

This is best described by the students in their own words:

“Once the Skypeople arrived in our village/colony we were automatically put underneath them on their hierarchy, they stole resources from the sacred mountain and begun tearing down our bunkers. Attempted trades didn’t last for long and they begun putting us into prisons (which they had previously set up upon arrival) due to not signing their suggested treaty. Keagan, Micah and I hid in our secondary bunker which proved to last throughout most of the fighting outside (although they didn’t have much respect for personal privacy). The overall habitat was mostly destroyed towards the end of the fighting (and little attempted communication was used to benefit the previous environment).”
“Signals were used for a variety of things such as communicating about trading, jail and whether you were friends or not.Some of the things that were communicated on facebook were about people asking for help if they were being invaded and people letting each other know who is taking whatSome things weren’t communicated well as some people didn't know what had been going on e.g the marriageEach person at the start tried to be friendly by signaling friendship but the invaders took all of our food and then tried to trade still.The communicating started to fail for us (the aliens) as we started talking verbally which we couldn’t do.Some of our stronger members started to talk with Raley who was their chief and we figured out a treaty by writing on paper and signing it. We used some hand signals that hadn’t been created yet (improvisation)Someone added a person from the colonie to our messaging system so they overtook it and started to delete people.”  

“Their first steps on our planet were a mistake (literally) as their first action was to trod our holy temple into the ground. (An action of the highest blasphemy)  And to collect our offering to the gods as an attempt to blackmail us. My first actions against these vile invaders was to (I am ashamed to say) cower in my home, but the fear soon turned to anger as the tyrants began imposing rules and laws to steal our land. Without food my only option was to steal, and to say the least it didn’t work. I amassed a grand total of three  steel pieces for consumption before I was hauled (kicking and clawing, literally) off to jail. There was where I met the first civilised human, ironic really, isn't it? Who confessed to trying to take land with force (not so civilised then.) Three unsuccessful attempts later I was out! Using only persistence and a good hiding spot I had evaded the guards! I moved back to my land and kept away from anyone who might be able to identify me. This didn’t settle well with me, being a fugitive and watching them take our land. Using the telepathy our specie possessed I attempted to catch up on what I missed. OUTRAGE! They were attempting to sign a treaty with our people, (after their hideous treatment of us) and what was worse people were buying it! I was soon approached by some  colonists bartering peace, intrigued I set aside my distrust  and asked them what they wanted.  It seemed they wanted my land and they were willing to pay for it too! Grudgingly I accepted the deal (what choice did I have?) and took leave of my land.”

"Throughout the process of the “invasion” of the planet, I was put in charge of protecting and accompanying the governess while she attempted to trade and communicate with the savages. I also helped the governess reason with the savages to sign a treaty to end the violence going on between our kind. I believe that I managed to succeed in helping her do that, as I helped her also get married off to one of the savages. Although I didn’t succeed in keeping hold of our groups food supply, as our chicken was stanched from me by one of the savages, who ended up being sent off to prison for committing the crime of stealing the governesses food. If I was to improve what I did next time, I would probably spend more time trying to communicating with the savages to find out more about them rather than just trying to avoid them."  

"Today we colonised the planet epic (aka The cafeteria). My recollection of things is that when we first arrived from the elevator it seemed quite normal. My first alien “encounter” was an alien coming up to us and just grunting. But then if kind of went downhill. Lots of the aliens were acting psychotic, yelling, throwing chickens and attacking. And someone (i think) stole my backpack as it was gone from our “house”. I was sent to jail in-lawfully but luckily was understood. People kept stealing our weapons and someone stole my chicken as I was trying to defend myself whilst protecting my “house”. A lot of the time I was completely confused about what was going on so just kind of went with the flow. I think that the rich people definitely had an advantage because they were able to trade easier. There was no order and everyone just kinda did what they wanted, took what they wanted and did not obey any guidelines." 

"The colonisation was a success in our eyes, during the colonisation we succeeded in gaining their resources such as food. After this happened things got out of hand. Josh got mugged about 5 times they never succeeded and Brennan was imprisoned and escaped four times. Our Governess got married, had three kids and then got divorced. Campbell was sentenced to death and I had to kill him, I shot him many times but he did not die. "

After Sim reflections and discussion

Alien perspective

Colonist perspective

We were incredibly excited about the success of this lesson. As Steve put it... on second thought, it’s best left censored. It rocked (or choose another appropriate excitable word). What made this such an exciting day for us, is that the events and perceptions that emerged paralleled those around the Treaty of Waitangi amazingly well. There were no teacher prompts to make a treaty, to interfere with communication, etc. In other words, the students had full autonomy, yet acted in such a way that led to many of the events around the treaty being naturally recreated. For example:

• Misunderstandings on what resources represented lead to conflict
• A Treaty that was signed by some was attempted to be enforced on all
• The majority (from both parties) felt that the Treaty was unsuccessful
• Some had no idea a Treaty had been signed at all
• Guns traded by colonists were used by Aliens against other factions of Aliens
• Once Colonists got access to the alien communication, they hacked it and kicked out the aliens from the system - remind you of Te Reo being banned from schools etc.?

Alien perceptions of the colonists straight after the simulation:

• Colonists automatically assumed they were better than the aliens.
• The aliens felt that the colonists would do anything to get you off their land
• The aliens found the colonists were brutish, abusive and violent
• The aliens thought the colonists acted in a way that suggested that everything was theirs
• The colonists automatically thought they had authority over our land as soon as they arrived
• The aliens felt the colonists had little respect for privacy
• The aliens found the colonists disrespectful
• Aliens felt the colonists were not making anything, they just destructed what we had built

Colonists perceptions of Aliens straight after the simulation:

• The natives were psychos/savages
• If trade wasn’t exactly what they wanted they attacked you - no understanding of negotiating
• They made really weird growling noises
• Frustrated that the aliens didn’t pay attention to the Treaty that was supposed to stop conflict
• A couple were interested in learning our language but the rest didn’t want to learn anything

How we debriefed the students

• After the simulation, students were asked to write a reflection about the events from their perspectives.
• From there, students were then asked to share their reflection with a member of the opposite group. They then had to come up with one thing that they found funny about the experience, one thing they found interesting and one thing they wondered about. These were shared as a class.
• From here, students were asked to complete a Y chart (looks like, sounds like, feels like + wonder about) from the perspectives of both the alien and colonist groups. The students started with the group they were part of, and then had to use the combined narratives to create the Y chart from the other group’s perspective. The students very clearly identified how challenging it was to empathise and understand the other group’s perspective.   
• Finally, we will finish this week with a SOLO hexagon task where students will be given hexagons with events that led up to and followed the treaty. They will then have to add their own hexagons of events that happened during the simulation. Students will have to find and justify the links between the hexagons. As we move through this module, the plan is for students to go back to their hexagons, adding more as their understanding develops in complexity. 

F = funny I = Interesting W = Wondering

What would we change for next time?

• Missionaries amongst the colonists who actively try to convert and civilise the aliens
• Wider gaps between groups of colonists arriving to allow events to unfold a bit slower
• Guard the jail!
• Set a maximum number of times people can die. Each death represents 100 people etc.
• Moonshot(ish): Put chalk on colonisers to act as a disease that colonisers are immune to. When the aliens get it on them, they get sick and have to slow down, return to their home base for a while.

Other thoughts

Danielle’s nerd moment: Piecing together the story from student reflections is like doing historical research, piecing together different artifacts to get at what the story might have been. This sits really really well within my current thinking around exposing students to the ‘nature’ of each academic disciplines way of thinking and creating new knowledge. Hence, a new nerd high reached.

Steve’s term for Social Studies focusing on Biculturalism, Responses to the Treaty of Waitangi and Perspectives is set up perfectly!

E for Easter in Education

Take a moment to consider how many of the students in your class were born in the same city or country. How many of the students that were born here, have parents that were born in another city? How many of the students in your class have no religion? How many of the students in your class are very religious? How many of the students in your class are deeply connected to their cultural heritage? How many of the students in your class are not particularly connected to their cultural heritage and might be searching for cultural or other roots? How many of the students in your class have particular traditions that are of special value to them? And then consider the cultural capital possibly hidden within your students. The parts of their identities that 'appear' to have no place in their maths, reading, writing... Yet, Shakespeare, Pythagoras, Pol Pot does.

E for easter has me thinking of the cultural, religious and other factors that contribute to student and teacher's identities that are simply ignored in schools. My own family have many cultural traditions related to easter and christmas. These traditions form a key part of my identity. Although we might never say your religion or your culture is not important whilst we are in a school context, we unfortunately do send negative messages about these critical contributors to identity when we do not acknowledge and integrate them. I worry that by removing the cultural and religious aspects from our academic curriculum, we are suggesting that it has no part to play in the preparation for our futures, the skills needed to gain jobs, pass exams and succeed.

In schools, we often tend to spend more, if not all of our time on academic, intellectual pursuits. As a result, we implicitly send the message that academic, intellectual pursuits are valued above all. You can see this attitude in the performing arts (think Ken Robinson's argument about schools killing creativity), but also in the Education Review Office's recent report around student well being that highlights explicitly how assessment and curriculum are valued over student well being. I have talked about this in a previous post, asking "What type of students our schools and the systems therein will be turning out? If we only teach and emphasise achievement, NCEA and national standards, then what are we teaching kids to value?" I wonder whether the similar messages are being sent implicitly around diversity?

And when we do set out to 'prove' that we value diversity, what does this look like? A map put up in class to show where different students come from? How does this teach students to value diversity and cultural capital? It may serve as a starting point but what long term impact could this possibly have? What about cultural interest groups at schools? Are they open to only students that identify with that culture, or are they open, and are advertised to be so, for any students who wants to learn about and with that cultural group?

Personally, it puts a great smile on my face seeing Asian, South African, Maori and other students performing side by side in Kapa Haka groups. It sees these groups side by side, valuing cultural capital enough to invest time and effort into understanding and empathising with its ideas. Key Competencies for the Future highlighted this idea for me again, when one of the authors talked about how she had always acknowledged diversity in her class, but she had not yet taught in such a way that valuing and utilising diversity became critical to the success of a project. Wouldn't you send a very different message about valuing diversity if this was your approach?

Consider the enormous amounts of immigrants world wide, and consider the ethnic groups that makeup schools in New Zealand (see Education counts for this data). I think it is safe to say that future success for our students requires them to celebrate and utilise the diversity of the teams in which they will work. Not only that, but responding effectively to diversity forms part of your Registered Teacher Criteria.

Given the above, I wonder... How might we embrace and utilise diversity in our schools more effectively?

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Academics and Achievement > Well being?

Many of us are familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs. We know that many things precede achievement, problem solving and creativity. Yet, with schools having such a big focus on the latter, it seems curious that we spend so little time on helping students build and develop their well being. You might argue that this is covered in the Health and Physical Education curriculum, but I would really question whether this is sufficient considering the home environments that some our students come from. 

I also wonder, what type of students our schools and the systems therein will be turning out? If we only teach and emphasise achievement, NCEA and national standards, then what are we teaching kids to value? I would argue that the same is true for teachers and other professionals, to what extent are we sending the message that results and achievement are more valuable than well being, happiness and quality relationships?

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This year, I have really enjoyed that working at Hobsonville Point means we are working at developing all of the students, not just their minds in class or the muscles in their sports teams. A large component of my role here is acting as a hub coach (for more information about hub coaches see Claire Amos's post). As this role evolved throughout the year, I found increasingly that it has dealt with friendships and family, with values, morals and respect. As most schools and teachers do, we have also dealt with safety of some of our students. But what really stands out for me about this year was the focus on student well being. The focus of developing student self-esteem and confidence and explicitly learning about respect and managing relationships. By working together in our hubs, we have given students a safe place within the school where they are able to explore some of the more personal things that we all go through as we learn to make sense of an adult world. Together our students have unpacked and reflected regularly using the hauora tools from the health curriculum. Together we identified strategies and unpacked scenarios where our well being might be out of sync, and what we might do about it. We talked about how we might support someone else who might be struggling spiritually, emotionally, physically or socially. 

In our hubs, we also unpacked the Hobsonville Habits. A set of ten dispositions that we aim to help our students develop. By calling them habits, we send the message that they are things we can develop until they become second nature. As a result, I am able to talk to the students in my hub, but also any student in the school, about how they might show more compassion. This might be in the context of looking after the school, our buildings, or their peers. 

Here are some of the activities that I did with my hub over the year in effort to build dispositional excellence:

The Love Wall

• Unpacking the Hobsonville Habit of Purposeful, we read some exerts from Sean Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens (Sean Covey is the son of Stephen Covey, author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People). The students really loved the book. In particular we focussed on the chapter about being proactive. Over a series of lessons, we then unpacked acting in a proactive and reactive way in more depth. This involved listing some of the proactive and reactive ways that we act in different scenarios. I prompted students by giving them different scenarios and by looking at some movie clips. Mean Girls is great for this one. We also looked at the compass of shame, a great tool that allowed us to explore different types of reactive behaviour in more depth. Finally, we also did some role plays, where we acted out a challenging scenario where the student had to respond using only proactive responses. The rest of the group then gave the student feedback about their responses. And finally, no series of lessons at Hobsonville Point would be complete without some alone time to reflect.
• Some of the simpler activities included the love wall, where every week for a term, students were asked to write something that they liked about themselves, but also something the liked about another student in the hub. These are displayed on the wall of our hub.
• Steve Mouldey also introduced the students to Caine's Arcade. A powerful video of a young boy who created an arcade from cardboard boxes. Students then unpacked lessons from the Caine's arcade video.
• Of course, no dispositional curriculum would be complete without a good selection of TED talks. Our favourite this year was probably the thirteen year old Logan LaPlante's TEDx talk, Hackschooling makes me happy. 

Other things that we explore in our hub is Hermann's brain, a tool which has allowed us to explore thinking preferences. This allowed us to help students explore how we learn, think and act in more depth. 

Most mornings in hubs also involved a quick check in with students. This might involve each person sharing what they most need to focus on for the week, how they are going, how they are feeling about particular events, etc. This often acts as a measure of where students are at, what support they need, whether they might need additional support in terms of strategies to cope or manage a situation, stress management or even referrals to the school councillor. 

Finally, there is also the ever important parent communication. By checking in with students, following their academic and dispositional progression and getting to know them very well through all the team building and discussion, we are able to bring parents and family on board to a much greater extent. Our conversations are often more meaningful and we are able to work together towards supporting our students.

All of the above, is only the first year of learning hubs. So as I sit and reflect about the where to next, I am as excited today as I was a year ago about the potential of the learning hubs at Hobsonville Point. Knowing that I have time and tools allocated to helping my students build their emotional and academic resilience, and their well being, that I can coach them through when they get stuck, and that that I am not alone in this, makes me excited for our students. It also gives me hope for the many under achieving students in our country. In fact, a 2014 Ministry of Education report about low decile schools that are performing well, actually talks about the success of schools who have adopted a similar model. 

Who would have thought that working with students around their whole well being, not just their academic achievement would have such great effects? Perhaps we all know. Or perhaps the real question is who is willing to rattle enough cages to make sure that every child has someone looking out for their well being? 

Quotes from my students: "Throughout the past year, my being has definitely grown and developed into something much better than what I started out like. One of my best highlights about my being is being able to learn more about my Hauora and getting to know more about how each of our quadrants in our Hauora needs to be equal and cared for." "Hub activities were new and different to me, it was interesting to get to know and understand different peoples opinions, to think about what others say and then take into account, how different we are but how we can still interact with each other." "My highlight for my being was that I have a better meaning and understanding of the word “respect” even though I have not fully changed, I am on a road to being a more respectful person to myself and others. I enjoyed learning about the difference between being reactive and proactive with my hub. This was useful because I now can have a look at different situations and understand how I can make the best of every situation." "I have learnt how to manage my emotions.  I have learnt different strategies to deal with conflict."