Two photos today, but of the same thing. One of my roles is as an Across School Leader for our kāhui ako of 12 schools. As we come to the end of the year, the teams I work with will be reflecting on the impact they have had in 2022. To help those conversations along I have reinvented snakes and ladders. Firstly, since we don't have snakes in New Zealand I changed it to eels. Secondly, on each open space there is a question to prompt deeper reflection about the focus of each team's inquiries this year. When you land on the space, you will need to answer the question you have landed on.
"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...)."
Where has your professional inquiry taken you this year? Our whole school focus on culturally responsive pedagogy has led me on a wild ride...
We kicked off our Spiral of Inquiry this year with the intention of having a culturally responsive and sustaining focus. As part of my new learning, I read Culture Speaks (a book EVERY New Zealand educator should read). The sections below really stood out for me:
"They control you, and it is really annoying. They have to be the boss. I don’t know, but if I don’t like the teachers I can’t learn. They just like, pick on you, it just makes you not want to work. So you don’t work. You do that on purpose. Or you do that because you don’t know how to do the work anyway." (Kindle Locations 438-441)
"These students raised the issue of not being able to sit by, or associate with their Māori mates. One student saw this as an attempt by teachers to separate groups of resistance, to ‘neutralise’ Māori students." (Kindle Locations 466-468)
"They think we will gang up on them if we are all sitting together, so they make us sit by ourselves because then they think that will control us easier. That will shut us up. Well, that’s what I think." (Kindle Locations 476-477)
"I don’t want to be a ‘dole bludger’. But … the problem is some classes are really boring, and some teachers give me such a hard time. ... He went on to tell us that he had given up working in most classes. ’Cause there was no point. They don’t like me, and I don’t like them." (Kindle Locations 670-671)
"That’s a substantial number of our students. Not only Māori students but certainly Māori students ... the first thing you notice is the lack of equipment when they turn up in the form room and accompanying that, often, a great big chip on the shoulder." (Kindle Locations 3110-3112)
If your schooling experience was one where you felt that teachers were trying to "control" you and "neutralise" you all the time, like the students in the exerts above showed, how likely are you to feel a sense of empowerment? If you were told continuously when and if you can use the bathroom, what you should or should not be doing, and what you can and can not wear, how autonomous are you likely to feel? It is no secret that schools attempt to control the students, their behaviour, etc. It would be chaos otherwise, wouldn't it?
Our 'control' of students is of course not just confined to the logistics of schools. We also control their assessment and what they learn. By setting the due dates, choosing the standards, deciding on the learning objectives are and prioritising what I know to be the 'most important knowledge' that students must learn, I am again making some attempt at control. Our senior students are often experiencing the effects of being chased by the 'content monster', where we just have to "get through" the content that they have had little to no influence on. In senior science, there are so few standards that students hardly get a choice about what standards they have to do. The content in standards has usually been predetermined too, and not by the students...
Essentially the curriculum itself is also a form of control, it controls what learning we value and prioritise in our schools. And further, there is a range of scholars who argue that the curriculum is Eurocentric in many ways, and as a result, contributes to the colonising and control of Māori people in a harmful way.
"However, in many cases, the education system has negatively affected te reo Māori indirectly through aspects of Eurocentric education. These include assimilation, cultural invasion, cultural subordination, language domination, hegemony, the curriculum, class structures, racism, meritocracy, intelligence testing, and negative teacher expectations." (The impact of colonisation on te reo Māori: A critical review of the State education system)
As I read more, thought more, observed more, I had a hunch... What if the disengagement that we see from so many of our Māori students, is not disengagement at all? What if it is disempowerment? I remember reading about a student in Culture Speaks that said "If I don’t like the teachers I can’t learn. They just like, pick on you, it just makes you not want to work. So you don’t work. You do that on purpose." These three sentences have continued to haunt me as I increasingly began to think about how the actions of a disempowered and an empowered student might differ.
An empowered individual might know that they should, could and can focus on learning in spite of the teacher. An empowered person might find other ways to do the learning. They might even seek help from a trusted adult to help them if they feel that they are being picked on unfairly. A disempowered person, in contrast, might feel that they have little choice or influence about their situation. They may be unlikely to seek help, ask questions, challenges injustice and demand more and better. If my hunch is correct, then I am dealing with an entirely different kettle of fish than I first thought. Rather than seeking to engage students, I would be trying to empower them. It would mean that all the fun lessons in the world, upskilling on my assessment for learning practices, or building up my Universal Design for Learning arsenal is all unlikely to make enough of a difference. Perhaps it means that I would need to seek ways to dismantle the power structures that keep exerting control on the most disempowered of our young people? Maybe it means that I would need to challenge embedded cultural narratives? Or does it mean that I would need to fight against the systemic ways that we seek to control students?
I got stuck in traffic a few weeks ago. I decided that I would use the time productively by dictating a blog post to my phone (thanks to Richard Wells for the voice dictation inspiration!). This post has been distilling in my head for some time and seemed a fitting post at this time of the year where we often have a moment to reflect on our practice.
When the subject of Teaching as Inquiry or Spirals of Inquiry is discussed in schools, one of the phrases that I have heard numerous teachers say over the past few years is "I inquire all the time, I just don't write it down". Sometimes this sounds like "I reflect about my practice all the time, I just don't write it down." Well, today I would like to go out on a limb, put on my devil's advocate horns, and say... I think that is nonsense, baloney and rubbish. I better explain...
There are two reasons for this, the first is the nature of memory. The way I memories work, is that every single time we access a memory, we modify it slightly. The more times we have recalled a memory, the we have manipulated it and changed its shape. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the video below from Dr Julia Shore.
Dr Shaw's research into memory showed that people who had never been involved with a violent crime, could be 'memory hacked' to believe that they committed one. Alarmingly, the memory hacking experiments was so effective, that the research had to be shut down early. While Julia's work is targeted at criminal psychology, this is very relevant for all of us who have a "but I inquire all the time, I just don't write it down approach". The reality is, that unless we write things down, we are like to bend and flex our memories to suit us. And, every time you recall a memory, you bend, shape and flex it even more. So while you thought you were inquiring into your practice, what we might really doing, is modifying your memory to suit our purpose. And every time I remember it, I convince myself just a little more. In other words, the retrospective recording of your inquiry just before your appraisal meeting is not great for critically reflecting on your practice...
The second bit of research worth paying attention to is the work of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and his book, Thinking Fast and Slow. One of the key ideas that Kahneman talks about is cognitive bias. Through great examples in his book, he shows us just how biased we are without realising. Have a go at some of these problems that illustrate our biases if your don't believe me! What this means is that if we are "inquiring all the time but not writing it down" and not formally collecting data, and attempting to analyse it objectively, it is very likely that we might in fact be feeding into the cognitive biases embedded in our thinking.
I’ve been reading Ann Milne's book, Colouring in the White Spaces. What really stands out from this book, is the generational prejudice and bias in our system that we don’t even notice. We are biased and prejudiced in ways that we are not even capable of identifying. The same is true for biases about women, race and more.
Consider for example the following,
"In 2003, Columbia Business School professor Frank Flynn and New York University professor Cameron Anderson ran an experiment to test perceptions of men and women in the workplace. They started with a Harvard Business School case study about a real-life entrepreneur named Heidi Roizen. The case described how Roizen became a successful venture capitalist by using her “outgoing personality … and vast personal and professional network [that] included many of the most powerful business leaders in the technology sector.” Flynn and Anderson assigned half of the students to read Heidi’s story and gave the other half the same story with just one difference—they changed the name “Heidi” to “Howard.” Professors Flynn and Anderson then polled the students about their impressions of Heidi or Howard. The students rated Heidi and Howard as equally competent, which made sense since “their” accomplishments were completely identical. Yet while students respected both Heidi and Howard, Howard came across as a more appealing colleague. Heidi, on the other hand, was seen as selfish and not “the type of person you would want to hire or work for.” The same data with a single difference—gender—created vastly different impressions." Exert fromSandberg, Sheryl. Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (Kindle Locations 723-728). Ebury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Ultimately, if we are really committed to make a positive change, it is necessary that we become aware of our biases. For many generations now, we know our education system has not served our Māori and Pasifika students well. We know that not as many girls stay in the STEM subjects. Whether we like it or not, some of this is as a result of our biases, and unless we are able to identify, critique and address them, change is very unlikely. Fortunately, Teaching as Inquiry and Spirals of Inquiry models help us to do just this. By forming a hunch and seeking ways to test our hunches, it allows us to challenge our assumptions. However... when we adopt an "I inquire all the time, I just don't write it down" attitude, we are in fact at risk of continuing to be subject to our biases, particularly given how our memories are modified every time we recall them. Additionally, perhaps when we write things down, when we deeply challenge our assumptions and beliefs about the world, the need to change ourselves comes to the forefront. Once we realise our bias, we have to do something about it. But making genuine change requires an investment of physical and emotional energy. Often making change is really uncomfortable. So perhaps when we can't be bothered to write things down, to do the work required to make change, what we are really saying is that we are not prepared to make change.
So here are my questions for you. How well did you record your inquiry? Did you do so regularly? Did you collect data in such a way that you could challenge your own assumptions? Just how committed were you to making change? Or will 2018 be the year where you inquire all the time and write it down?
Focussing Inquiry:"In the focusing inquiry, teachers identify the outcomes they want their students to achieve. They consider how their students are doing in relation to those outcomes, and they ask what their students need to learn next in order to achieve them."
Although I did my teacher training in New Zealand, my first teaching role was in Ramsgate, England. From there I went on to Albany Junior High School where we had students from year seven to year ten. In 2013 I joined Hobsonville Point Secondary School as a foundation staff member where we started with only year nine students and have gradually grown from there. What all of this leads up to is the fact that I have never taught at NCEA level. Although I am a mega professional learning junkie, doing copious amounts of professional reading, attending conferences and even doing some more formal university study, this does of course not guarantee that my practice will allow my students academic success at NCEA. As passionate as I am about authentic learning experiences, creativity, problem finding and solving, diversity, sustainability, how do I know that these values, my philosophical approach to teaching and learning, will also lead my students to have success within the qualifications systems? I am a huge advocate for teaching with dispositions, in particular Art Costa's Habits of Mind, and our very own Hobsonville Habits. In my opinion, this provides students with the means to become life long learners, to build growth mindsets. It provides students with a toolset for managing their own learning, for finding and solving problems, but also to become more thoughtful in their actions.
In my practice, I am also constantly seeking to increase student engagement, to move from a covering content approach, to helping my students become curious, eager to learn more, keen to question, to think deeper. I want my students to keep learning without me, I would rather be the spark to their fire than the fuel. I want my students to want to learn. I want my students to have, hopes, dreams, ambitions, and to pursue these with their hearts and minds aligned. I want my students to have authentic learning experiences so that they feel empowered to contribute and make a difference in their world, so that they know that they can build the futures they want, both for themselves and the world. Over this year, I have also increasingly realised that I want my students to embrace diversity, able to collaborate, able to build and draw on the strengths of others. I want my students to have empathy, for the world and community, for perspectives different than their own.
As great as these goals and aspirations might be, my students still need to gain qualifications. They need these to move on to their careers of choice, to universities and more. Qualifications in today's world are usually the entrance ticket, even though once you get in they may not necessarily provide much value (this is a blog post for another day...). Hence, one of my professional goals for this year, but also the focus for my Teaching as Inquiry project became:
How might I ensure that I am deeply challenging my learners to promote further learning that leads to pathways for academic success?
Teaching Inquiry: "In this teaching inquiry, the teacher uses evidence from research and from their own past practice and that of colleagues to plan teaching and learning opportunities aimed at achieving the outcomes prioritised in the focusing inquiry."
Many educators around New Zealand will undoubtedly talk about their love for SOLO Taxonomy as a way to help students towards success in their qualifications. This thinking Taxonomy scaffolds deeper thinking in a clear, easy to understand way. Pam Hook has a phenomenal amount of resources, books, Pinterest boards and more. My colleagues here at Hobsonville Point Secondary also bring an enormous amount of expertise in this area, in particular Cindy Wynn and Megan Peterson. There are also those colleagues across the country such as Matt Nicoll and Mel Moore whom I have watched carefully over the years in regards to their use of SOLO Taxonomy. In the context of this inquiry, SOLO Taxonomy could be used as a tool to scaffold students towards speaking the 'assessment language', as well as the assessment for learning tool that it was intended to be.
As well as SOLO taxonomy and the associated assessment for learning practices, we also know from John Hattie's work that feedback has a huge impact on student achievement. "Self reported grades comes out at the top of all influences. Children are the most accurate when predicting how they will perform. In a video Hattie explains that if he could write his book Visible Learning for Teachers again, he would re-name this learning strategy “Student Expectations” to express more clearly that this strategy involves the teacher finding out what are the student’s expectations and pushing the learner to exceed these expectations. Once a student has performed at a level that is beyond their own expectations, he or she gains confidence in his or her learning ability." - source.
Of course, if academic success with the the NCEA framework was my goal, it was also important that I familiarise myself with the standards, the clarification documents and assessment conditions. It was important that I had a go at writing my own tasks, and completing the assessments myself. Of course the NCEA workshops also contributed here.
Teaching and Learning:
Rubrics:
I used many rubrics throughout the past year. The one above was inspired by Austin Kleon's Show Your Work and the ongoing maths teacher frustration around students showing their working. This allowed students to self assess their working for problems, independent of whether their answer was correct or not. This saw a marked improvement in students communicating their thinking. I even went as far as designing a task where each question already had the answer directly underneath and the students simply had to give the working. It was a great activity to see where students were in their thinking. You can see the task here.You can also see a range of rubrics that I have constructed over the year here.
SOLO Taxonomy tools:
One of my favourite SOLO Taxonomy tools are the hexagons. Each hexagon has one key concept and students are asked to find connections between the hexagons. This is a great tool to help students consider how concepts, key words or ideas relate.
Another SOLO Taxonomy Tool that I have used extensively are SOLO Hot Maps. Pam Hook Shares the templates and rubrics for these on her Wiki. These are great tools for helping students to build a more comprehensive understanding of concepts. It also helps student to go deeper in their thinking.
Developing my own SOLO Taxonomy inspired tools:
Throughout the year I also developed some of my own tools using the thinking behind SOLO and Hattie's work around feedback and reflection, and marrying them up with some other ideas that I had encountered over the year. Some of these include developing a Describe++ Rose Bud Thorn Thinking Map inspired by design thinking and a Data Feelings Impact thinking map inspired by a Complexity Theory leadership book called Simple Habits for Complex Times. Other tools I developed include the Super-gons and the Reflexagons. While Super-gons were an expanded version of the SOLO Hexagons where students had to write a PEEL paragraph about key words/ideas and then write explanations for the links, Reflexagons were aimed to help students gain a more comprehensive understanding of a large topic or idea.
Students constructing their Super-gons
Learning Inquiry: "In this learning inquiry, the teacher investigates the success of the teaching in terms of the prioritised outcomes, using a range of assessment approaches. They do this both while learning activities are in progress and also as longer-term sequences or units of work come to an end. They then analyse and interpret the information to consider what they should do next."
Although I have undoubtedly increased my repertoire of teaching tools and strategies, and improved my understanding of NCEA, I felt that more often than not, I was not actually making much progress towards my goal. In fact, I frequently felt that I was doing something 'wrong' in my Inquiry because I still felt little confidence in my ability to help students achieve academic success. Being incredibly stubborn however, means that I could just not let it go. I kept banging my head against the goal that I had set for myself, trying to break through whatever was leading to my lack of confidence. It was not until the last few weeks that things really clicked into place as to 'why' I have felt this way.
Over the past year, I have had the privilege of working with Jane Gilbert in the area of Education Futures, as well as working at Hobsonville Point Secondary where I am actually able to test these academic ideas in practice. This has meant that I have grappled with the purpose of education, what knowledge is in a schooling context, and how knowledge is changing. This has meant that I have had more than a few existential crises this year. I feel real empathy for Descartes and his thoughts around whether anything is real! Once I started really questioning 'why' we teach things, and why we teaching things in certain ways, things really started unraveling.
I increasingly found myself struggling to consolidate what I felt was important with what was required for success within the assessment criteria of NCEA tasks. What if students showed some powerful, deep and meaningful learning however there were no standards to recognise this? Where are the standards that recognise a student who can recognise and apply the unique approaches of learning areas (disciplines), can negotiate between what each learning area offers and then bring them together to consider problems and concepts in a new way? You know, the way Climate Change as a fields transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries and requires climatologists, mathematicians, sociologists, and more to make sense of ideas together?
More and more questions arose... Why are things like knowing about the carbon cycle assessed, but collaboration is not? Why did I feel that little if no understanding of the Nature of Science was needed for achieving at NCEA when this was the compulsory aspect of the science curriculum? You may have read my recent blog post about my issues with exams too.
Even just the word 'standard' started to annoy me. Although I appreciate that we need some measure of success, I feel increasingly conflicted with the idea that all students should 'know' the same things. Our students are so diverse, so talented and interested in areas outside of these 'standards' that I struggle to ask them to fit in within the standards. I am far more interested in developing my students' capacity to explore, make sense, think deeply and broadly, find and solve problems, make the world a better place than to ensure that my students meet a standard.
As it turns out, I think my personal philosophies clash with the approach that I sometimes need to help my students succeed academically. It took most of this year and feeling incompetent multiple times to come to this realisation. Often, I felt that it was simply because I was incompetent. I don't think this is the case... I am pretty sure that I could just teach to a standard, but why on earth would I want to do that?
I have to give a huge shoutout to Jill MacDonald here. Jill is the Learning Area Leader for Maths at Hobsonville Point and she has done a huge amount of thinking around how maths might look different. She has been relentless in her support this year as I worked through making sense of this NCEA business. It is thanks to Jill that I feel that I can somehow consolidate my personal philosophies with NCEA. It was Jill that helped me to recognise how easily the mathematics standards could map to the learning my students were doing. As for science, I am still working on reconciling. However, some little high flying birds told me that I was not alone in my feelings that some of the science standards do not necessarily map to the intent of the curriculum. No wonder it made me feel so frustrated!
This has been a particularly tough Teaching as Inquiry project, however on reflection, I am very proud of it. How often do we really challenge our own assumptions and thinking in our Teaching as Inquiries? How often do we simply modify our practice without actually revealing or thinking about our hidden commitments? How often do we really examine our theory-in-use? I really appreciate those people that have helped me to do this, in particular Jill MacDonald for her leadership and support at school to make sense of NCEA related things, Matt Nicoll for blogging his rethink of the year eleven science programme, and Megan Peterson for her expertise both with NCEA and Assessment for Learning. Of course, my supervisory Jane Gilbert who regularly turns my brains to scrambled eggs with different ways of thinking. There are of course many others too!
Where to next you might ask?
Well, the way I see it, I have on of two options. Option one is to investigate the use of e-portfolios as a means of assessing student learning more holistically. Option two is to show evidence of student learning that completely knocks the socks right of NZQA and the Ministry of Education. I guess 2016 will be another interesting year!
