Monday 16 May 2016

What Is My Innovation?

Trying to get to the point where students can identify what they are doing and why they are doing it. But also being brave enough to share how they are doing, without fear

Have I explicitly taught the strands? No. Is this a mistake? Possibly.

I consistently address that fear of people seeing whether or not the students are 'good enough'. I am so caught up with my junior classes teaching in the limited time that we have, that unpacking the strands, can be something that gets put 'away'.

SOLO - we did this once! We had extensive PLD on it and then it fell away with the numerous other commitments we have. I am wondering how I explicitly re-introduce this and link to this as well as make those strands more obvious, student owned. When I took on SOLO in Art, I added in an extra step. When SOLO is related to NCEA 'achieved', 'merit' and 'excellence', multi-structural comes out as 'achieved'. I feel that is inaccurate at level one NCEA. So we added in another step. in order to get 'achieved' we rely on relational as the step that correlates. I will post separately on this to explain this further.

The term one focus for us with the outreach programme has been rewindable learning. The google site, with the teaching blogs has been a way of keeping learning available and rewindable. This has to aide in helping students develop their understanding of the work, but not necessarily the base strands that work applies to.

So the google sheet design collecting students self-assessment actually becomes less of an innovation and more of a data collection as to how well students manage putting their own thoughts about learning out there as data and whether or not they understand our teaching and how it all works. How do students feel about making their own thoughts on their grades visible? Do they understand what is expected of them?

Because the students have not designed the google sheet with me - i.e. they have to understand the criteria for each task, but I am using language they don't get, they do not yet own it. We have reworded lots of it already.


Challenges:
- Time in the classroom - we lose a lot of time in 7 and 8 for Kiwican, sports, teacher conferences, attitude talks, assemblies...
- Access to devices - this can be cumbersome when not all students have them. Locating spare ones takes time and energy and at times guess work.
- Is this relevant to actually making what I am trying to ultimately achieve?
- Have I extended myself too far?

Next steps:
- Focus on one class only. Not all.
- Take time out of the curriculum intentionally with this one class. 7 Bk - as they have already lost a lot of content time so maybe they are a class to work with. Because the content is lacking, then I can already safely afford to determine that understanding process is more important? They can make up for their lack of content by understanding the curriculum better and being able to articulate it and therefore progress almost as quickly upwards because of their more implicit understanding.
- Clarify SOLO for Visual Arts at Hornby.
- Create an exemplar of processing work into curriculum strands.
- Create basic definitions of each strand, set it up as a group exercise where students categorise and process an art assignment into the strands. This can be the work we have already done or work from other years.

Because I only have this class once a week, it could be that every lesson for 15 minutes we do this. I teach a refined programme to this class that could help back up the strand focussed on, or not.

Working using Google Draw, I have an idea of how to create a 'make a copy' file way of doing this.



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