Writing- Session 2 (Teacher Inquiry Examples)

Thursday 22nd February - PD- Minutes by Anna

Suz’s Inquiry - 6 kids using goal setting strategies and reading recovery strategies. Making use of the matrices and having them front of mind.


Aim: consciously be thinking about what they need to add while writing, strengthening neural networks (letter formation and confusion).

Only one child decided goal for each session. The reflection would influence next steps (the goal for the next day.)

One on one→ transitioned into groups of 2 of 3 based on needs.

What made it an intervention: “Biggest goal was to improve my responsiveness to what I saw and respond immediately. It was also targeted to what I noticed”.

10 minutes each day

Tracked at the end of each week and did vocab test at start and end on inquiry (which was a term).

Reflection: Jumping in BEFORE they wrote, the kids were more conscious and aware of their letter formation and confusion. Is the Davis programme a next intervention? Keeping everything front of mind so you could work on today’s goal, AS WELL as the previous days goals.

Ximena’s Inquiry - How to accelerate priority learner, especially Maori in writing

Successful year of writing in 2016

Broke down into 4 terms and what general focus would be.

Simplified learning goals - created goals in smaller ‘like’ groups

Students chose one goal and would come to one workshop with teacher, then have to practice that goal at least three times before checking with teacher. Students would identify goals with red dots.

Use range of engaging writing prompts and choice writing--along as they were practicing their learning goal.

Reflection: Smaller achievable goals, all students were exposed to other children’s goals but had no pressure to focus on them. There were fun prompts and choice = better engagement. Needed more child voice, what they thought. Big group, so hard to stretch better writers. Could have introduced more mixed ability groups earlier.

John sharing writing from his group

reluctant writer

played with words and came back to shape time and time again

3/ 4 days of work, crafting, playing, shaping process. Green pen use. A page and a half of playing.

Really proud of final result and process

Aim: develop critical eye of kids, so that rather than writing a lot, they are playing with words and choosing the best words, in the best order. What words don’t you need? Using a criteria - does it sounds good? Does it look like a poem?

Gillian sharing writing from her group

Using keywords like ‘can’ and then creating a story with pictures

Sounding words out

Words and stories coming from oral language

Teaching as Inquiry

Team inquiries - ‘overarching’, things that might challenge and shift thinking about writing

Individual Inquiries - ‘ground up’, what the kids in front of us are doing/their needs

Hunches

Writing- Session 1 - Overview

Writing Professional Development- Minutes taken by Gabrielle



Session 1 - Overview

What are we doing to enable all of our students to be writers?

UDL tool - how to make a seesaw activity. Can direct to certain kids, and in folders. See Video.

Had writing with Murray Gadd and Sally Muir, how do we make this our own?

We’ll be completing Internal Evaluation of writing this year.

What makes good writing - it’s tricky. We’ll try and work this out collectively. Can you share something generated in classroom that you’re happy with?

What are we looking for in a piece of writing from kids?

Personal voice, authentic

Picture in your mind

Fits purpose

Makes sense, shows thinking

Some structure, finished - clarity over purpose practice or product

Impact, audience awareness

Supports, passion

Legible

Risks eg spelling

Purpose

Free as possible

Passionate

Pumped

Their writing, personal


Pride

Getting started

Pride “happy with”

Voice

Scaffolding balance especially with emergent writers, structure, phonics, letters, word bank

Fluency

Talk

Choice of genre

Link with reading

Text models eg Gail Laing book, model texts to share

Details overdone

Recrafting

Challenging yourself

Verbs not adjectives, rich words

Variety of sentence structures

Does it sound good?

Honesty in expression

Audience

Purpose

Clarity - legibility, ideas, structure



Discussion around personal voice

How to tap into great ideas when process (maybe physical) stops them. Could record stories

Technology can help, eg purpose can be to entertain and be good storytellers

Write without thinking - fluency

Goals and aims for literacy practice 2018 - take ownership of our teaching and learning of writing… what do we do that affects change?

Literacy Action plan 2017 - keep front of mind

Formative assessment

How do we give feedback, consistency across staff etc?

Direction for students

Communicated on seesaw too

Scope may widen beyond reading, writing and maths

Developing writing programmes for our students…

Teaching as inquiry - lifting student achievement - more on Thursday

Share in pairs ides

Nicola shared her writing inquiry term 4 2017. There was a focus on goal setting and progress towards that. Great engagement with boys bringing friends to the writing group. Lots of choice.

Our Code, Our Standards: Streamlining our Appraisal

In today's session we began to plan how we will go about gaining evidence towards the teaching standards. Jude shared her goals and performance mapping as an example.

We have set performance goals and learning goals for ourselves with clear actions and outcomes. 

We used the Blank Performance Mapping Template 2018 to map our goals for the year. 

Goal Setting 2018

What do we already know about goal setting?

Why bother? What’s the point? What makes a decent goal? What are the difficulties when setting goals? How can these be overcome?

Angela Duckworth- GRIT ( Good and Bad Grit!)

Good grit is sometimes known as  authentic grit rather than the stubborn pig headed type of grit!

Reflect on your grit scale score for a minute or two……..

People with authentic grit are renowned for setting hard and some may say unrealistic goals. If the goals are easy grit wouldn’t be required.

Why do goals matter so much?

Channel passions and energy

Martin Seligman’s PERMA- just like our SPIRE - A for achievement, Positive Purpose……..

Achievements are required for us to feel masterful in our environments and in our lives, it’s about finding meaning.

RESEARCH:

4 Critical Functions:

1.Goals direct our attention, both cognitively and behaviourally, toward what matters.

2.Goals energise people, and difficult goals are more energising than easy goals or no goals.

3.Goals impact persistence, and hard goals particularly impact persistence because they prolong effort - impacts performance

4.Goals lead to the discovery of our skills and resources

Self-efficacy- self belief- that you can! ( Albert Bandura- remember those mastery experiences!)

Necessary to cultivate grit and flourish emotionally.

Bandura discovered that there are 4 ways to build self-efficacy

1. Have  a good stress response
2. Be near someone or have a role model who has accomplished the goal you want to accomplish
3. Have a significant person around you who has faith in your abilities
4. Have mastery experiences of accomplishing smaller goals that set the stage of accomplishment of larger goals

Goal setting theory- learning goals and performance goals

Latham and Locke proved through hundreds of studies that best performance occurs when we set specific and challenging goals- and we distinguish between learning goals and performance goals

Setting more difficult learning goals- and it’s an unknown where this may go…...leads to better performance overall.  Performance goals also benefit from being challenging…….more likely to be flourishing than languishing!

Accountability

Must be built in- helps ensure we do what we say we will do.

Written goals drives commitment

What accountability measures do we already have in place? What else could we do to support performance?

https://angeladuckworth.com/research/ Angela Duckworth research

https://angeladuckworth.com/grit-scale/ Grit Scale Test

Article: 5 Characteristics of Grit

TO Day 2: Stephanie Sinclaire Lightsmith, Artist

Stephanie Sinclaire Lightsmith

came in and talked to us about using art to express emotions. We did some exercises together that she has done with children and adults around the world, and she did with our seniors last year.

Painting emotion:
First close your eyes and feel into your body.
Write down the first emotion that comes to you. No judgment, be authentic (sometimes people need help clarifying their emotion).
Then paint what that feels like.

We were encouraged to use our hands to paint with, to deepen the experience and embody it.

Sometimes the emotion changed as we were painting, and we painted again to express the new emotion.

The science behind this is all about expressing emotions in a positive, creative way so that we don’t hold onto negative emotions, and enjoy our positive emotions.

We shared what our paintings meant to us, giving us all some understanding of what was alive for each other.

This is a great exercise for children to teach them a positive way to handle emotions that they are struggling to manage constructively.

Tapping into your body’s wisdom:

Close your eyes and focus on any body part that you choose for a couple of minutes. Feel into it deeply.

Now write from that body part to you - what is it’s wisdom that it is trying to tell you? Write for 5-10 minutes then read it over. What have you learned?

A third exercise Stephanie shared with us (but we didn’t complete) is to write to an authority figure in your childhood (parent or caregiver, etc) fully expressing whatever you want to and then also have them write their response to you.

We ended the session with a lead meditation to the stars and beyond...

Blog post written by Gabrielle

Relationships - ACR - 1 FEB 2018

Responding to success or failure

Recognition and gratitude are the fundamental building blocks of positive relationships

So in working with others to get going on the campaign- this is paramount!

The way we react to news- both good or bad is important to the continued health of these relationships

We might think- I’ve got a good relationship with that person so it doesn’t really matter how I respond to their successes however Shelley Gable ( University of California) has shown it’s not that simple. Your respond to success can lead to future success OR it could in fact shut it down big time.

Gable and her colleagues found that how we respond to positive events, is a better predictor of relationship success than how we respond to negative events. The most empowering way of responding is Active Constructive responding - ACR. (We touched on this is a TED TALK with Martin Seligman last year)

Active Destructive	Active Constructive
Passive Destructive	Passive Constructive

Example:

Let’s say Susie has come up with a new plan for how she is involving parents in the planning of service learning. A few other colleagues have been thinking about this but she is the first to bring the idea to fruition. She comes energised to staff meeting to tell us about her plans.

The worst response we can give her is lower left. PD. We might turn away, avoid eye contact, or change the subject. Or we might make a quick criticism of the idea- say it’s already been done, it’s not clear enough...and then start to talk about the work other people are doing.

Top left we have the AD response- it’s not much better at all! We find something to attack, to critique and focus just on that. Our response is entirely and relentlessly negative….vigorously so  in fact! “ That’s not going to work, they won’t like that...that will take too long, I wouldn’t do it like that…”

Underlying these 2 forms of response could be a reluctance to recognise others positively, possibly insecurity, feeling threatened…..and the like

PC response- well this one is positive at least. We might smile, say “good one...that’s nice” Then move on to something else. It doesn’t make the most of a positive event which could lead to further success.

ACR - Ideally we would hope to find a way to respond in this way. We’d maintain eye contact, take  real interest in what Susie is up to and her excitement over this new idea, we would ask more questions, show enthusiasm- maybe help her fine tune by saying something like “ That sounds great, tell me more, how exactly do you see that working?”  You may think it’s got a few holes here and there- but start with the strengths, help Susie uncover any potential gaps or weaknesses - help her consider it against other possible options.

In this way you will have helped Susie do more and better thinking.

Role Play Activity

Form groups of 5 or just get creative if it doesn’t work out numbers wise

1. Each person will share their ‘ success story’ Their good news……..
2. Take turns at responding - take on a quadrant each
3. Change quadrants at each story so you get a taste of all of them

What are the barriers? What prevents us from ACR? How can we catch ourselves more frequently?

I wonder how many ACRs we will give to colleagues, children and their whānau today?

Jude

TO Day 2: Natalie Hogg, Sports' Psychologist

On our teacher only day, Natalie Hogg, a sports’ psychologist and parent at the school, came and spoke to us about making 2018 even better than last year. She spoke to us about some of her work with the Hurricanes and other sports teams. We ran through some visualisation exercises and talked about wellbeing and its importance to mental health. We were each asked to give one word that represented what we felt we needed to make this year better than last. The team ranged in ideas from unity and vision, to communication, to growth mindset and action. We discussed some of the perceived barriers and made a small action plan for where to next. We’ve already begun implementing some of our ideas with our This Week/Next Week whiteboard in the staffroom to improve our communication and keep everyone on the same page for what’s going one. Natalie also showed us a few helpful diagrams.




This is to help check in: be present in what you’re doing, commit to what you say you want to do, accept that sometimes we are slightly diverted, don’t beat yourself up and carry on.





If you can imagine the big picture goal is at the top of the line and we are walking the line, we are often diverted from the big goal to either avoid or have immediate gratification. Keeping the big picture in mind and not straying too far from it helps you stay grounded, mindful and in good mental health.


Lastly, as a tool to stay on track we have this diagram for actions on a minute to minute basis. Just being mindful of whether your actions are leading you towards or away from your big picture goal is important and being mindful of what is driving you to those choices.

The session was incredibly informative as it gave us practical tools to use to keep us on track towards our big visions. It also helped us clarify what we, as a larger team, feel we can do to improve upon what we already do well. Thanks very much Natalie!

By Gillian

2018 team actions/improvements to support the ‘Campaign’

1. Cohesion/Unity

Increase transparency

The why are we doing this- big picture

Ask questions

Challenge each other

2. Communication

What’s on top- whiteboard in staffroom- advertise what’s going on

Emails- check audience/detail/ timeliness- especially with parents

Trips- improve systems and processes- delegate/clarity

3. Growth

Being open and flexible

Take risks

Quality of feedback

Dream BIG!

Commitment

Be open

Just do it-action!