Ulearn Presentation: Developing Mathematical Communities of Inquiry by Nic and Ximena

Nicola and Ximena shared their Ulearn presentation with the staff. 

Maths PLD: Formative Assessment continued...

Carl: Starter (Philosophy for Children Discussion about Artificial Intelligence)

Therese and James: Shared Reading about Cultural Responsiveness/ Maths

We reflected on our Seesaw Goals and discussed what we have achieved. Where to next? with a Maths focus.

Exit/ Entry tickets. We spend some time in teams making, discussing, etc. 

How can we use these as formative assessment? Seesaw Maths Folder

We also looked at Assessment Strategies 10 ideas (beyond exit tickets)


A bit of thinking for homework…
We are thinking about the Parents meeting in week 9.
What are your ideas? What do parents need to know? What do we want them to take away? What worked well at the last meeting? How can we bring your culture/ home culture/ lives into Maths?

Maths: Talk Moves and Formative Assessment

We started the session with a Number Talk. We worked in groups to discuss the benefits of Talk Moves as a way to elicit student thinking. 

Maths PLD: Moderation and Assessment

We looked at types of assessment and categorised them.

Matariki/ Mahutonga:

Tautoru: 

Autahi: 

We discussed these questions/ ideas about assessment...

Maths PLD: Overview, 1st July 2018

Imagine you are going to a Maths conference: What are the titles of the workshops you will go to?


We are all working through the Stanford Online Jo Boaler Course: How to teach Math. Here is a summary of what we have implemented so far.

Matariki/ Mahutonga

Tautoru



Autahi



Hunches

We shared some hunches and asked staff to evaluate.

Goals/ Actions from discussion about Jo Boaler Course

Using Seesaw as Formative Assessment

How can Seesaw be used as a formative assessment tool? 

In teams:
Go and evaluate 1 or 2 students in the area.

What does this do to tell the learning story? Formative assessment?
What do we need to develop?
What are the advantages? What is missing?
What conversations are we having?
What is evident in the pieces?

What does the next piece look like? 

Is the criteria evident? 

Is the child goal evident? 

Teacher reflection? 

Each teacher set a Seesaw Goal:
Seesaw Goals: 2 Weeks
Using "Skills" on Seesaw

"Teachers using Seesaw for formative assessments can now tag their students' posts with their own set of skills or standards. They can assign a simple 1-4 star rating to student work to get a real-time understanding of how students are progressing towards key curriculum objectives. Skills also helps teachers inform instructional practice and save time on reporting.

Skills and ratings are only visible to teachers and are fully customisable to the learning goals your class is working towards."

Activities on Seesaw

"Now you can easily create and share activities for your students to complete in Seesaw on iOS and the web. Get inspired with grade-level specific activities from our library, or create your own!"

 

100 ways to use Seesaw

This is a Collaborative Presentation set up by Allanah King for New New Zealand teachers. There are lots of ideas for using activities on Seesaw. Please add your ideas!




Guidelines for posting on Seesaw:

Is your post about learning? 

Remember to add a caption to say why you are adding the post.

This shows that I am learning to… 

This shows that I can… 

I figured out that… 

Wow! I did this for the first time… 

I am sharing this post because… 

I learnt that… 

I think that I did a good job with this because… 

This shows that I am meeting my goal… 

My next steps will be... 

I could improve this piece by... 

Next (time) I would like to try...

Teacher Inquiry Check In: Thursday 17th May

We started the session with a Kahoot quiz about Formative Assessment. If you missed the session or would like to take the quiz again, you can Click Here.

We discussed where we are at with our Teacher Inquiries in small groups. We all shared our next steps. 

We will be celebrating our inquiries in Week 9. We are all learning from each other!

Formative Assessment: Writing Focus, Monday 14th May 2018

Ximena started with a breathing exercise

General discussion in teams: What would a classroom in which formative assessment and feedback are happening look like sound like etc?  

The Key Messages from Dylan Wiliam:

1. Everybody is thinking all the time.

2. Make students do the work.

3. Only give give feedback that will be used.

What could these statements look like in action?

Seniors:


Juniors: 

Examples of feedback:  We shared a piece of writing and discussed different approaches to written feedback. We evaluated in pairs.

There is some consistency around pink and green. Teachers are generally picking out one thing to work on and one thing that is going well. Feedback is usually linked to a student's goal. The juniors are using symbols. We agreed that we write words above the words.

Seniors: P for punctuation, G for grammar, S for spelling. Simple marking.

Here are examples of exit tickets in Maths:

What could this look like in writing at your kid’s level?

During discussion we thought that exit tickets could be good if the questions were open e.g. Can you write a simile? Multi-choice might work well too. ARBs- short tasks would work well. We could collect a bank of exit tickets for skills. You could ask students things like how would you shape a green light question? Using exit tickets could be good for workshop planning.

Further Reading:



These are Ximena's notes from Dylan Wiliam course, Embedding formative assessment with teacher learning communities:

Feedback- What is Happening? March 28th

We are really keen to dig down and explore what people are doing with regards to feedback currently. We want to explore what our current ideas are and our burning questions.

As with a PMI - We asked teachers to contribute thoughts, ideas and questions to the slides with initials. This will be the basis for our future discussions.

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.

Monday 7th August, Maths: Internal Evaluation and intro to Number Talks

The Maths PD links with our Internal Evaluation.

The session involved:
Reading Research Brief: Five “Key Strategies” for Formative Assessment (Dylan Wiliam)
Watching Number Talks Clips by Jo Boaler and Kyle Thain
Looking at Seesaw Maths as a form of formative assessment
We Discussed next steps...

Here are the slides from the meeting (including video links):

As part of our Internal Evaluation, we will be trying new things in Maths and present back on Monday 4th September: 

I have started a Number Talks Crowd Sourced Document. It is full of great resources: