From the Web: Teaching in the 21st Century

Professional Learning and Develoment : SOLO Taxonomy

What is SOLO Taxonomy?
"Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes" - Links into Blooms, with the pedagogy extending student's critical thinking skills.

Click on image for larger viewable size. Source: http://www.educatorstechnology.com

Discussion Points:

• What is constructivism?
• What are the five levels of SOLO?
• How can this link to practise in the classroom? 

Reading: "What is Constructivism?"
Comments:

• It's a great article - allows us to make links to our own prior knowledge, constructivism;
• We often need to adopt different roles within the classroom;
• A way to engage our students/community of learning and have a clear understanding of where we're going!
• We know the difference between LI and SCs, the importance of talkalouds, modelling books etc-
• We're digging deeper - recognising that our children need to develop their critical thinking skills;
• Takes Blooms Taxonomy to the next level -
• Learners co-construct their knowledge - if we don't have a 'hook' for something to link it into, the knowledge falls away...
• Thinking critically - do I need to change my view / understanding? Is this information relevant? 
• Learn Create Share links to second paragraph - along with formative practise, knowing you students well. Might look at this as a spiral, also (i.e.: Spiral of Inquiry);
• In closing, the article notes "constructivism taps into and triggers the student's innate curiosity about the world and how things work. Students do not reinvent the wheel but, rather, attempt to understand how it turns, how it functions. They become engaged by applying their existing knowledge and real-world experience, learning to hypothesize, testing their theories, and ultimately drawing conclusions from their findings."

Resource Used

Introducing SOLO Taxonomy 
(article cited from Pam Hook's book as per image above, published by Essential Resources Educational Publishers Ltd, 2011, pp. 5-6)

Next steps: trial this instructional approach in your classroom - through Inquiry / Literature, and including the use of SOLO hand signals across the school. Will arrange to have visual cue cards / laminated in folders to begin to introduce these - to begin to help our students to express where they are at with their learning

Key for the five SOLO levels (Pam Hook 2011, pp.3-4). The first is emergent, the next two are quantitiative, with the final two being qualitative i.e.: as students move from learning, through researching/knowing to deeper 'critical thinking' along the continuum.

PLD Activity: Discussion of "George" Case Study, to help us understand what each of the five SOLO levels looks like for our learners.

Resource used: "A Children's Guide to SOLO Taxonomy: Five Easy Steps to Deep Learning" by Pam Hook, 2011.

Other Recommended Readings (Online Source)
"Where To Next When Introducing SOLO Taxonomy and Hot Maps"

Mindlab by Unitec: My Professional Community of Practise

25 January 2016 (APC Week 26, Task 4)

My Professional Community

This blog post is intended to be around defining my own professional learning and leading context using Wenger's concept of community of practice: a group "of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly." (2015)

   Within my own community of practise, I am going to critically review the following three areas:

1. current issues within our community of practise;
2. challenges faced within my professional practise; and
3. changes that are occurring within the context of our profession, and how we might address these. 

 Within our 'Decile 1A' South Auckland kura (school), we face many issues; ranging from socio-economic challenges (i.e.: truancy, absenteeism, transience) through to the need to specifically cater for a predominantly Maori student body. [I have also discussed the wider contexts for this in my recent RCIP blog entry.]

    This also brings us to some of the contextual challenges we face as a community of practise - how do we bring value-added learning outcomes within a socio-economically 'disadvantaged' setting?

   In recent years, digital learning platforms have increasingly offered us an effective tool for overcoming these obvious geographical and physical limitations. Our leaders of learning have worked alongside our coummunity to bring greater ICT-based learning opportunities into our kura and devices onsite for our akonga.

   Whilst this support from our wider community and leadership has seen a huge shift in the resources we have available to our learners, this has been a reflection - and perhaps a response - to the huge changes occuring within our profession in recent years.

   Shifts in the tide of political agar in which we learn and teach have had huge implications for all of us. For example, while National Standards gave a standardised tool for the government to measure our student's progress over time 'longitudinally' against their peers nationally. This has led many local communities of learning once again losing their self-directed autonomy or sense of tino rangatiratanga, once implicit in the once innovative New Zealand Curriculum document.

   In the coming years, the ability to foster and grow effective, lasting (inter)relationships - within and between communities of practise and learning (locally, nationally and globally) - will be the most likley basis on which we can best share the resources and skills our young people will need to succeed and thrive in the new millenium.

References  Cited
(including additonal / suggested readings for understanding and defining your own community of practise.)
Hodkinson, P., & Hodkinson, H. (2004, May 11th). A constructive critique of communities of practice: Moving beyond Lave and Wenger. Paper presented at “Integrating Work and Learning- Contemporary Issues’ seminar series. OVAL Research.
Lave, J. (1991). Situating learning in communities of practice. In L. Resnick, J. Levine, and S. Teasley (Eds.), Perspectives on socially shared cognition.[ E-reader version](page 63-82).
OPENiPhotojournalism. (2009, Sep 15). Etienne Wenger talks about 'walking the landscape of practice'. [video file].
Team BE. (2011 Dec 28, 2011). Communities versus networks? [Web blog post].
Wenger-trayner.com. (2015). Introduction to communities of practice | Wenger-Trayner. [PDF file].

Mindlab by Unitec: Reflecting on My Learning and Practise

18 January 2016 (APC Week 25, Tasks1-3)

My Reflective Journal
Kia ora, my name is Marla Jane, and I am a primary school teacher in South Auckland, New Zealand. 

   I have been teaching at my current kura (school) for nearly eight years now; I have had the good fortune to have taught across the school as a classroom teacher for akonga (students) from Year 2 to Year 6 during my time as a kiako (teacher) there. 

   I've been teaching within the senior syndicate for the past few years, so I get to work with students from Year 4-8 as we move into innovative learning environments and full immersion digital platforms through the Papakura Kootuitui initiative in 2016.

   As part of my role within our community of learning, I have been actively involved in co-developing ICT-related practises, most recently around our class blog and learning hub website.

   To keep up-to-date with the goings on in education in the 21st Century, I also keep a pinterest board and interact with other educators through my own Google+ and Twitter accounts 'in my spare time'. 

   Then, of course, we arrive at this blog, which I've created in the past year to keep track of all my professional learning: from professional learning and development in the workplace, through to educational conferences; and most recently, during the Mindlab By Unitec PGCert course. 

   Beyond my obvious strong interest in "all things ICT", my other passion is for Visual Art - from teaching and learning about it, through to sharing my creations with the wider 'globe'.

My Learning and Practice

   I have created this blog post to reflect on the last 24 weeks of my PCGCert studies at Mindlab by Unitec. To begin, let me start with 'a critical discussion' of two of my own Key Competencies that I believe have been developed the most during my studies the past several months.

My Original Reflection - cut and pasted from our Google Form made in August 2015.

   Reflecting on my initial comments in August 2015, one of the most striking contrasts for me over the past several months has been how my pre-existing 'Participating and Contributing' competency has proven to be a real asset when undertaking both e-Learning and professional networking.   

   My locus of interest has greatly expanded over recent months - from discussions with my fellow post grad students, through to my relatively new use of Twitter as a way to foster networks and source innovative ideas in ever-changing professional leading and learning contexts. 

   Along with this post graduate course itself, experiencing ULearn'15 allowed me to confidently approach educators from a wide variety of professional settings. 

    Another noticable change has been in how my 'Thinking' key competency has been opened up even further by this discourse and sharing of such a broad, expansive and increasingly globalised view of education as it is now occuring in the present tense.
 
   Other key changes that I have noticed within my own pedagogical practise since starting this course include how my use of online networking and cloud-based tools and resources have all effectively become an intrinsic part of how I gather, learn, create, share and reflect on my teaching and learning.

My Response to Finlay’s (2008) article 
In Lynda Finlay's (2008) article "Reflecting on Reflective Practise", she paraphrases Zeichner and Liston (1996) as saying that the reflective practise can effectively occur at five different levels:

1. rapid reflection - responding to the immediate contexts within the learning setting;
2. repair - adjusting teacher responses and behaviours in light of different student cues;
3. review - thinking, verbalising or writing about aspects of one's teaching;
4. research - engaging in a longitudinal view of one's pedagogy through a process of traingulation of assessment data, professional readings and other professional sources of information;
5. retheorising and reformulating - adjusting one's professional thinking and pedagogy in response to all of the above.

This particular hierarchy of reflective thought aligns well with my own learning experiences around the professional reflections at this juncture. Within my own professional teaching and learning, the model that we endeavour to use is identifed as Teaching As Inquiry.

   This process aligns with my professional obligations in regards to meeting my own goals within my teaching practise, and the model itself essentially provides me with a clear picture of "where I am, what has worked, what didn't work, and what my nexts steps would be". The process of review is complimented by my being able to discuss these different steps within my syndicate and as part of my professional appraisal cycle. 

Source: Teaching As Inquiry (TKI website image)

Teaching As Inquiry effectively gives me a clear, definable platform on which to best develop the professional skills and reflective approach needed in an ever changing world of learning and leading.

   Looking at Finlay's discussion around the concepts of reflexivity and critical reflection also align well with how the practise often necessarily occurs within learning environments where 'value-added' appraoches are explicit in the pedaogogical setting in which teaching occurs.

   "Reflexive practitioners engage in critical self-reflection: reflecting critically on the impact of their own background, assumptions, positioning, feelings, behaviour while also attending to the impact of the wider organisational, discursive, ideological and political context." (Finlay, 2008)

   It is necessary that we understand the contexts in which we teach, and the wider influences on both ourselves and our learning community of learning - from our immediate students who need both our informed empathy and guidance, through to the over-arching educational bodies that govern our practise.

   As we seek to provide our learners and our colleagues with the tools they need to live and learn within a globalised educational context, it is important that each of us is able to confidently approach and then master the skills we all need to be 'digital citizens' of the new millenium.

References Cited
(not directly cited unless undelined as above - citations include suggested readings for creating your own reflective learning journal.)

Dawson, F. (2012, October 10). Reflective practice. [video file].

Finlay, L. (2009) Reflecting on reflective practice. PBPL. [PDF file]
Galanis, M (2014, November 4). Blogging in Education. [video file]
Godin, S. (2015). The tribes we lead. Ted.com. [Web blog post].
Goins, J.(2015). How to Write Scannable Content for Your Blog. [Web blog post]
Gunelius, S. (2015). The Secrets of Blog Post Length. About.com Tech. [Web blog post]
Gunelius, S. (2015). Legal Issues Bloggers Must Understand. About.com Tech. [Web blog post]
Gunelius, S. (2015). 3 Expert Tips for Better Blogging. About.com Tech. [Web blog post]
LSU Center for Academic Success (2013, March 26). Think about Thinking - It’s Metacognition!. [video file].
Trinity,A. ( 2010, April 19,). Reflection Models. [video file].
Walker, J. (2012, February 17). Brief Intro to Metacoginition. [video file].
Zeichner, K. M., & Liston, D. P. (1996). "Reflective teaching. An introduction. Reflective teaching and the social conditions of schooling".

Mindlab by Unitec: Ethics and Cultural Responsiveness

RCIP Week 24 Recommended Viewing
Every Kid Needs a Champion - Rita Pierson
Rita Pierson, a teacher for 40 years, once heard a colleague say, "They don't pay me to like the kids." Her response: "Kids don't learn from people they don't like." A rousing call to educators to believe in their students and actually connect with them on a real, human, personal level.

My notes: Rita discusses how relationships are the basis on which  learning occurs - without mutuality of intent, and connectedness, there is no lasting basis for this to happen. The ability of a teacher to build relationship "seeking first to understand before you are understood; apologising to students" where necessary, reflects your humanity as well. Building a learner's self esteem - "you say it long enough, it starts to be a part of you". Rita Pierson: "Teaching and learning should bring joy... We're educators, we were born to make a difference".

Becoming a Culturally Responsive Teacher
Class Notes / Youtube explanation: "How do you reach students who are culturally and racially different from you? This course provides thought-provoking background and practical suggestions for teachers seeking the answer to this question. Participants explore their own assumptions about race, class, and culture; and learn strategies for creating classrooms that are culturally inviting to all. Classroom footage illustrates principles of Culturally Responsive Teaching, including affirming students' cultural connections, stressing collectivity as well as individuality, and managing the classroom with firm, consistent, caring control."

Culturally Responsive Teaching
Class Notes / Youtube explanation: "In The Culturally Responsive Teacher, Sonya Whitaker shows you how to provide a safe, respectful, and professional place for teachers to discuss cultural conflicts and learn to be culturally responsive educators. Sonya... shares a simple framework to resolve cultural conflicts that may have a long-term impact on students performance in school."

Reality Pedagogy - Christopher Emdin at TEDxTeachersCollege
Class Notes / Youtube explanation: In this talk Christopher Emdin talks about the true meaning and role of "peace", "justice", "equity" and "equality" in the classroom by talking about Reality Pedagogy. The full title of his talk is: Reality Pedagogy: Teaching, Learning, Truth, and Distortions. 

Digital Citizenship: Visual Art Networking on Facebook

Upcoming 'Adult' Colouring In Book (To Be Published in 2016)
Posted by Marla Jane - Visual Artist on Saturday, 26 December 2015

Digital Citizenship: Professional Networking Conversations Online

#edchatnz @NZMindlab - Your thoughts on this? "Shifting From Pedagogy To Heutagogy In Education" https://t.co/KQy4QITFbz via @teachthought

— Marla Jane (@Marla_jane_nz) January 4, 2016

#edchatnz @MindlabNZ Blended Learning: Resource Roundup @ashtcronin https://t.co/CE5LCboKZf

— Marla Jane (@Marla_jane_nz) December 28, 2015

Source: Facebook - Closed Group

You Can Now Compose Google Docs With Your Voice https://t.co/EdwJFnf92y via @thegooglegooru

— Marla Jane (@Marla_jane_nz) November 28, 2015

#edchatnz Shifting into 21stC Learning @NZMindlab ? See "The Definition Of Heutagogy & Self-Determined Learning" https://t.co/fVDGHtp6kj

— Marla Jane (@Marla_jane_nz) November 24, 2015