Take a second – have a look – make a decision to donate something this week to those less fortunate – I did to those affected by the floods in Pakistan – what about you.

I heard him speak recently at our Statewide forum on the use of the Ultranet in schools. This clip is a reminder to all those in decision making roles to take a balanced view of school improvement and what constitutes school success for students. Sure good skills in core areas like maths and science are important but not at the expense of creative skills fostered through the Arts.

As I begin to consider school structures for 2011 and feel the pressures to lower class sizes at the expense of what feels all else [usually in the well less informed stance that by lowering class sizes you release teachers to work more one on one with students and improve outcomes - as measured by test scores] this is a timely reminder to stop – consider a whole range of skills and ensure students get a fair share of a balanced curriculum. Don’t get me wrong I think students and teachers deserve smaller numbers in home groups but perhaps that’s more about working conditions not outcomes.

I think the trick here is in the planning – having preplanned for low expectancy students and written scaffolding questions ready to ask [it's in my opinion too hard to continuously do this on the spot].

I’m reminded of the lesson study approach to planning here where they know the possible misconceptions students might encounter in a lesson and have planned for this.

Lots depend upon the quality of teacher planning – and here leaders can help teachers by insisting on planning proformas that take account of misconceptions and differentiated instruction at the initial whole class instruction period.

Most of us at some point have attended a party, work function or been somewhere where you look at a person and say I know you from somewhere. Well that happened to me last week  whilst attending a special session on Instructional Rounds with Professor Richard Elmore.

The session, which was absolutely brilliant, had just finished and I stood up to get some  lunch and looked at the next table and spotted these two women and thought I know their faces from somewhere.. but where?  Well one spoke and asked are you Mark Walker?  The rest is history as they say…. for it was Jenny and Nina two educators I had been networking across the web with but never met before.

Jenny and Nina have a Ning on which they share their work on Instructional Rounds which I have linked to my blog. We have shared stories about our work for some time and to finally meet them was not only a surprise but as they said felt kind of weird for we knew a lot about each other and yet this was the first meeting.

One gets to wonder if others who correspond for a while and then meet fell the same way? 

We are going to set up a visit where we can talk further about our work next term which I’m looking forward to but in the meantime check out the links.

Common Context:

We have two flexible learning centres at the school currently occupied year 1’s and year 5/6’s.

• Both the year 1’s and 5/6 teachers work as a team to plan and evaluate a responsive curriculum and I think  this common planning is the foundation for consistency [as do all our other teams].
• Both teams are working on developing a more differentiated curriculum – early stages as we get better online tools to determine student needs [as do all our other teams].
• Both teams work on explicit teaching in the core tool subjects of English and Mathematics and an Inquiry focused curriculum [as do all our other teams].
• Both teams bring all the students in their care together  to develop during term 1 to develop from the student perspective [in keeping with our school values of course] a set of learning and social norms/expectations/rules/common commitments [different language same intent] for their centre.
• Both teams use a restorative justice approach [e.g. use of circle time] to build student learning relationships [as do all our teams].
• Both teams have a teacher office in the centre where conversations about the day, the curriculum, particular students needs, use of technology tools etc… are talking about continuously.

So lots in common.

But there are questions being raised by parents and teachers.

Is it harder for senior students to adapt to these spaces because they haven’t been “forced by circumstance”  to develop these broader relationships and relational trust or personal learning skills in single classrooms? Are schools and therefore students at a disadvantage if they chop and change from single classrooms to flexible learning units over their 7 years of primary school?  

Observation

Teachers across the school and in the senior primary unit have had a real focus on building broader sets of learning relationships and relational trust through the use of circle time at least twice a week. Why? Well when they initially started collaborative group work in larger learning areas they found the level of relational trust and mutual accountability between students and their peers and to a smaller extent between students and their teachers was weaker than anticipated. This didn’t appear the case in the younger year 1 group. The teachers thought the collaborative tasks were developmentally appropriate so that wasn’t the main variable.

Some 18 months later, whilst we await official attitudinal survey data results, anecdotally it appears the level of relational trust has improved. This therefore paves the way for some more flexible groupings to occur.

Now What

Teachers in the senior unit are moving with their home groups into different spaces each term within the building. This is different from the younger unit who have a constant home room and a shared middle area. Why?

We have learnt that the building design isn’t as flexible as we would desire and modifications are being considered including perhaps the use of glass walls and other more flexible walls. We have learnt that the timetable for senior students can be an obstacle to more flexible groupings. Also it takes time for the teachers in these units to learn to use tools to differentiate a curriculum that takes advantage of the flexible learning spaces. Plans around two of the issues are being developed for next semester.

To broaden our knowledge base one of the teacher’s project teams which is investigating use of flexible spaces is planning to visit other schools with similar spaces .  

More explicit personal learning skills [goal setting, actioning teacher feedback, managing work timelines and mutually accountability for independent use of resources like netbooks and reflection] are a focus this semester.

Future Learning

Our next initiative to make an impact across the school and in these units are the Ultranet [an online learning environment which will support individual student goal setting and greater development of independent and collaborative online learning tasks].

Transition for students into these spaces is important and the transition working party are looking at this for later in the year.

We know from experience that addressing parent anxiety about change is important as well and blog posts  and evenings that present information are part of our intended transition program. One wonders if the whole school was designed around these areas whether there would still be parent anxiety or whether parent anxiety is about about chopping and changing models of learning delivery [single classrooms and flexible learning area]. Anyway that’s another topic for a future post on flexible spaces.

The next post I anticipate will be around student personal learning skills or the use of the Ultranet in these flexible learning areas.   

PS: When I asked teachers for feedback on tis post one replied about the need for a glossary for the teacher speak terms – which I think is a great idea not only for this post [ I'm thinking almost about a separate definitions page for my blog on this - what do you think?]

Links

Restorative Justice

Overview of restorative justice approach in American Schools

Transforming Conflict

Circle time in a UK school to build self esteem

Circle time – a whole school approach to improving citizenship

Ultranet

Ministers announcement about the Ultranet

Ultranet delay

Blog post on the Ultranet

Relational Trust

Building relational trust in schools through consensus

Relational trust in schools

Last term our district instructional rounds team visited a school where the leadership team identified differentiation in instruction as the problem of practice. Nina and Jenni posted this clip on the Ning and I have copied it to my blog as I think its a great 20 minute clip and that sets up a discussion with teachers on what differentiated instruction is and isn’t.

Two things are clear – there is no one way to differentiate instruction and that simply giving more work to the “brighter students” isn’t differentiation either. His two articles are worth reading.

Rick Wormeli has some great links on differentiation. He breaks 10 common myths about differentiation that are well worth reading.

Thanks  Nina for the link.

For parents from Elsternwick reading this clip – think differentiation as part of the personalisation of education we are seeking in our school – it’s a goal in our strategic plan.

Now its up to you – is this clip worth it – does it set the record straight?

On a slightly separate topic one of the focuses in semester one was how to establish PLT’s and how they are different from other teacher meetings. While we are moving away from this in semester 2 to an almost exclusive focus on data it will need to be re-established in 2011.

The effective use of data to improve student learning is one of our key improvement strategies outlined in the school’s strategic plan.  

These meetings, which are planned by our leading teacher, use a number of data sets including: Words their Way spelling tests and assessment online adaptive maths tests from the years 3 -6 teams. In term 4 we will look at the Naplan [National Assessment Plan for Literacy and Numeracy] results.

Team leaders, who are being trained to use data effectively in their own classrooms, support these meetings to help classroom teachers focus their efforts.

I found these 3 short videos that may help focus and perhaps challenge teachers to continue the great improvement work they have started.

Video 1   focuses on the need for the select use of data to be done in collaborative teams [hopefully a function of our PLT's]

Video 2 talks about the need for data to be useful for parents, teachers and students and that context is all important. So teachers need to consider data within the context of their students and of their classroom environment e.g. are student present or arriving on time whenI begin my instruction on this topic? This clip also looks at peer observation in classrooms.

Douglas Reeves in his article published in ASCD’s 2009 on the use of data gave 4 tips on its effective use:

1. more frequent than yearly use of data is more effective for closing the achievement gap [again our PLT's meet this tip]

2. Start with a focused question:  ”Just what are the starting points for teaching spelling in my classroom?” or “It appears from the school test data that spelling is weaker than other areas of literacy and I think that’s true in my classrooms but what can I do?” [this is a work in progress and one of the better examples of this in 2010 was when the year 3/4 team posed these questions above].

3. Test a hypothesis: Will students improve if I group students according to their spelling needs identified through a test [say 4 groups focused] and teach specific spelling strategies each week. [this again in my opinion is a work in progress for us].

4. Go beyond the numbers to look at causes of student success and failure. 

His finishing point is really important to me for it starts to turn the lense from purely looking at content in the curriculum – and don’t get me wrong getting students zone of proximal development within the curriculum is critical-   

Only when we can articulate the “why” behind the data and turn the lens on our own teaching and leadership behaviors can we understand how to move from drowning in data to improving professional practice.

At some stage we must turn the lense on our instruction as well. In semester 2 we as a staff are relooking at the E5 instructional model this time with an initial focus of where this fits in now with our current improvement work – with the lense of peer observation in classrooms to name one thing.

Clip 3: is about a teacher gathering feedback or data from the students on the effectiveness of her instruction. 

I’m hoping teachers might look at some of these clips prior to our first PLT for this semester as a way to set the context for our work together.

Parents might look at some of the clips so they are informed about our teacher improvement work for as I have written about before  according to the work of Hattie and others outside the student themselves teachers are the next most powerful influence on student learning.

Finally colleagues in the wider community might want to contribute to our work by posting comments on what works for them on the effective use of data in classrooms to improve student learning.

Sometimes its useful to get a reality check on what’s important. Have a look at this clip – I think its useful to start conversations with teachers and senior students.