Miss Corry presents to the Nation

Wow what an experience!

 In the second week of the last school holidays I had the opportunity to attend the national educators conference “uLearn” in Hamilton and present the project that I am working on with other teachers from our community.
 I was overwhelmed with the number of people who were there. I didn’t quite know what exactly I was going to. There were over 1500 educators, 250 presenters and over 300 breakouts to choose from It made it real seeing my name listed in the book .

I was lucky to be presenting on the first day of the conference. Thank goodness for that too! The morning of the presentation I was so nervous! I couldn’t eat lunch as I was going to be presenting straight after. When we arrived at the room that our presentation was going to be in…It felt so real seeing the sign with our names on it.

We had a good number of people choose our breakout session and we delivered our presentation over the next hour and half. Boy time flies! It was crazy that I was so nervous to start off with as once I began speaking it was so hard to stop...I guess when you know what you're saying and when you are really passionate it is very easy to keep talking.  The people who attended were intrigued and really interested in what we were sharing. It was good to get great feedback afterwards.

Thanks to Kelsey Morgan for the support at the session..she was great when the IT started playing up half way through. It was such a good feeling being able to share what I have been learning and I am really proud of myself for stepping up and going outside of my comfort zone.

   

Presenting on the first day allowed myself to relax for the rest of the conference and really enjoy myself and be able to attend other sessions and give all my attention to them.

This is the slides that we used for our presentations. We used them to inform people what our research project is on, the background of project, the screening tool, initial data summary and the teacher inquiries and where we are heading next.

We had key note speakers that everybody could attend and then we were able to choose other sessions that were of interest to us.  There is so much I could share!

The main message from all of the speakers was about relationships and how important relationships are and how they are the key. This related and really stuck with me as one of the main things learnt from our inquiry so far is that “It’s not okay to not have a relationship”

I attended a breakout session run by Sally Peters on Compassion, care and curiosity - Powerful drivers of teacher research. I was really engaged through her entire presentation, as I am currently undertaking teacher research and I could directly relate to everything she said. Sally Peters is one of the key gurus in New Zealand for transitions to school from ECE also. Her work and research is well worth the read!

Here are the links to the main key note speakers: Each speaker spoke for an hour.

Eric Mazur was the first key note speaker

“Innovating education to educate innovators”

Brad Waid was the second key note speaker

“Engaging the globally connected student of today: A look at emerging technology, gaming and digital citizenship”

His presentation had me hooked for the entire hour..so much to think about.

He had so many quotes throughout this one in the photo has stood out.

The last key note speaker on the final morning was Dr Ann Milne. Her presentation got the crowd really thinking and she had a standing ovation at the end.

“Colouring in the white spaces: Cultural identity and community in whitestream schools”

I came back home buzzing after attending this conference...

I thank the CaWS project for making this happen and also Andrew and the Gilberthorpe School Board for allowing me this amazing opportunity to attend this national conference. I hope to be able to attend this again in 2018 and present our findings.

IYT - Incredible Years Teacher Programme

Incredible Years Teacher Programme

This year long course has certainly been one of the best PD opportunities that I have had this year. Through seven sessions of videos, information, readings and group discussion with other teachers all in Junior level classrooms I have learned so much and had many aha moments. The IY programme is based on a pyramid and throughout the weeks we worked our way from the bottom to the top, from strategies that should be used first and most at the bottom, to the least used final steps at the top.

The six sections of the pyramid are broken down into:

-      - Building Positive Relationships

-       - Being a Proactive Teacher

-       - Giving Attention – Encouragement       and Praise

-       - Motivating through incentives

-       - Decreasing inappropriate behaviour

-       -  Negative consequences

It is hard to put into words all of the great things I learned this year so here are just some of them...

•  Building strong relationships is the most important thing “a nurturing teacher-student relationship built on trust, understanding, and caring will foster students’ cooperation and motivation, and promote their learning, social and emotional development, and academic achievement at school” (Incredible Teachers, Carolyn Webster-Stratton, PH.D.) Building strong relationships doesn't take a lot of extra time. A simple 2 minute conversation every morning with a student can go a long way to strengthen a relationship. I found it very powerful with a few of my students to do some child-directed play during break times. They enjoyed being in charge and getting me to do whatever they wanted in their games.
• There are many skills that can be coached by a teacher: social, emotional, academic and persistence skills. Coaching academic skills can be done by simply naming the things that the students are doing while they work. Giving them the language (can be very beneficial for ESOL students) and is not demanding anything from the student, as questions would. Through social coaching you can label the skills they a showing and praise them at the same time e.g. I can see that (child) is sharing with (child), great job this way you both get a turn. Coaching persistence can give the child the encouragement they need to keep going e.g. I can see you are really focusing so well, even though it's getting tricking you are still working on those maths questions and now you're halfway!
• Social skills, emotions and solving problems are things that need to be explicitly taught so students can understand and learn how to self-regulate, learning how to calm themselves down, how to make friends and deal with others. 
• Incentives can be a really powerful tool for a class (like fish tickets), for a group, or an individual. Working with a student and their family to come up with an individual incentive system and goals when necessary is so much more powerful than me just thinking about what they need to work on and what I could give. This gave more ownership to my students, who had already come up with the positive things they needed to do instead of the undesirable behaviour.
• "Ignoring muscles" are really important things for both you and your students to develop. They need to know why we are ignoring and be praised for it when they're doing a good job. Once a child has stopped the behaviour they then need to be re-engaged into the class/group. It was also really powerful for me to learn that it is important when a child is having a negative consequence (something taken off them etc.) to always focus on the first thing they did that caused it all and not act on any secondary behaviours. Ignoring the secondary behaviours that arise is a very important thing, because when you are ignoring it always gets worse before it gets better.
• Always focus on the positive! I was amazed with the way we saw teachers in the videos responding to so many different things in a positive way. Something that will stick with me was a video we saw of a teacher dealing with a tantrum. Just the way she could deal with something so frustrating, in such a positive manner amazed me.
• Natural vs. logical consequences - some consequences happen naturally without any intervention, e.g getting wet clothes when they go down the slide after being told not to. Whereas the logical consequences are those that are made by an adult to fit with what the student did.

Throughout the year we also chose one student that we would learn to build a behaviour plan for. I chose a child that was having difficulty regulating his emotions, who often became quite angry without knowing how to direct or control this. The behaviour plans had nine different steps, which we filled in as we learned about the pertinent strategies.

-      Step 1: Identify the negative behaviour

-      Step 2: Functional assessment (identify some reasons why you think the behaviour may be occurring)

-      Step 3: Positive Opposite behaviour

-      Step 4a: Relationship Building Strategies

-      Step 4b: Proactive strategies

-      Step 5: Teacher Attention Coaching and Praise

-      Step 6:  Motivating children through incentives

-      Step 7: Decreasing inappropriate behaviours… ignoring and redirecting and reengagement

-      Step 8 Decreasing inappropriate behaviour…following through with consequences

-      Step 9: emotional regulation, social skills and problem solving.

I started with building a stronger relationship with him at the beginning of the year and then we worked together to address the negative behaviours. He now has his own incentives chart, which he is responsible for, with goals we decided on together (phrased as the positive opposite that he is learning to be able to do e.g. I can choose a good learning spot)

 and a reward he has chosen (stickers of cars, motorbikes and superheroes :) He also uses a calm down thermometer to take some time out to calm down when he becomes angry. He has worked incredibly hard this year and his behaviour now certainly shows this.

I am now proud to be an Incredible Years trained teacher, and I can definitely say that I have the confidence, skills and knowledge to build a great classroom culture and to know what steps I can take when any issues arise.

Cluster Writing Moderation

Writing Moderation 2017

Our session started with introductions of our fellow cluster leaders of Literacy.  

We then looked at one piece of writing and marked solo.  As a group we discussed similarities and differences in our scores.  

We then looked at samples of writing from across the cluster and worked together to determine scores using the e-asTTle Rubric.  Scores were entered into a sheet which identified the marker from each school and the moderator's scores.  When marks were different, we then looked a little deeper and had more input from lead teachers.  

The rubric we use:

Two pairs discussing writing samples.

A lot of thought and discussion goes into this process.

Lead Teachers from Gilberthorpe with flash sign in stickers.

So how did we compare?

The charts below show the mark given by the teachers of our school (A), the moderator's score (B) and the difference between the two (C).  

In the Junior Hub, marks given by teachers and the marks given from the cluster lead teacher moderators are very consistent with very little difference.  One sample caused quite a it of discussion.  Unfortunately scores were not added to the cluster sheet so we will add these later.  

In the Senior Hub, three teachers marked the samples individually.  For the moderation session, the middle score or most common was used.  As a hub, we have some more discussions ahead as some of our scores varied and in some cases had a difference of three marks.  We can now use the moderator scores and our initial thinking to make clearer and more consistent decisions around marking using the e-asTTle Rubrics. 

I think it is really important to be aware of the inconsistencies in interpretation and marking of writing samples using these rubric.  Below is a table showing scores given by two different moderators at the cluster moderating meeting.  The variations in some marks given in sentence structure and punctuation in particular, show that the scores given by the lead teachers are not necessarily the correct score.  These show we still have much discussion to do.  

I wonder also, do the rubrics need to be updated and made clearer?  The tools we use need to be fair and consistent in order for our children to be getting accurate information about their ability and achievement in all areas of the curriculum, and in this case in particular, Writing.