Collaborative Inquiry Meeting - Give a Little Get a Little

This afternoon instead of our usual staff meeting our collaborative inquiry groups met together. 
Each teacher had to Give a little - a piece of advice, and get a little - come with a problem for others to solve.

Each group of 6-7 teachers went off to a room with afternoon tea and spent about an hour sharing.

Teachers had been forewarned to bring a gem that they had learned this year through their inquiry into practice. These came thick and fast. Some of the advice that was shared was in the form of warnings - what not to do. Others examples were from successful trials such as giving boys a short set times using a visible times to complete tasks or creating a bank of reading texts recorded by the teacher for students to revisit.

I thought this would be easier, we had a similar 'Agony Aunt' inquiry meeting last year that was very popular. This year, in the group I sat in anyway, teachers found it hard to define a problem for others to solve. There were general or broad issues such a 'the kids don't write enough' or 'kids are out of class so often' These needed to be teased out into exactly what were the gaps in writing or when are students out of the class and what are they missing out on. 

The possible solutions for these problems created great discussion. Having teachers from different ages meant junior teachers were able to teachers from older classes suggestions and vice versa. There was also a lot if input from the two beginning teachers in our group who had a new and different perspective on how things are done.

A successful format for an inquiry meeting as long as teachers have time to think about and prepare their pieces of advice and their problem.

Achievement Data

Teachers have been busy testing and gathering data over the last 3 weeks. here we use easttle writing, PAT reading comp and maths, STAR, reading running records and GLOSS/JAM for maths. All of this obviously takes a long time to administer and a lot of training and moderation to ensure consistency.

Now this data is being used to help write reports for parents and to form reports for the school, community and MOE on achievement and progress.

So that teachers can measure the impact their practice has on achievement these results need to be broken down at class level. This is what we are working towards in our  Inquiry meeting next week.
Teachers have been asked to come armed with their reading data. They are required to list achievement levels at the beginning of the year, at the end on the year, and then calculate the shift made during the year. It could look something like this:

(not real names)

Then together we are going to manipulate the information in a spreadsheet to analyse our own class data by asking the following questions:

1. When students are sorted into reading ages from higher to lower is there a pattern of shift? Which groups am I shifting the most?

2. When girls and boys are separated is there a difference between achievement? What about shift?

3. Given that our school aim is to accelerate learning, what percentage of students shifted more than 1 year? What percentage shifted less than a year?

After this data inspection teachers are going off into their collaborative inquiry questions to discuss the Whys. 

Our inquiry  presentation in a couple of weeks can hopefully use this information to reflect on the impact out teaching, and the goals we set had on learning.

No, Not another Lecture!

Here we are in term 2 and our collaborative inquiry groups have had a re-shuffle.
We have 4 wonderful  PD providers whom I was able to book in for our meeting afternoons, so teachers have been regrouped to make the most of the professional development that suits them.

This is has become a very high PD input term, and not what teaching inquiry is supposed to be so heavily based on. I will have to make sure this is redressed next term. What is also a concern with top down PD, is the impact is has (or doesn't have) on learning for teachers.

This Learning pyramid (from the National Training Laboratory, Bethel Maine), shows different retention rates for training.

What we need to do is make sure that we don't waste teachers' time, and lose opportunities for learning by providing the wrong type of PD. This also applies to  the clever experts we bring in to support out teachers.




The different content areas for the collaborative group meetings include

• Jannie Van Hees and her research into dialogic classrooms and explicit teaching or writing for year 5-8 students.
• GaTE definitions and provisions from Core Education aimed at specialist teachers and middle-senior students
• Junior Literacy acquisition for low decile schools
• Rubrics for success with Dorothy Burt

This is also supported by PD provided to the staff as a whole in staff meetings on blogging, the SAMR model, and SOLO.

Our PD training is aimed at the top 5 levels, and we are lucky to be able to draw on wonderful trainers and experts from within the school as well as externally to deliver this. My challenge now is to ensure there is practise by doing and teachers sharing this learning.

Better Together

At Pt England I am working to develop a collaborative culture of inquiry into practice in order to improve teaching pedagogy and lift student achievement. The first element of this is collaboration.

In their book Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School Hargraves and Fullan (2012) talk about human capital, thats the skills, capabilities and qualifications we bring as individuals to teaching, and how it can be enhanced by social capital. Social capital is the capital we have together. We are stronger as communities when we trust each other, collaborate and work together to reach goals. Social capital adds value to human capital, so the relationships we have with our colleagues will improve our teaching performance over time.

Our collaborative teaching inquiry model follows this assumption that we are better together. We are aiming to build capacity through critical thinking and collaboration, that has a positive impact on our students.

To facilitate this collaboration teachers are in flexible groups that are created around their area of inquiry, level of experience, area of teaching and social connections. These groups meet together 3 times each term to share, learn, support and reflect together, then again at the end of the term to present what they addressed in their practice, and what impact it has had so far on student achievement.

These collaborative inquiry groups range in size from 3 to 10 and have a coach who leads their discussions and acts as a support person. As our teaching  inquiry facilitator I liaise with these coaches to set meeting agendas and provide external and internal expertise for their group’s needs. Just as our teaching pedagogy for our students, our own leaning cycle is a process of Learn, Create, Share.

We just met for the second time this week and I was excited to see the momentum some of the groups were gathering.  There were less confident teachers smiling and showing off the learning activities they had created collaboratively. What they were able to achieve with support was more than they were able to develop on their own.

Another way networking and collaboration is being facilitated, is through the professional blogs teachers are setting up to share their teaching inquiry. For some this itself is a challenge, and the function of the group has proved powerful in not just the practical sharing of digital knowledge, but also the feedback and support teachers are giving one another on their blogs.

Take a look at some of these to see what interesting inquiry journeys our teachers are on:

                 Goodwin Gold  
   

    

             e-xplore

                  A Teacher's Journey

                  Initiative, Connection and Challenge

                 1 2 1 4 1 2 3