Three Teachers Better Than One

This sounds like a dream situation doesn’t it? Something you might have in a Special Education class or a well resourced International School.

Well I work in such a classroom!  I am lucky enough to be one of 3 experienced full time teachers in our class.

At this time of year with assessment, reports, prize giving items and end of year scratchiness I certainly appreciate the relief, the support, the jollying along and the flexibility this provides. In fact I can’t imagine how I managed Novembers pre Open Learning Space.

Last Thursday between morning tea and lunch, the whole class were creating brochures to inform and motivate next year’s Yr 6 Campers. This involved designing (pencil and paper), writing (google docs), drawing (sumo paint), illustrating (camp photos in picasa), displaying (google draw and spreadsheets), and publishing to print (pages and keynote). This took a fair bit of modelling, discussion, conferencing and feedback. But in typical fourth-termness there were a whole lot of other things going on as well.

Between the three of us we were also trying to complete the last GLOSS maths assessments, moderating some writing samples, re-connecting two angry parties that fell out over a morning tea game (kids not teachers!), taking a group of avid readers to the library to select and issue books,  coordinating a group of choreographers to come up with suitable moves for our item, visiting other classes to collect data, connecting with family to check on sick week old baby at home, re-wiring sound system to be able to listen to the school news in 30 minutes, re-imaging netbooks, tracking down missing charger......

Every teacher has these goings on. The difference is I have 3 of me to cope.

Now I’m just wondering how I can get 4.

Learning To Be A Learner

This term we have embarked on an exciting journey in maths where our focus is on problem solving. This involves children learning to behave as mathematicians. They are taught to communicate their processes, justify their thinking, challenge and be challenged. The key competencies - managing self, communicating, relating to others, thinking and participating and contributing are all required to work in a more investigative mathematical model.

We decided that for teachers to get this up and running, and to allow those with key competencies to learn and adopt these mathematical behaviours, we would regroup in term two. We decided to stream our large learning groups around key competency levels primarily, and then ability.

The idea is that just as you ‘Learn to read” then “Read to learn”, children “Learn to be learners” then “Behave as a learner in order to learn”. These behaviours need to be taught more explicitly to some children, and may take longer to develop. This has become my challenge!

I have the lower children, who on the whole are the lower ability children. The other two teachers have the top streams. While the other two teachers run an adaptive,  problem solving approach in maths time, I have a far more structured programme. Rotations for seeing the teacher are frequent, tasks and follow ups are shorter, and times for taking part in different activities are managed. This doesn’t mean we don’t look at problems, we do. However these are teacher led in smaller groups, where the strategies and behaviours an be modeled and intensively scaffolded

We are learning to put pencils and maths books in our tote tray so they can be found the following day. We go around the group one at a time to share our ideas and have “How I behave” posters for working with the teacher, practising online maths, sharing our learning on ipads and completing follow up activities. What it looks like, sounds like and feels like is explicitly shown, discussed and reflected on.


 I continue to follow the cycle of Learn Create Share. Children are sharing and reflecting on their learning frequently, and posting these on their blogs.  They continue to thrive on having an audience and having their learning recognised.

This is going well. The higher groups are flying (both the teachers and the children) as they work in a more flexible programme. In my programme so far there is less flexibility. The challenge is to make sure that these children who most struggle with being a learner, aren’t  deprived of the very choice to opt into alternatives, that they most want. I am hopefully just providing more productive choices!

It Takes a Village

One of the unexpected advantages of our year 5 and 6 open learning space is the wrap around pastoral and learning support the students are getting from having 3 teachers. Yes there are more students, so it’s not as if there are more teachers per child, but there are more teachers overseeing each child.

It feels a bit like a village with 3 three elders leading and taking care of the students. Some students might be with one teacher for literacy, one for maths and another for their home class, but even if they are only in learning groups with two or even one teacher, we do see all of the students in the space as our responsibility. We know them all well by now, and between us are able to provide different strengths, interests and ‘eyes’.

This has worked really well in situations where there have been behavioural or learning issues. Three adults monitoring, problem solving, backing up or helping, has been able to provide more support for that child than one teacher on his or her own could provide. From the child’s point of view this could this really could bring truth to the saying that ‘teachers have eyes in the back of their heads’ - there is no escaping!!

How do we minimise the impact of extra learning opportunities in an open plan learning space?

Eight weeks in and the learning space is finally running to more of a routine. What a long set up!

The ‘chaos’ was due to several factors:

1. We chose to do a 2 week swimming rotation in weeks 2 and 3 so that it was before camp and swimming sports, and fitted around testing and the end of term Fiafia preparation.   A class group at a time was to roll through different time slots to the pool daily,. This, like all ‘class’ opportunities provided us with a headache. Our learning groups aren’t in ‘classes’ so to take a home class would mean for that 3 hours a day of swimming no learning groups were complete.

To get round this we took our maths learning groups with the idea that when we weren’t at swimming (80 minutes from leaving school till return), the other maths groups could go ahead. This did help in terms of setting up our maths learning for the year, but routines were shot. There was no set maths times, children had to swap into other swimming sessions to allow for remedial classes, school ambassador or monitor jobs, performing arts sessions, sports coaching and sports days out. We didn’t ever end up with only our maths groups or all of our maths groups. 

2. Weeks 4 and 5 were testing week. A matter of only 3 asttle tests, and done in learning groups again (this time we chose literacy

groups), but not a matter of only 3 testing sessions. 

To make sure we are getting the most accurate picture we can from a ‘one point in time’ or snapshot assessment, we assign students to the most appropriate leveled test. Then depending on how well they do they may need to re-sit at a higher or lower level with more elements within their range of achievement level. For about 50% of our students this meant at least one other tests.

Then due to absences, remedial classes, school roles, and sports days there were many catch up sessions to ensure all students were tested.

3. Week 5 and 6 were then preparing and going on School Camp. Another interruption to setting up our open learning space.

These extra activities are an important part of schooling and something I think Pt England does well, as do New Zealand Schools in general. We provide learning opportunities outside of the classroom and extra curricular activities to cater for different strengths and interests. The tricky thing is to get a balance of these so that the learning is enhanced but not replaced.  However the impact of ‘interruptions’ in an open learning space has so much more impact just because of the number of children, groups and teachers involved.

We have always had a thorough testing regime, many clubs, groups, remedial groups and sports to add value to our teaching and learning but the management of this in a single cell class is a little easier. It is easier to keep track of who is where, and who has done what when you have only one group of 32 children. When this crosses 3 groups or 32 for each teacher it can get messy - for both teacher and student.

How do we minimise the impact of extra learning opportunities in an open plan learning space?

Different Learning - Different Spaces

As part of The Manaiakalani Programme an  Innovative Teacher Accademy has been set up. This is to provide an opportunity for  teachers to form a network for support and mentoring as we follow areas of interest an innovation that we want to investigate further. I submitted my plan for an innovative project for 2013 and was lucky enough to be accepted. This was my proposal:

"Open classrooms were a fad in the 70s which didn’t survive, but here we are looking at this again in our planning for a new learning space to be built for the Yr5/6 students at Pt England School.

Based on the fact that we teach digital learners differently, and these students learn differently, the traditional single cell class space has more and more constraints. A new pedagogy is driving a new learning type of learning space.

These things are proven to make a difference in our schooling improvement journey:
*Group teaching, needs specific explicit teaching
*Relationship with teacher
*Digital engagement
*Personal voice

But these things are becoming increasingly apparent:
*Digital learners are connected to each other, the teacher and those outside of their classroom or community online. For Anywhere learners space becomes less relevant.
Teachers don’t have to be physically close to students to be able to give them feedback, keep them motivated or help them out. Furthermore the ‘teaching’ is done by more than the class teacher.
*Learning Anytime - defined curriculum/subject times blurred. Learning times no longer restricted and the pace in which students learn can be differentiated
*Personal voice, personal device, personal learning. Seating, style of learning, area, collaboration, choice, tasks... flexible
*Creators and creative - spaces for this

Flexibility to allow for digital learner pushing us into a different pedagogy and a different kind of space.

Changing practice for 21st Century learners is harder than changing technology or space, but new spaces and tools can inspire teachers and learners to change their practice.
( NLII Fall Focus Session, Learning Space Design in the 21st Century,)

I want to:
1. Investigate what an effective learning space that allows for any place, any space and any pace learning looks like.
2. Develop classroom organisation for our digital learning pedagogy.