2021 DFI - Day 6 - A Coach's Perspective

DFI day six already! Another great day focusing on the kaupapa of connected and on Class Sites...

Connected:

Dorothy's presentation reminded me of the need to encourage participation in the Ako Hiko Google Currents community. I think there is still a lot of apprehension when it comes to sharing our practice but there is so much potential for us to learn from and support each other that I think it is essential.

Dorothy's toolkit about attracting an audience to your blogs was very useful. I will use some of these ideas while planning Cybersmart sessions in future terms and will also unpack them further with our Ako Hiko ambassadors who are starting their roles in Term 2. 

Class Sites:

Having time to view some sites from other clusters was extremely valuable. I found some great examples where the teaching and learning is visible on the reading or maths group pages. In many cases the learning was also fully rewindable and had links to T-shaped literacy. These will be good exemplars to use with teachers I work with this year.

In the afternoon our bubbles had time to work on their own class sites. It was a good opportunity for me to reflect on my recently built Poetry Slam site (our Poetry Slam is next week and all online if you are interested in joining us).

Ngā mihi

Phil

Jagged Smackdowns

Everyone is different. In Room 3 we make jagged profiles to show what we're good at and what we need to work on next. This week we researched our goals (e.g. leadership) using YouTube videos but interestingly students got more useful advice from each other. They then shared their tips in a smackdown where they all presented for a minute. A genuine collaborative process.

epro8

Taking the Wesley Wizards to the epro8 (engineering, problem solving, innovation) taught me a lot about collaboration. It was really challenging to sit back and NOT help. But I was proud that they were the only team to take the time to draw a plan before they started building. Good communication and collaboration all round. We ended up coming 7th out of 12 teams with 160 points.

Jigsaw Learning

Hi all, I did some reading about jigsaw learning on this website. Next week I'm planning on using this idea in reading. Each student only reads one page of the text so they really have to collaborate to gain an understanding of the whole text. I also like it because students from different groups who are reading the same page get to support each other. This means that students can choose their groups but also get to work with a range of different people. I'll let you know how we get on...

Collaboration Rubric

I was given a great reading around collaboration. Using the rubric on this site made me realise I was controlling too much of the planning when my students were collaborating. We carried out a science investigation and I encouraged groups to visualise the experiment and plan for the different jobs that would need to be completed. Here is the doc...



We also happened to have our assembly in the same week so I threw all of the planning and organising to the class and they collaborated to complete five different (but cohesive) items with minimal planning from me. Here are our slides...