Holiday Reading

Just finished reading "Me before you" by Jojo Moyes. It is a good romantic novel with a message.Will Traynor who leads a big life suddenly gets tied down to a wheelchair after a nasty accident. I loved the character of Will more than the main character Louisa Clark. Despite of him being a handicap, Will leaves no stone unturned to improve the quality of Louisa's life. He encourages her to take risks and gives her the confidence to achieve and do better in life. The book certainly left me in tears.

Instant benefits of meditation in a classroom

One of the most simple ways to meditate is to close eyes and concentrate on the breath. The simple intake of air through the nostrils, feeling it travelling through the windpipe into the lungs and then release of carbon dioxide back from the body. This is s a very calming exercise for students especially after they have come back form their lunch hour.
Though I have always encouraged meditation in my class but it was not a very regular feature last year. In 2017 I will make sure that I keep ten minutes  aside for meditation. Usually I would play a soft meditation music from you tube and ask students to listen to the music and concentrate on the breath. Music helps them to settle down quickly and once their eyes are closed and and they start taking deep breaths, they become more relaxed and ready to learn.

Some of the instant benefits of meditation are -

1. It improves the mental health of a person and so helps in improving concentration.
2. It reduces anxiety levels and so helps in having a class of more calmer students.
3. Helps in improved blood circulation, so energises the body.

I am determined to create tiny buddhas in my class in the coming year. I would love to hear any feedback and would also love to know if teachers out there do meditation in their classes to get some more ideas if they do it differently.

The 6 C's in Education

At U learn Conference this year, I have been very inspired by the 6 C's. 

Here is a brief description of what 6 C's stand for and how they are so important in education. This write up is also a reflection on how I will be developing my plans so that I create a space for all the C's into my lessons.

Thinking Critically- This is done the best when students have a variety of media to inform themselves about the topic. It allows students to analyse and filter the information and eventually form their own opinion based on the facts and information received. They weigh the positive and negative affects of the information.  It also allows students to think if the information is valid or is it biased. They make connections with their experiences and understand the topic deeply.

How can I plan to make this happen in my class?

Working Collaboratively - When students work collaboratively, they communicate to make an optimum outcome. In the process, everyone's ideas are valued.

 How can I maximise the success by making communication effective in my class? What are the most effective means of communication when working collaboratively? 

Communicating Clearly -  This means that students and Teachers need to communicate meaningfully. This will happen if communication is effective and engaging to the classroom audience. 

 How can I make communication purposeful and effective for my students? How can I encourage engagement within the students? Do my students need to develop their communication skills? 

Embrace Culture - Students become more engaged in their learning if teachers encourage and appreciate the cultures of their students.

How can I become more responsive to the culture of the community I teach? How can I include the members of the community to become a part of my classroom culture?

Develop Creativity - Creativity allows students to express their learning and share it with others. Just learning would not be of any value if students are not able to apply their new learning in a purposeful way. When students apply their knowledge to create something, they gain deeper understanding, their knowledge expands, possibilities of innovations arise, imagination happens and their is a sense of completeness to the learning.

 How can I bring more creativity into the topics I teach?

Utilise Connectivity - This allows students to share their learning with the wider community. It is important because it allows students to have authentic audience to get constructive feedback.

How can I use Technology to connect at the local and global platform about my learning?

Reflection -  On reflection I feel the need to plan my lessons very carefully keeping in mind the 6 Cs. Though I already plan under the umbrella of  'Learn, Create, share',  but sometimes the essence and richness of the learning experiences can get lost if emphasis and care is not devoted to the 6 C's.  For this to happens effectively, I need to set up norms in the beginning of the year where students will learn how to communicate and collaborate so that we get more engagement through richer discussions. I will need them to learn to embrace each others cultures and value each other's ideas  and communicate respectfully so that the outcome of each lesson is acceptable and workable for the community. 

Multimodal Literacy - Manaiakalani Leaders PLG

Last week I attended the Manaiakalani Lead Teacher's PLG.  Dr. Aaron Wilson is one of the researchers at the University of Auckland and he was sharing his views about the importance of multimodal reading. It is different to reading a story in a journal over the week. Multimodal texts show the interrelationship between reading and writing and develop deeper understanding of the texts by making meaning of different modes of communication. 

We talked about

• Why it is important to talk about the text and how it benefits children's learning?
• What are some of the key indicators of quality talk about texts?

We shared our ideas on a padlet. Click on the link below to view the ideas.

Share your ideas - Padlet

Aaron emphasised and we all agreed that IRE ( Initiation, response and evaluation) way of teaching can be useful if it helps the teacher to check understanding of students. But it has it's limitations. It is one sided as it is teacher centred. Students do not get involved into deeper understanding of the topic as they do not get a chance to explore about the topic.

Texts should be talked about and students should be given opportunities to share their opinions about the ideas in the text. This would enhance deeper understanding of the text. Ideas in the text develop into rich discussions between the teacher and the students and within groups as everyone questions, agrees and disagrees. Most discussions are supported by reasons and so everyone contributes to the learning.

Teachers need to very careful about the level of the students and multimodal reading can become very disengaging if texts are not chosen strategically. Click the link below to see what Aaron had to say about what makes rich talks harder and easier.

What factors make rich talk about text in classrooms harder and easier

Aaron has been working with teachers at Tamaki College and showed us how there was a change between the teacher and student utterances as teachers shifted form IRE to more meaningful and authentic discussions.

Observations in the beginning of the year

Observations - mid year

Observations towards the End of the year

Aaron discussed that it could be valuable to re- negotiate the norms in the class about talk. I personally believe that it is very important to keep visiting the norms in the class as they develop a culture where everyone feels supported and comfortable to participate in discussions.

Our class treaty is all about class norms and has worked well for me and my students. It is not just a poster that hangs on the walls. It is very much a living document that is referred by students and teachers regularly so that our class remains a healthy place to discuss, ask, inquire, justify, agreeing and disagreeing. This is what our class treaty looks like-

I have not changed this treaty for the last two years because it works for me. What changed is just the koru patterns.
To involve students in discussions we also practice talk moves. Both me and my co- teacher Ashley use talk moves in all areas of the curriculum.

In the end Aaron left us with some question to ponder over?

• Are we on board with a shared focus on deep and wide learning using text sets and talk about text approaches?
• How many times should we engage students in multimodal literacy?

In my opinion, this is a great way to develop critical thinking amongst students. I have tried this in my class and the results were very satisfying for me as well as for the students. They felt like they had a voice and that their ideas and opinions were valued. 

The topic of my multimodal literacy was Theme parks. Please view the presentation below to check what year 3 and 4 students did for their reading last week.

Teaching Writing in my Class

I had my literacy observation recently and one of the  criteria is to record our lesson and then analyse the  lesson with a critical buddy. My critical buddy is Paula Were who does PLD for Writing at our school.

My goals from my last observation were-

Specific development of vocabulary eg clines

Continue building power words

Seeking the very best choice to avoid ‘over blown’ language

I not only wanted to achieve the above goals as a teacher but also wanted my students to to achieve their goals to become better writers. The group that I am teaching is  mixed ability group and their goals are to write interesting stories in order to create impact on their audience. To achieve this goal they have the following Success Criteria-

• Use detail for ideas
• Use correct punctuations
• Use Powerful words and similes
• Use dialogue
• use emotive language

Connections with Reading and writing

To start the lesson I made connections to the text that they had read the previous day.

I drew their attention to the new words and phrases they had read in text. I made sure that they understood the meanings of all the new vocabulary so that it becomes easy for them to use these in their writing.

Global Connections

The picture prompt that I used was that of a roller coaster. This was because I wanted to make connections with the recent incident that happened at Dream world.

Specific development of vocabulary

Most of my students use simple words in their writing or else they may use overblown words that really do not make much sense. To help them use specific vocabulary I made clines.

Making connections with culture

After explaining the word cline I asked my students if they could make any cultural connections to the roller coaster. It is important that we acknowledge and cherish what our students bring with them. In this case the students said that the roller coaster looked like a Taniwha, an eel, a huge wave or a whale, a dragon's tail and a tunnel.

I reminded students several times about their goals and gave them hints on how they could transfer the new words learnt to their writing.  Here is what they produced in about 5 minutes.

Revisiting Learning intentions and success criteia
To sum up students read their stories to each other and checked to see if their friends had met the success criteria. Next, students checked if they had achieved their goals. They checked this with their buddies and then ticked against the success criteria if they had achieved them.

Follow up task

A follow up task was to ask students to highlight detail, powerful words, dialogue and emotive words in a text on roller coasters. This was a winding off activity that would help them to remember their goals. Here is the text that was given.

To sum up students read their stories to each other and checked to see if their friends had met the success criteria. Next, students checked if they had achieved their goals. They checked this with their buddies and then ticked against the success criteria if they had achieved them.

Reflection and feedback - The feedback that I got from my critical friend was very good. To sum up she said that the connections with the reading and writing, culture and student goals were very elegantly done.

Link to my plan for the above lesson

Values in the classroom

We at Tamaki have five values. They are Whanaungatanga, Manakitanga, Rangimarie, Tukumarie and Ako. These are very important to us as they reflect who we are. They provide a vehicle to talk about student behaviour and learning. It is important that students connect to the values and so were carefully chosen in consultation with the community.

Until two years ago we had four school values and decided to add 'Ako' as our fifth value. This was done because Students could make connections to the values only when they were outside in the playgrounds. We wanted our students to live and breathe these values everywhere, in the classroom..., in the playgrounds... at all times... and hence there was an addition of another value 'Ako'. So our values evolved over time.

Our school values are culturally responsive. These values are held very closely by our demographically dominant Maori and Pacific families. They were purposely chosen to be in Te Reo so that our community could make connections with our values.

It is important that we teachers in the school are role models of our values. Last term we had one of the schools who needed to evacuate because they had found asbestos in their building and it needed to be fixed before kids could be let into the building. Our principal welcomed this school and we all looked after our guests. Our principal demonstrated our school values.

Reflection - Though we have a very robust selection of values for our school I want to see these being lived and thrived in all corners. I would like to see the values being the vehicle to talk around achievement and behaviour. I want to see these values being walked in our school. So I started the Term by revisiting school values and the task for the students was to brainstorm what they meant by these values.
I felt quiet proud of them when some students said that they used it all the time in school as well as at home.

To take this a little further I framed three questions for my students:

• Did you get a chance to use your school values today? What were they?
• How did you use your school values during learning time today?
• How did you use your school values in the playground today?

I asked them to reflect on these questions during the day. At the end of the day, they had heaps to share. Have a look...

Karen Spencer - Beyond the Echo Chambers

Karen was the last of the key note speakers at the ULearn conference 2016. She was the one who most inspired me as I could connect to my real teaching world. She started by challenging us to think about 

so what now? what will we do when we go back to school in about 72 hours from then?

She then started to give us idea about how to go about when we are in our work spaces.

These ideas were very well summed up through a sketch at the conference 

• Praxis - this is the weaving of the research and ideas into practice. She illustrated this with the image of basket weaving where everything is twined and intertwined to turn into a beautiful basket. Teaching is the same...
• Professional Development - We as educators should always strive to be better educators. Improving our skills in teaching should be a continuous process because 'Professional learning is not an extra thing on the plate, it is the plate'

• To keep up with the changing world of education - it is important that teachers stay networked. This will allow them to stay connected and share ideas with each other. It is not just to stay at the receiving end but to challenge ourselves to participate in more complex conversations. Then Karen talked about holding ourselves and take the time to consider what is the most urgent need of our learners.

• Find the urgency - Every school has a curriculum that has a vision. This vision reflects our learners and the vision has some kind of outcome. Any new changes should drive this outcome. Students and teachers should live this vision so much that 'it can be seen dripping of the walls of the school'. If change is not planned strategically keeping the needs of our learners in mind then sometimes it can lead to dillusions and create more stumbling blocks in the way to achieve the vision.

• See the story behind the data 
• Data is not just the picture of numbers... data tells us the stories of our learners...When we question ourselves deeply about the data then we can hear deeper stories and understand what is going on in the lives of our children and so need to look at planning in a way that will help these students make shifts.

We should acknowledge that everyone is different and each person views different things in data and in their learner's stories. We should embrace these different points of view and and learn from them. we should challenge our biases so that we do not end up in an echo chamber. She illustrates this very nicely using John Cussack's role 'keep the fear out of the set'.


It is great to know about the new ideologies and the strategies that bring change, but we need not to be impulsive. We need to refrain ourselves from quick solutions as they can prove to be dangerous. We should spend some time to pay attention to most important current needs of our students and then address these needs. She said that we needed to plan carefully and 'hold our ideas lightly' rather than jumping to make a change.

Karen reminded us that we in New Zealand were very fortunate to have a curriculum that allowed us to be flexible. Our NZ curriculum is very good that we need not look further!

In the end she summarises by sharing a quote ' Education does not change the world. Education changes people and people change the world'.