Weekly Reflection: The Last Post

New Zealand Graduating Teacher Standard 7.c

“Graduating Teachers are able to articulate and justify an emerging personal, professional philosophy of teaching and learning.”

What my Diploma in Teaching helped me Learn

45 weeks
6 exams
13 assignments
2 teaching placements
169 posts
29,311 hits

And as of 2.13pm on Thursday I’m done.

When I enrolled in this diploma almost 12 months ago I thought I was training to be a teacher. Little did I know 11 months later I think of myself more as a learner.

But that’s not the only thing that changed.

This time last year I was in a profoundly unhappy place in my life. When the clock struck midnight for 2011 I wasn’t all that psyched about the year ahead. I thought my studies would be something to be endured not enjoyed.  I didn’t even know if I wanted to be a teacher.

How wrong I was.

For me there is nothing more amazing than seeing a group of kids take an idea and making it more awesome than I ever could imagine. This year I watched the year 8 class I was placed with take a discussion of leadership and turning it into a bollywood inspired flashmob on the school field and the juniors in the next Teaching Experience take a simple maths warm up and turn it into a powerful learning moment. I may have struggled a lot to find those teachable moments but finding them is, to quote the amazing @annekenn, MAGIC!

So there’s the first important lesson I’ve learned this year, we all need some magic in our lives.

The second is the importance of people.

Over the course of the year I’ve watched the network of people supporting my learning transmorgifiy from a couple of friends and classmates to a global network of hundreds of teachers.

I’ve been humbled at how unbelievably generous the innovate educators I’ve met both virtually and in real life have been with their knowledge. I want to thank you all, especially the ones who gave up their time to give me advice online and more importantly in real life. Your generosity has been life changing and something that I will forever be indebted to each and everyone of you for. I can’t bake you all a cupcake but I can promise to Pay it forward.

In fact I’ve already started.

I’ve always said from the outset that purpose of this blog share my experiences for the benefit of others. I don’t pretend to be an expert at anything except being a student teacher in New Zealand.

But I think there is a need for more of this sort of sharing.

The most popular post on this blog is the Graduating Teacher Standards E portfolio which attracts a steady stream of visitors looking information about the standards and they end up here. They might not be commenting but my site statistics tell me that they are out there.

If there is one lesson teachers, student or otherwise, could take from my work this year it would that I think more teachers need to tell our stories and make our learning visible. More importantly we need to share the experiences of our students beyond the walls of our classrooms and borders of our nations.

As I look towards the future of education in New Zealand I can see the storm clouds of educational reform gathering overhead. I often find myself getting pessimistic at the current state of what often passes for education debate in this country. I ponder why policy makers in particular seem so determined to not listen to the very people working in the educational system and I start thinking that the work that teachers do just isn’t that important.

But perhaps it is.

This Tuesday I watched my reflection on the introduction of charter schools generate nearly 1,000 hits to this site in a day. At the time of writing this post has generated almost 1,300 hits and is now the second most popular on the blog. I don’t pretend my post made a huge difference, it’s just a small ding in a wider debate.

But then I’m just one student teacher.

There are of others of course.

New schools, new ways of thinking, people willing to be positive deviants. They are the true reformers of education.

But what if more teachers stood up and said pay attention, this is important work, this is hard and, at times, frustrating work but we’re not sitting around on our hands waiting for permission to do things differently.

What if we declared that our voices matter?

Because despite the best efforts of those outside the system to bring about change, ultimately the most effective educational reform will come from within.

I speak of the amazing power that the internet and mobile learning has to revolutionize and personalize education.

I know that there are still plenty of doubters out there wondering what the value is in students spending time in front of a screen during class. Some of this resistance may come from not knowing how to use the internet for learning. More likely stems from the fear that teachers might soon be replaced by a computer. I guess that’s natural when you feel threatened you retreat to what you know.

Ultimately our future depends on teachers embracing this new way of learning but more importantly new ways of engaging with our community. I just hope education doesn’t have to hit rock bottom to find the courage to change.

Which brings me to the final lesson I’ve learned this year, the importance of failure. I’ve lamented in the past that our society doesn’t do well with failure. We don’t speak of our own setbacks hiding them away in places we hope others can’t find them. Yet learning how to the heed the lessons when life doesn’t go to plan is by far the most important qualification I will ever gain.

When I look at my first post I’m reminded of the starting point of the journey wasn’t all that great.  2009 was a horrible year and despite the grand world trip, 2010 wasn’t that much better. But the bonus of the setbacks I faced during those two years was a stripping away of the inessential in my life.

I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than who I was, and began to direct all my energy into the only work that I had enjoyed doing, teaching. Had the setbacks of the last two years not occurred, I might never have found the courage to change course nor the determination to succeed. As my studies draw to a close I find myself ending this year feeling happier and more excited about the possibilities in life than I’ve felt in years. That is the power that learning has to transform lives.

Of course the end of one journey is really just beginning of another. I might not know where I am going but the purpose of this post is to document how I’ve come to this point.

Therefore it seems fitting that I dedicate this, my last post as a student teacher, to The Child, who turned 8 yesterday. Happy birthday kiddo. I miss you heaps and love you lots.

“Words have no wings but they can fly a thousand miles.”
Korean proverb

Teaching mihimihi through digital media

New Zealand Graduating Teacher Standard 4.e

Graduating teachers use te reo Māori me ngā tikanga-a-iwi appropriately in their practice.

The other project I had to undertake for specialist week was a group assignment on language learning. The task was to create a teaching resource as a group. We were given the option of making a poster or powerpoint which all sounded so 1990s. I emailed our lecturer to ask if we could hand in a link rather than an actual file. He said yes which meant we got to submit a prezi with youtube clips rather than a boring powerpoint presentation.

We decided to focus on the teaching of mihimihis and think that getting students to create a digital mihimihi would be an ace language learning activity.

Epol323 group assignment on Prezi

How forgetting about ‘the teaching’ helped my students and I learn

New Zealand Graduating Teacher Standard 4.c

“Graduating teachers demonstrate high expectations of all learners, focus on learning and recognise and value diversity”

Graduating teachers focus on the learning. It seems like such a simple idea, you can talk about it, read it but actually doing it? That took me a long time.

For my first assignment for Teaching Diploma, I had to write an essay and draw metaphor around my theories of teaching and learning. I got an A for my discussions around learning theory but my metaphor I only ended up with a B, too much focus on the teaching was the feedback.

Did I take it on?

Nope the marker was being nit picky, it wasn’t my fault.

From there that I went into my first Teaching Experience all pumped up to do a good job of teaching  kids. The problem with this approach is that because I spent so much time thinking about teaching I didn’t do much thinking about the learning. I was student teacher with a plan and I was sticking to it! More importantly because I was so obsessed about being good teacher I was afraid to make to mistakes, take risks and ask questions least I be called out as the imposter I most definitely felt like inside.

I passed my placement with good but not great feedback, I wanted to do better but was at a loss. I was taking on the feedback from my Associate Teacher so was open to the idea of learning but I was also way too focused on teaching. But the more teacher blogs I read and twitter chats I participated in, the more I realized what teachers were really interested in wasn’t teaching it was learning.

When the student is ready the teacher will appear.

In this case my teachers were 25 year 1/2 students and their fabulous teacher who would be Associate for my next teaching placement. I freely admitted when I went in that year 1/2 wasn’t my first choice of age group and I had no idea how to teach these young learners. So I stopped focusing on trying to teach and started thinking about learning.

When I found myself completely overwhelmed at the seemingly frantic pace of the teaching programmes I was undertaking  instead of battling on I took a big breath and sloooowed down, deciding from guidance from my Associate that it was better to do a little bit really well rather than a lot not so well. And then the craziest thing happened, I could manage the programme that was causing me so many problems.

But more than anything what I found from teaching year 1/2 is that they really helped me to listen for the learning.  Because the little snippets that sometimes seemingly come out of nowhere have great such great learning moments attached to them ‘why does my xlyophone have 2 Cs?’ ‘Is that snow?’ ‘Why does the equal sign not mean the ‘same as?’  When I stopped frantically trying to teach and really listened to the students, I found the learning moments I never thought I would see.

But more importantly being focused on the learning took a lot of the pressure off me to be perfect. If I make mistake now I don’t think ‘ZOMG I suck I am the worst student teacher ever.’ I think ‘ok that sucked now how am I going to do it differently next time?’

Because it is not a fail it is a

First

Attempt

In

Learning

I used to think that if a teacher concentrated on good teaching then the learning would automatically follow. Now I think that if you focus on creating the right conditions for learning the good teaching will flow from that.

And now I wonder why that seemingly simple concept, graduating teachers focus on learning, took me eight long months to learn.

What is the purpose of the Graduating Teacher Standards?

New Zealand Graduating Teacher Standard 7.b

Graduating teachers uphold the New Zealand Teachers Council Code of Ethics/Ngā Tikanga Matatika.

A few weeks ago I had someone “why were graduating teacher standards established in nz” and I thought “that’s a good question to which I don’t know the answer.” So I decided to blog on it and knock out another GTS post while I’m at it (because being on Teaching Experience I’m need to be a lot more efficient with my time).

Graduating Teacher Standards aren’t unique to New Zealand. In fact my project of blogging on each of the New Zealand Graduting standards was inspired by a Sydney-based student teacher blogging on the New South Wales version a few months ago.

The New Zealand stanadards were introduced back in2007 and came into effect in 2008. As you can see from the  media release from the New Zealand Teachers Council, the reason’s behind the GTS were due to an eneven quality of teachers graduating from the myriad of New Zealand-based intial teacher education providers. This year’s graduates will be third chorot of students to have their perforance assessed against the standards and I’ve had some mixed reviews about the purposes of the standards.

To be honest upon first glance the GTS definitely fell into the ‘useless paperwork we fill in to make bureaucrats happy camp.’ A view that was obviously solidfied when the evidence I needed to gather for the GTS were literally forms to fill out.  It wasn’t until I started reflecting on the Graduating Teacher Standards through blogging that I realised that they were more than just some annoying forms that the Teachers Council and the University makes me fill out, they are a conceptual framework on which I can hang my ideas on what I think makes good teaching and a good teacher. Being the giant nerd that I am, I’m already drafting my post against 7.c and am looking forward to finally publishing it because it will be the last post I make on this blog.

The first purpose of the Graduating Teacher Standards is obvious, they are used as an assessment tool for Associate Teachers and Visiting Lecturers to assess my progress. Looking back on my learning, I can see from formal teaching appraisals where I progressed from competent to strong on each of the Graduating Teacher Standards. I didn’t quite make goal of getting a clean sweep of seven strongs on one report but my last Associate Teacher gave me six out of seven so I’m pretty stoked about that.

The second purpose for the standards are more philosophical. Teachers are called upon to make hundreds of little decisions a day some of which are mundane does little Timmy get to go the toilet a few minutes before lunch through to biggies like suspected child abuse and the political minefield that is sex education.*

In the last 30 or so years there’s been a definite shift in thinking  about the status of children within society. Previously a child’s interest was previously seen through the lens of parental rights. If you look at the language of legislation like the Care of Children act, the best interests of the child are at the centre of decision-making. Similar language can be found in the Teacher Council Teacher Ethics. While some would argue that best interests of the child is another example of PC gone mad, it makes sense to place the interest’s of the child at the centre of all decision making if you believe that children are people too.

So yes the Graduating Teacher Standards have some purpose and I’m really looking forward to beginning the next learning journey on the path towards full registration.

* My first meeting as a student member of my school’s Board of Trustees consisted on a very heated discussion on this very topic.

How a simple warm up can lead to learning

New Zealand Graduating Teacher Standard 1.a

Graduating Teachers have content knowledge appropriate to the learners and learning areas of their programme.

It was just a simple maths warm up called ‘guess my number.’ It’s kind of like hangman but for maths.

Now I’m sure you are rolling your eyeballs.

Hangman?

Seriously?

But the thing is this game is great for getting kids to use place value so long as you can make the thinking visible.

So we start with the learning.

WALHT: use place value to guess a 3 digit number.

I use 3 digits because that’s about where my year 1/2 learners are at. But you can go down to two digit numbers to start with or up to 5 or 6 digits depending on what your students learning needs are.

The success criteria is simple  students will be able to explain how they guessed the number using place value. This means even mistakes are opportunities for learning if you ask the right questions.

I write 3 spaces and the students start guessing the number and put ticks and crosses beside the guess according to whether each number has a correct answer. So if a student guesses 124, I will tick 1 and 4 if the ‘answer’ is 194. Nine gets an X.

I will always give a ‘tick’ for one number on the first guess to start the students off.

From the second guess I will start asking questions.

How did you know to pick that number? What digits have ticks?  What do you think would be a better guess for next time (if a student makes a guess that hasn’t used place value)? What digits do you think will have ticks?

A student wins when they are able to explain how the guessed all three places (which I point out is the success criteria for the game before we start playing).

What was amazing wasn’t how quickly students started using place value to make their guesses, but how they chose to adapt the game.

At the end of one warm up a student commented that he wanted me to record a plus or minus sign instead of ticks and crosses. So for the next lesson I use his suggestion and away we went. The students quickly figured out that using plus and minus signs meant the game was a lot easier because the symbols told them whether to pick a number greater than or less than the previous guess. So not only were the students were not only using the language of maths they had stumbled upon a key concept of probability, chance = favourable outcomes/total possible outcomes, and were now using it to improve their odds! I hadn’t even considered using plus or minus as a way to record answer which showes how agile children’s minds are when the right questions are asked.

I was dumbstruck that a simple warm up yielded such great learning moments.

The students have now decided guess my number is too easy and want to guess 4 digit numbers.

Who am I to argue?

The challenge of teaching literacy when you have #dyslexia

New Zealand Graduating Teacher Standard 1.c

Graduating teachers know how to develop metacognitive strategies of diverse learners.

Pencil or torture device? (photo by author)

Primary teachers are expected to teach a very broad curriculum. Throw together some reading, dancing, writing, maths, science, music with a bit of technology thrown in for good measure and you might have a school teacher’s week. But if scratch underneath this broad curriculum and you’ll find that just about every teacher will have a problem area that they don’t feel confident in teaching in. Maths daunts so many learners that there was a component of my teaching diploma  on mathsphobia.

But what about literacy?

I’m guessing that there aren’t many teachers out there who have problems with literacy because our education system can be brutal on learners who struggle with reading and writing.

Enter the dyslexic student teacher.

Having spent almost all my schooling life being labelled illiterate, the idea of teaching reading and writing was not a prospect I was looking forward to. The shame of having *THESE EXAMS WERE SAT UNDER SPECIAL CONSIDERATIONS* emboldened underneath my grades on bursary certificate still burns brightly despite having since gained an Honours degree. In fact I have never sat another exam under those special considerations least that label pop up again. But this placement I finally had to come to confront this particular demon.

What my dyslexia looks like.

I frequent mix up the letters b, d, p, q and for some reason e and 3 also befuddle me. When I’m reading, especially out loud, I’ll often omit words or substitute words that look the same, for example accept/except or won’t/want but it is writing that really causes me problems.

My spelling is atrocious and the most accurate description of my handwriting is that it is like a drunken chicken making its way across the page (an actual quote from my school report). I can write neatly but only if I am concentrating on letter formation and nothing else. However if I want to write anything of any substance, the writing process for me is a bit like a Jackson Pollock painting. Bits of sentences and ideas get thrown around in no particular order and somehow a coherent argument emerges at the end of it.

Most of the time.

I’m sure at times I come across as a bit of evangelist when it comes to technology in education but the only reason I didn’t fail out of school altogether is because someone gave me access to a word processor in year 12 to write a story and I found away to get my thoughts into written form.

To say that was a game changer is an understatement.

When I am writing by hand I struggle to write a coherent sentence much less a paragraph, the words just seem to get stuck. However when I’m put in front of keyboard little snippets of ideas come out, they might not be in any order but once they are out for me to see I can start taking my garbled thoughts and putting them into a logical order.

This makes me wonder how many children there are out there educational system has previously discarded because  their physical or cognitive differences didn’t fit the model of educational success which involved putting pen to paper in order pass exams. Every time I’ve seen technology used in the classroom, whether its an ipad for a student with cerebal palsey or blogging with students with Autism Spectrum Disorders, the result has been a child who had the potental to be marginalized in a classroom engaged in learning.  That’s a hugely exciting development in education, learners our education system once deemed defective now get a chance to succeed.

But now I’m back in the classroom and sometimes I wonder if I have any business being in there, especially as I tried to adapt my Associate Teacher’s classroom processes into my own practice. Then one morning I plugged a USB into the classroom’s laptop and had a sudden moment of clarity. The processes I was using to teach were the very same ones that cause me so many problems as a learner. What was I doing copying down a learning intention in a modelling book during a guided reading lesson when I could throw the ideas up onto the classroom’s two-touch along with some pictures to help illustrate the vocabulary that needed to be pre-taught? If I use technology to learn, it make sense that I should also use it to teach.

What’s more maybe the internal conversation I have with myself when I read, ‘go back that doesn’t make sense’ or ‘I’m not sure how to pronounce that word but I know what it means,’ are thoughts that the other learners in my classroom need to hear because I’m using decoding strategies. Handwriting continues to be my bugbear, my students often comment that my letters sometimes come out a bit wonky. I really have to think hard about how each letter is formed when I’m teaching in order to model something legible for them. But perhaps the fact that I have to struggle puts me on an equal footing with my students, we are literally learning together.

Speaking 한국어 to one student helped me to engage with many more

New Zealand Graduating Teacher Standard 6.d

Graduating Teachers promote a learning culture which engages diverse learners effectively.

I speak Korean. I don’t speak the language particularly well, but alongside living in the country for four years I also attended night classes at Seoul National University. As a result of my study I can read and write 한글, the Korean alphabet Hanguel, and can also hold up a basic conversation. Since I moved back to New Zealand a few years ago, my Korean has largely laid dormant, except when I was ordering food at Korean restaurants and very occasionally at my previous job.

However at my current placement I get to speak Korean every day. There are a number of teachers visiting my current school to study about the New Zealand education system (which has a very different pedagogy from the Korean one). I love surprising the visitors when I start speaking to them in Korean as I’m usually the first non-Korean they’ve met who will natter away in 우리 말 (our language).*

If you had walked into the classroom yesterday, when the student-led conferences were taking place, you would have heard languages from across the globe being spoken not only by the students and their families but also by my Associate Teacher and I. Obviously my speaking the family language changed the tenor of the relationship between myself and the parent and student but what was surprising was that this relationship also changed the relationship of the other children.

The students were curious as to why I could speak ‘student A’s language.’  They didn’t say it, but the learners undoubtedly noticed that while ‘student A’ is Korean I am not. My current placement is a really multi-cultural school so the pupils are well accustomed to the idea that some children speak different languages at home than they do at school. But I’m guessing that the kids know that immigration is the reason behind people speaking more than one language as the rates of second language learning in  New Zealand, especially of non-European languages, is quite poor. So it is hardly surprising that the idea that a Pakeha teacher who obviously grew up speaking English could also speak an Asian language would be something that piqued the children’s curiosity.

I explained that I had to study very hard to learn Korean but I really enjoyed it and hopefully one day I will speak Korean as well as ‘student A’ speaks English. Hopefully as a result of this encounter the students who grew up speaking English in their households might be open to the possibility of learning another language in the future. But more importantly the students saw a teacher learning which is perhaps the most powerful lesson of all, you never stop learning.

*Koreans typically express possession in the plural, ‘our mother,’ ‘our language,’ ‘our country.’

Dear Teacher Education Providers – Can you enter the 21st century please?

Paper, paper everywhere. (Photo by the author)

New Zealand graduating teacher standard 4.d

“Graduating teachers demonstrate proficiency in oral and written language (Māori and/or English), in numeracy and in ICT relevant to their professional role.”

Dear Teacher Education providers

Yesterday I received my pack for Teaching Experience 2 containing a wonderful array of informational booklets, multi-coloured forms for myself, my associate teacher and visiting lecturer to fill out on my next Teaching Experience. The forms look wonderful in their different colours and I’m sure its taken someone a long time to collate.

For fun I’ve also added the paperwork from this course that I’ve already amassed. The red folder is my unit plan from my last TE, the blue envelope has copies of the forms of my last placement, the clear folder contains all the marked assignments that my institution has printed out and sent back to me while the black folder underneath contains resources I’ve had posted to me during my studies.

Is this evidence of twenty-first century teaching practice?

I feel a bit bad for ‘outing’ my university but I know that they are not the only ones who still like to churn out paper for student teachers to collect and organize into ring binders.  At my last placement there were students from three separate institutions and we were all doing the same thing: dutifully filing away pieces of paper which were filled out BY HAND for our institutions (and in turn Teachers Council) to see evidence that we are meeting the professional and legal requirements necessary to graduate and therefore teach in a classroom.

I’m trying to remember the last time I wrote something out by hand and it was for my exam and application forms to get into university. These processes seem so far removed from my reality where I learn, bank, shop, socialize and watch TV online. Almost all the teaching I did during my last placement was done using my laptop with physical materials for students to manipulate. I would have happily incorporated more if the students had devices themselves.

Perhaps I’m the lone blogger in a sea of people who like to file paper away in ring binders where no one else can read it or see it. But then the associate teacher at my last placement made a remark that these forms should be available in digital form and apparently she isn’t alone.

There are so many reasons why pre-service teacher practice needs to go digital.

• Waste of resources – From an environmental point of view the  carbon footprint from the paper generated from these courses is phenomenal and I haven’t even factored in sending these packets out. Throw in staff time collating all these packs, putting the envelopes, sending them out receiving them again at the end of the placement and that’s a lot of time and money down the drain.
• Content not easily reproducible - I needed to have a goal setting conversation with my mentor so my last appraisals were important part of this conversation. In order for her to have the data I had to take photos of the photocopied forms (since my institution needs to have the originals), covert them into a PDF and email them off for my mentor so that we could both have a copy of the form as we live in different cities.
• Data security – For some reason people seem to think that hard-copies of evidence are more secure. I really don’t get that. If my school bag gets stolen while I’m at the gym or my water bottle leaks over my paperwork or perhaps someone spills coffee then ALL my paperwork is ruined. Backing up my work via hardrive, cloud data or USB means that I have multiple copies ready to go. Likewise not all digital content needs to be public like this blog.

But the big one is:

The process of filling in forms doesn’t encourage collaborative practice.

Over the last few weeks I’ve noticed a lot of incoming search strings (that’s visitors who have come to my blog via search engines) with phrases like

• “strategies for promoting and nurturing the physical and emotional safety of learners”
• “promote a learning culture which engages diverse learners effectively”
• “complex influences that personal, social and cultural factors have on teachers and learners”

Anyone working in teacher education should immediately recognize these phrases are from the New Zealand Teacher Council Graduating Teacher Standards.

These incoming search strings indicate students are coming here to look for information because the internet is where they go to find the information. Right now my e-portifolio is the only source of information of real-world examples of the Graduating Teacher Standards for students to easily access on the internet. In fact if you type the phrase  ”working cooperatively with those share responsibility for the learning and well being of learners” into google, a blog post of mine is the first entry. That’s a great ego boost for me as a blogger because someone might be using my information but I would love to have other students out there responding to my reflections and challenging my ideas because it will make me into a better teacher.

Institutions need to think about how they are encouraging student teachers to become digital literate, how to blend the digital technologies into our learning so we in turn can teach to others. Don’t assume just because we can text, facebook and google with the best of them that we are automatically digital literate. We may have mastered the technology, but it doesn’t mean we know how to apply it to our learning or students learning.

But we need to.

The students in our classrooms want it, our country needs it.

Right now teacher education providers are part of the problem of digital illiteracy when they need to be part of the solution.

If student teachers aren’t integrating digital learning into our practice at a university, when we have people who are supposedly far more learned than us show us the way, how are going to do it when we are out being real teacher? It goes down the bottom of the to-do list as we work our way through survival mode of the first few years in the profession. I don’t understand why institutions insist on perpetuating old practices when they should embracing the benefits that this new technology for pre-service teachers who will soon be out in classrooms full of digital natives who also don’t want to be filing away work in ring binders.

I’m six months away from graduation and I can assure I’m not pondering how to fill in forms or organize information into folders because I stopped using ring binders once I left high school. I am wondering how  to incorporate digital learning that I’m doing here into a classroom setting? What digital tools can I use to promote the learning areas and key competencies of the New Zealand curriculum?  How can I maximize the benefits of social media platforms to enhance learners literacy while minimizing the risks? What applications exist to plan collaboratively? How am I going to communicate effectively with a generation of parents who grew up in the digital age? What platforms can I use to organize student work? How do I stay relevant as a teacher in a world of information abundance?

I don’t know to the answers to those questions but I do know I won’t find them by filling in forms.

Kthxbai

A student teacher

Postscript, this post influenced me to go ahead and digitalise my practice for my next Teaching Experience rather than waiting for the wheels of the university system to turn.

An education to which they are best suited?

New Zealand Teachers Council graduating teacher standard 3.c

“Graduating teachers have an understanding of education within the bicultural, multicultural, social, political, economic and historical contexts of Aotearoa New Zealand.”

On my last day of Teaching Experience I listened in on my students as they discussed which high school they were planning to attend. At the end of the class, one of the students asked me where I had gone to school. When I mentioned the school’s name, some of the students were shocked that I had gone to this high school and lived to tell the tale. Well perhaps not that extreme, but the school is located in a very working class area and has a reputation for being a bit, umm, rough.

I did admit that yes some of my friends from school are currently on the benefit and one of the girls I was friends with is now serving time in prison for fraud.  Conversely I know a lot of school friends  in my year went on to university to earn degrees two went on to get PhDs and two went to study at Cambridge.  All in all, not bad for a  low-decile multicultural Auckland school. What I wanted my students to take away from my experience is that as they enter high school they need to realize that the have the power to influence their destiny. The girl who is now in jail sat in the same classes and had the same friends as the girl who got her PhD in maths in year 9. Somewhere along the way one of them stopped coming to class, got into booze, then drugs and then dropped out in year 12. It isn’t hard to guess which student that was.

What I didn’t tell the students was how awful it is to be a student in one of those schools that the local community has given up on. Seeing dozens of students waiting outside for a bus to take them away from your school isn’t an inspiring start to the school day. Likewise trips in the school van on its last legs to schools that had nicer buildings, better computers made you realize at a very young age that not schools were created equal. But the worst thing is that I still hear ‘oh’ when I reply to the ‘what school did you go to?’ question from people 15 years after I left the place.

Some bonuses to going to one of ‘those’ schools is that I get along well with everyone, something that happens when your classmates are refugees from Bosnia, second generation Samoans or students who could trace their whakapapa back generations.  I still had opportunities and some awesome and some not so awesome teachers.

However because I went to private primary school, it would be wise to keep my privilege in check. We had food on the table and my parents not only had the knowledge to challenge the schooling system over perceived problems with my schooling but believed that they had the right to do so. The reason I ended up in private school in the first place was because after a year of schooling I still couldn’t read or write my own name and when challenged on this the reply my parents got was that the school in question wasn’t for doctors and lawyers but for factory workers.  I’m not sure what would have happened to my life if my parents hadn’t removed me after my first year but it scares me that there were people in the  education system who had already put limitations on what my 5 year old self could achieve.

Is the answer greater school choice and vouchers? After all, the only reason my family could afford private school was because the costs of doing so were a few hundred dollars a term as opposed to the five figure tuition fees that are demanded now.

These sort of policies are predominately sold on the idea that kids from poorer neighbourhoods could access the same schools that kids in wealthy areas attended. What is an implicit and unstated assumption in making these policies work is that there would also be students like me, students from comparatively wealthy backgrounds who, for whatever reason, have parents who were happy to send their kids to low decile schools. Because otherwise you have a system that tolerates ‘loser schools’ which in turn means that there must also losing students which really sucks and believe me, the kids know when they’ve been given up on.

But what are the alternatives?

Back when I was university the first time around I was on a committee that was deciding on entrance requirements for its programmes due to the introduction of NCEA. One of the academics suggested that the University on the Hill should follow the University of California system that gurantees entry to the top 9% of graduating high school students dryly remarking that such a policy would undoubtedly lead to a dramatic reversal in our city’s bussing patterns. Likewise  the city of Raleigh, North Carolina stipulated that no school could have more than 40 percent of its kids on free school meals, or 25 percent of who were a grade or more below their expected level in reading or maths. The idea being that the kids who needed the most help weren’t all lumped together.

But what about expectations?

I was recently having lunch with another student teacher who had spent some time in mentoring programme in a decile 1 school who was incredilous that the facilities at that school were almost on par with the private school she attended. I didn’t say anything at the time but I could help but think why shouldn’t the kids in poorer areas have access to the the same facilities and great teachers that kids who live in wealthier areas have? Why should the kids have to travel, in some cases long distances, bypassing many a school on their way to access to education? Shouldn’t that education be freely available in their local neighbourhood? But perhaps most importantly shouldn’t our society have expect that all kids should have the chance to succeed within the education system (and more importantly in life) instead of consigning them to the scrap heap, much like I almost was when I was 5.

So yes expectations matter.

But also money. Because when you are eating weetbix for dinner because pay day isn’t until tomorrow it really is about the money.  And when your local school isn’t doing so well  the answer isn’t to start bussing kids out the area making it shouldn’t just be someone else’s problem, it needs to be everyone’s problem.

Homework, love it or loathe it?

New Zealand Graduating Teacher Standard 6.a

“Graduating teachers  recognise how differing values and beliefs may impact on learners and their learning.”

Last week there were a lot of tweets in my feed on a New York Times article on plans by schools to scale back homework demands on their students. The idea of moving away from the traditional worksheet has already been implemented in some schools in New Zealand.

As a student in general I hated doing homework. I was quite content to go to school orchestra rehearsals, attend Board of Trustee meetings as the student rep and reading encyclopaedias to find out stuff (spot the nerd) but when it came to writing assignments or filling in worksheets, I tended to do avoid doing them if I wasn’t interested in what it was I supposed to be doing. The worst were the school projects which seemed to take hours and involved lots of yelling on the part of my parents.

When I was on Teaching Experience I was in charge of setting and marking homework. To be honest I didn’t enjoy doing it. Here was I perpetuating all the stuff I hated about homework onto the students, the dreaded worksheets. Marking the worksheets dealing with students who had lost/forgotten/didn’t have their homework sheets ate into classroom time that could have been utilized doing other stuff. But classroom time isn’t the only time wasted doing homework.

Some working parents resent the impingement that homework has on the very brief window between dinner time and bed time that they have with their children while others complain that homework eats up time that their children devote to sports and hobbies. Moreover some parents argue that taking trips to the museum, cooking and playing games are just as important part of a child’s learning as formal school work.

To be honest the only week I actually enjoyed the setting and marking of homework was when I decided to get the top-achieving students to design a simple game of chance to be played in class by the other students. The homework was relevant to the work we were doing in class which was a unit on probability, we had learned about what was good game (something with an even but fair chance of winning) and the students knew that I had the materials for the game in class.

The goal was getting students to apply their knowledge and teach the other children in the class. For their part the students took to the assignment with gusto turning their class into a gambling pit, complete with chips and a pit boss (again, we were studying probability) and it was rewarding to see the students using the principles we had learned in class. More importantly the students, both the players and game designers, enjoyed the activity.

But should these sort of homework assignments be the norm?

There are many parents that believe that traditional homework of worksheets, times tables and spelling lists are an important part of their child’s education. They themselves likely did a similar type of homework when they are at school. There’s also a school of thought that if teachers set students a lot of homework, then the students must be doing a lot of learning.

There is some merit to the idea that there are some things you just need practice, practice, practice in order to get better.  Martin Gladwell’s best seller Outliers argues that individual success in any field is based on the 10,000-Hour Rule. Drawing on a studying on the making of an expert by Anders Ericsson,  Gladwell argues that the key to success in any field has nothing to do with talent. It’s simply practice, 10,000 hours of it — 20 hours a week for 10 years.

The idea of practice, and lots of it, makes perfect undoubtedly drives some parents in particular those who sing the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. However buried under the headline of the amount of time needed to achieve mastery is how the time is spent:

“You will need to invest that time wisely, by engaging in “deliberate” practice—practice that focuses on tasks beyond your current level of competence and comfort. You will need a well-informed coach
not only to guide you through deliberate practice but also to help you learn how to coach yourself”

The problem with homework isn’t the amount, but how homework is utilized by teachers. However like many aspects of teaching what constitutes effective homework practice depends entirely on your point of view of what effective learning is.