#ETAD800 Week 2 - Starting in a Good Way

I think this week has been very fitting and great way to start our learning around research methodologies. Thinking about and considering Indigenous ways of knowing has been a part of my work for the past couple of years. While I have learned a lot while working a long side our indigenous team and other colleagues, I am already appreciating learning more from a scholarly standpoint.

When working with Blackfoot elder, Saa’Kokoto, here in Calgary he asked us to reflect through the analogy of a Stick, Rock and a Leaf.
What will stick/has stuck out to you?
What has rocked your world?
What with you leave with?

I will use this way of reflecting as I begin to reflect on my learning

Something that has really stuck out to me already is the importance of the connection to people and place that is placed on Indigenous research methodologies. Something that I am noticing a lot in our schools in Calgary is the importance of place, in learning. This is something that our own community is really focusing on is it has been amazing to see our girls benefit from this. They often make reference to things they have learned about the land and our community in relation to our own family life.

Something that rocked my thinking, as I look ahead to the learning I will do in ETAD800 around indigenous ways of knowing is learning more around the idea of relationality and what this means for classroom teachers as far as truth and reconciliation is concerned. Over the last couple of years I have listened to and read some of Dr. Dwayne Donald’s work around ethical relationality and would like to learn more about this too. I also hear that term come up in Kovach’s work.

As a Kiwi, I feel, and I’m not sure I’m OK to say this, that coming from NZ gives me a slight head start on understanding what truth and reconciliation means for a person from western culture. As a teacher in training we had a fair bit of education around Maori ways of knowing, culture and relations. I felt this preparation in Teachers College prepared me somewhat for the classroom, in which I only taught in for two yers in NZ. All of the work we are doing here in the CBE (and Canada) towards truth and reconciliation reminds me of what New Zealand has been through in the past as a nation.

I am leaving this week feeling optimistic and really looking forward to seeing how learning more about indigenous knowledge/methodology and how it might influence my own work in ETAD as well as professionally, in my work.. As I am focusing this year on developing a research project for ETAD 992, I think this learning will be incredibly timely and will ground me in solid indigenous pedagogy as I head back to work next year.

Blog Refresh

Its been too long since I blogged.

This post is acknowledging that I need to start afresh and begin reflecting through blogging again. Recording my ideas and my thinking is a good way for me to document my reflection and also a way to look back on what I've done.

I also start my Masters of Educational Technology and Design in the fall (Hoefully - I'm still waiting on final confirmation) and this will be a good way to reflect about my professional learning.

As I move into my 2nd year as a specialist (I have completed a year in a temporary role and now I begin the first year of my 3 yr contract) I'm finding I have many opportunities to reflect and share my thinking. I don't expect anything back but rather, want to share what I learn as well as use this space to think about my own thinking.

I will start my first post right way...

Back to our beliefs

Wow, here it is...

It's been 7 or 8 months since I reflected on anything using my blog. Something has been speaking to me lately that it is time to start up again. This is the first of a new burst of posts. As I warm up to the idea of doing my masters, I think I need to dust of the keyboard and get back into writing. There is so much to think about, reflect about and write about. Sometimes I hope to draw, sometimes write. Maybe even find other ways to reflect.

In my new job, as a specialist, I get to work with amazing people. Both the team I collaborate with, and also the teachers I get to learn with too. Visiting over 35 schools in the short 5 months I have worked in this role, has already opened my eyes to many new things.

One of the biggest things I have come to realize in all the work I have done lately, is how we need to continually remind ourselves of the core reason we are in this work. To learn. In our work to help support school in design think, maker education, learning commons, educational technology, learning resources, and whatever else we do in our team, we stumbled across a reminder shared by our #CBEliteracy team about the importance of focusing on our beliefs about learning first. It is important to consider what we know about learning, before we start planning our lesssons/projects, and also choosing our resources. Routman (2014) says our "practices are our beliefs in action" (p.85). He talks about how we often start with resources, then look at our practice and the finally, think about beliefs. He also suggests that we need to do a hard flip of way we do things.

What often happens...

What needs to happen...

I think this is always a good grounding for us as teachers. What kinds of things do we remember as learners. What learning experiences stuck out to us? As Will Richardson suggests in his Ted Talk, we'll all come up with a very similar list.

The following image is one I created a while back, as I reflected on some of the work I had done overthe previous year.  After sharing that image on twitter, it was retweeted a lot. It has turned into the most retweeted tweet I have ever shared. Such a simple idea but something that has resonataed with many!

This is something I am going to continually keep asking and reminding myself.

References:

Routman, R. (2014). Read, write, lead: breakthrough strategies for schoolwide literacy success. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.​​

Hooking Them In!

I'm a big believer in hooking students in to learning. I think it's worth spending time to create something engaging that will hopefully hook their imagination, excitement, curiosity or something inside students so they want to learn more.

Tomorrow I launch a new inquiry around the choices that preteens and teenagers make in their day to day lives. The grade 6 students I'm working with will end up creating infographics that will promote healthy choices.

We will start by watching the following video.

Then we will look at a few symbols and discuss them in the presentation below.

I am also going to make a conscious effort to give the students plenty of time to think and THEN talk. I am going to say very little throughout this task. I want to listen their ideas so I can shape the lessons to follow.

Designing Icons, Thinking Visually

After a meeting with a colleague this week, I have been thinking more about how I can make my thinking more visible. I would love to bring this in to my teaching more as well. I wonder if all students will benefit from this?

Visual thinking is certainly different than writing down all information. It requires the brain to think a little differently. I'm a very visual thinker. I often think and make connections with things that I have seen or by drawing something to get a better picture of it. I have enjoyed sketchnoting and drawing notes of keynotes and ideas I have come across in my work. I haven't done it as much as I would have liked and would love to make more time to draw. I am currently trying to think more visually. 

This weekend, a group of colleagues have challenged each other to sketch an icon that you haven't used before. I pushed it a little further. I designed an icon for 'evidence capture' as that has been I have been focusing on this week (see note below). My icon consists of four other icons brought into one and represents what it means to gather evidence of learning.

This is my entry in this weekend's #sketchdown. We document learning, we have conversations, we record video and voice to capture learning in different ways.  

In my work this week I have been all about gathering evidence. At this time of the year we are thinking back to work we have done and we start reflecting on how effective how work has been. We also want to share that reflection with others and also celebrate our successes. I have begun recording evidence of learning this year as we have focused on literacy throughout the year. We have come to learn that I this first year of this focus, we have realized that we have probably focused more on reading and writing literacy. We now need to move into more discipline based literacy. This will be an exciting shift as everyone, in their own discipline, will be able to focus on what it means to be literate in Math, or Science, or Music, or in PhysEd.