Inquiry, Developing the learner narrative

On Friday at our weekly PLD meeting, we were asked were our Inquiries were at. I am thinking of a starting to think about a new inquiry I want to do. It is something I see that engages and gets people to reflect well within their practice. Now, why do students not want to do learning journey or narratives about their learning. (Hunch, students may not see what the idea is, amount of writing to be done, why do they have to do it. Maybe they just don't like blogging?) How can I take the hassle out of it, make it something that is not a chore, easy to do, purposeful and reflective.

Hobsonville Habits

Students and the learner narrative.

Narrative Learning highlights the role of narrative and narration in an  individual learning and an understanding of how they act in the world.  The ‘interior conversations’ whereby a person defines their personal thoughts and courses of action and creates their own stories and life missions, is situated at the heart of a person’s map of learning and understanding of their place in the world. Narrative learning as a concept seeks to shift the focus of learning from the prescriptiveness of a strongly defined curriculum to accommodate personal narrative styles and thereby encouraging engagement and motivation in the learning process.  Hence narrative learning is a concept, if embraced, has radical and far reaching implications for existing government policies on curriculum.

http://www.ivorgoodson.com/narrative-learning

Why do students not want to blog? record a video? narrate their story?

I was taking with a PE teacher a couple of years ago when we had installed wifi and he was thinking of ways to incorporate it into his teaching. There was a PE standard that had poor performance, mainly because of being paper based, it got lost, screwed up, wet. Students didn't get good feedback because they didn't hand it in. Moving towards google forms and a database solution allowed for students to access it anywhere, and keep track of where they were up to, how many entries they completed, as well as the teachers commented about the increased reflective nature of the entries.

What is there that supports this within our school?

Prompts for hub coaches to use with students to think about reflection.

HPPS and the Learner Story, some thinking from staff

“The Learning Coach supports learners to reach academic and personal excellence by supporting them to set learning goals, constantly revisiting them and revising them and to seek ways of supporting each learner to enjoy the success of achieving their goals.  The Coach also works with learners to tell and track their learning journey / story, to discuss learning issues and find solutions, provide pastoral care, provide guidance for life beyond school and build on learners’ capacities to take responsibility for their learning.

What is the Learner Story?

• Goals
• Successes inside and outside (Academic and Personal)
• Highlighting gaps, next steps
• Personalised (Learner stories are different, so how do we have a genetic understanding when that means we are placing them into a category)  Every student's story is different, the way students learn is different.  But, like in modules etc, there are certain requirements / assessments / criteria that students have to meet.  This comment reminded me that it’s not about saying to every student that they must do a Blog / or tell their story in a specific way, but rather:
• This is what Hubs are about
• This is why we have Learning Stories
• This is the criteria for Learning Stories - how students meet this criteria will depend on them, working with their coach.  

• Academic:  Tracking through curriculum levels, Rubrics and where they seem themselves.
• Personal: Setting personal goals through hubs, careers, goals, where they see themselves when leaving school.
• Developing the whole learner (cultural, academic, personal, progress)
• Enduring - easily accessible, persistent till Yr 13
• Realistic, authentic and natural
• Reflective, responsive - main purpose s for own reflections, not showing off
• Encourage connections with Whanau
• A hybrid of learner portfolio and reflections
• Progression towards academic and personal excellence
• A way of sharing learning with whanau
• Student owned, student empowered.
• Academic and Personal *
• Progress - not just the outcome
• Portfolio of projects / inquires and reflections on what it means.
• Mixed perspective story about a learner’s learning in all aspects.  i.e. extra curricular, personal, hubs, modules, dispositional and academic etc…
• A running narrative, rather than a summative looking back.
• Should encompass warts and all - failures to learn from.
• Need the learner story to be a diagnostic too - where do I have areas that need development?  What are my strengths?  
• Authentic - not to be mixed up with reporting.

How might our learners tell / track their story?

• Blog *
• An app
• Photos
• Email home - their responsibility?
• Portfolio - which mode - there are so many and it’s hard to keep up.
• Visually
• Needs to suit the story teller
• In a HPSS Community we have decided to use a Blog to evidence their Learner Story to evidence their Learner Story.
• long term it's a good way to show progress
• Is this the best option for individual students?
• The blog is a visual way to communicate and reflect on their learning
• A way of tracking
• There are still questions around this
• A good way to track goals
• There may still be too much information in a blog to present in an IEM situation
• Is it for everyone - Depending on what suits individual students

• Blogs with template or scaffolding (ie. Aaron’s prompt cards)
• Timeline or achieve view for at a glance micro look
• Some sort of zoomed-out glance view with modules, summary sentence etc.
• Blog or Seesaw APP
• Could be a google doc or google site
• Students need to be Asked! Completely agree - ‘learner narrative’ was done to students and if we want them to be empowered and for the story to be theirs then we need their voice.  However, so students can decide on how they can best tell their learner story they need a criteria to work from.
• Google site so can be shared with teachers, whanau, whoever they want to share with.
• Learners should have choice (UDL) - it should suit the learner style, not ours.
• Needs to be flexible and should be able to include a range of media.
• Doesn't need to be online so that it can be useful for all stakehoders:  kids, whanau, coaches, teachers

OVERARCHING LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

To REFINE by developing your personal and academic excellence through reflecting, goal-setting and conferencing (including IEMs/exhibitions/sharing Learner Story),

To FOCUS by prioritising and planning your LearnPath

To MAKE SENSE by understanding self and by connecting and empathising with others

To EXPLORE by investigating the Hobsonville Habits

To GENERATE by communicating your Learner Story

Part of the work this year that was carried out by another teacher was around a habit tracking tool. https://heemimcdonald.wordpress.com/2016/02/14/hobsonville-habits-tracking-learning-dispositions/

I am going to switch tacks for a little while, I hope to get some data soon from my hub students and others about learner stories. 

Live More Awesome

Last year we had a group come in and talk about the gratitude journal. The live more awesome group came into school and talked about the mental wellness of all people. As part of this programme we were left with gratitude journal for students to write in once a week what they were grateful for.  

http://www.livemoreawesome.com/gratitude-in-schools-programme/

Headspace

https://vimeo.com/90758138 How headspace works

As part of our hub curriculum we are to look at mindfulness, as part of that 

The headspace app was recommended to our students by another presenter, https://www.headspace.com/headspace-meditation-app The pity was the cost of the in app purchases. 

Unstuck

The second thing that I have seen lately is the unstuck app

https://www.unstuck.com/

While i like the idea of the app, the one that intrigues me is the cards. The tip cards and superpower cards. http://madeby.sypartners.com/ These are something that I can see providing students with starters on the learner story. 

Collecting first part of data.
As part of Hub this morning, what do students think learning stories are about:

Students feedback about what they think Learner Stories are.

Through one of our community meeting on Tuesday one of the suggestions for learning celebrations was, how could a student create a book at the end that shows the learning story. This could be an outcome that is incorporated into the final look.

As well as thinking what this could look like and be developed, I have been thinking about how to get the students to own this? Qualification 2 Digital Technologies could have this being developed as a project, students developing their own way to record and develop their learning story.