Learning

While the learning of the student is important, there is also the learning of the teacher.

This was summed up this week by a post from Maurie, the principal of Hobsonville Point Secondary School. I believe it shows the learning that our teachers at school are going through and explains what their journey is at present. http://principalpossum.blogspot.co.nz/2016/02/others-voices.html

I myself am I going through that Journey. Taking up a leadership role this year. The Learning Design Leader of Technology.

Over the weekend I attended the subject association committee meeting and contributed towards the discussions. Many of these are the same that happen at each new committee. How to develop a regional based structure, as well as Professional Development of the members.
It was interesting when I listened to the conversation, around how to develop regional based participation, the word clusters kept coming up. This causes many confusion of what a cluster is, we now have cluster of schools, clusters of teachers. The idea that has merit is one of Hubs. Considering how we have Learning Hubs at school, we need to develop what these regional Hubs will be focussed around, and who will lead the Hub. This will be developed as we go on through the year, but first thing, who is in each Hub? Have we got the areas sorted?

That night saw conversations with a cousin, who is into supporting youth through scouting. The ideas of dispositions and developing these as part of the scouting curriculum is of interest to me. It is great to see various students at school interested in scouting and talking about it with us teachers. The ideas around the slackline development as I talked about in my previous post came from his ideas. We are now developing a shared understanding of the lingo used. I also handed over the 12 GPS units that I used to support the Get Lost initiative that we ran at school last year for his scouts to learn how to use. Developing mini geocaches where scouts get GPS coordinates to be able to find, that then moves to geocaches around the city. Many talk about how the phones that they use could be used. But there is something in having just a basic tool to do a complex job that makes it unique. Also having conversations about his son's learning and how he is going at school, makes for some interesting conversations in the different way students learn.

Working through on Sunday writing an educational paper with another teacher about a project that we have been developing over the past four years has been one of reflection and challenge.
While writing this paper, it has been amazing the number of ideas and learning that I have taken from Hobsonville Point, and how before I was at the school was developing ideas and context around.
One of the ideas was around how teachers could mentor each other, which I see as the basis of the critical friendship that we have at school. See Ros' post about what this means. http://rosmaceachern.blogspot.co.nz/2015/10/critical-friendships.html

The other is around growth mindset, being open to try new ideas, through searching growth mindset and Hobsonville Point Secondary School I came across Steve Mouldey's blog post which has been the basis of this weeks Hub lessons for me. https://stevemouldey.wordpress.com/2015/03/28/growth-mindset-activities-for-students/

I will have to search the #hpssblog (only just being introduced) more for other ideas I can use in my learning.

Adventurous

At the beginning of extended hub today I asked my students what adventurous meant to them.

Developing the habits and for students to be able to see them not just in school, but in life, is important to us. We spend a great amount of time in Learning Hubs, and developing the relationships with these hubs is important. Without these relationships today would have been a complete fail. Students need to be supportive, give things a go, have trust in each other. 

I have been looking at doing this activity for the last couple of weeks, but weather and other activities have got in the way. Today, though it was hot outside was the perfect day.

Once students entered what adventurous means to them, I showed them this video

Getting students to realise the opportunities and the risks, rules for this were important, only one person on the slackline at a time. We want everyone to try, as well as safe.

Everyone gave it a go, tried different ways to balance, walk the slackline. It was one thing that struck me though, was the support from all the students to walk the slackline with support from a helper. Even though there were many failures, the support was there to try again. Something that I want to see from other areas of their learning.

Yes, even I had to give it a go, I had to demonstrate what would happen, they thought that I was playing shaking the slackline at the start when trying to balance, however with their own experiences they found the same issue. Conversations about breathing that came out of the videos were then had.

Students want to give it a go again, develop their adventerous, I wish to show them this video on where it could lead, but that can wait for another day.

Here are some photos from the activity today

I will end this post with another piece of information, this is from our hub curriculum

Next time, I need another set of post it notes to ask the question, what does adventurous look like?

Things to do next
Developing support, only fingertips to be used.

• Walk the line and hug the pole.
• Swat - two feet on the line get down as low as you can, go past the wobble point
• One foot Balance, 10 seconds
• Walk Backwards
• Bounce (gentle bounce) offload

Hand hold support

• Onload, 30 cm jump, 90 degrees to the line, up and forwards to get on the line, control forward motion
• Side jump

Vocab
Relax and Breath. Try to feel whats happening. And only exercise will stop you from shacking. And
believe it or not: Everyone is shacking with it foot and leg like a lot.
Shacking is when the line wobbles a lot when you try to stand on it.

Thank you to Steve for supporting me in the developing of the ideas.