PP planners CfU with fellow-teachers and students

Visible learning became the point of our discussion and reflection this week.The automatic answer was "yes" and I asked how do we know this happens in our class? How do we know that students and teachers share a common understanding of the purpose and progress for the PP?

AN: Just the fact that you are aware of how you present the information is important. Making sure our starting point was passion, making sure that our initial focus was what the product will look like and provide examples of that product. All the technical details were unpacked slowly and not delved into at the outset. The whole group discussion with other supervisors help - the explanations of AOI – but not everyone can attend them and so there is a gap in information. Do other teachers and students, who are not in our supervisor group, understand everything that is clear to us? Or is it, as the literature says, us teachers getting excited about what we are doing and its changing our view points but not our students (the other teachers) or the third level which is the actual students. 

ED feels that other teachers are starting to understand what is happening so that they can help their students. He described a lesson that he co-taught to help explain something that the other teacher was not comfortable with. As the lesson carried on the other teacher started to take ownership of the lesson herself which links directly to the comment made on the quality of the relationship between teacher and learner. We understand the goal and the process of the PP is clear. We have not interrogated whether the other teachers understand or whether the kids understand. 

We collated a number of questions to check for understanding and that will be carried out in the next lesson with teachers (Tuesday) and learners (Wednesday).  

How do we know the extent to which students understand or meet the objectives we set for them?

In our study today we watched students acting out a mime to describe their own learning. Their aim was to convey their understanding of content relating to print art and the work of specific artists. We could clearly see that students often struggle to take ownership of difficult concepts, such as the concepts presented in the lesson. Even after two interactive presentations given to students, letting them do some writing, discussing the content in small groups and as the whole group, having them ask questions and answer questions, watching tutorials, asking them to role play, giving them homework sheets to check for understanding and finally asking them to convey their understanding through miming and ultimately explaining their thinking, we were uncertain that everyone grasped the concepts. We were also surprised that in the mimes, some groups have repeated mistakes that were corrected in prior presentations.

The question remains: how can we be sure that our students are learning?

There were concerns in this case about why a student whose work was brilliant was hesitant of it being shown to the class as an example of the expected standard of work. It seems this student was being teased  by classmates for producing excellent work. This led to questions about the culture of producing excellent work. These social issues are very real issues in many schools and it becomes important for us to make decisions about how to establish a culture of being proud of excellent work and to nip academic bullying in the bud.

The group has a sense that we might need to have to adjust our focus within our lesson plan study.  

Scripting a collaborative lesson on Drugs

Today in the Humanities lesson study cell we focussed on understanding both content and teaching methods related to teenage substance abuse.  Prince Tshilowa and Hanno brought some content information around the causes of drug addiction and way the brain responds, myths about drug addiction, signs and symptoms and how people who have fallen into addiction might be helped. 

Anton Reynolds, part of our Teaching and Learning Centre gave us some broad stokes ideas about how we can sensitively and effectively begin to address this important topic with teenagers. We realised that we should try to steer clear of any form of moralising, preaching or excessive teacher talk. The group agreed that we will all take a good look at the content or “what” we hope to teach the Gr.9 classes and think of at least one learning task that will facilitate engagement with that particular piece of information or will lead to thinking around a question related to that information. 

We loosely divided the different kind of learning tasks to be looked at as follows:

• Heidi and Anton – A “do now” task that will help students to look at the issues and arguments surrounding substance abuse from various angels – Parent, Child, School, Police etc.
• Mpho and Joe -  A paper based case study type task that will help students to become aware of the “root causes” of addiction
• Hanno and Brain – A task based on a video clip of young addict sharing the story of his addiction and the difficult process of rehabilitation 
• Prince and Sibongile – A task that helps students engage with and understand the serious nature of the physical symptoms experienced by an addict

Our agreement for next week is that we will bring these different tasks in a typed format so Heidi and Joe can lead us in a session where we try to bring all the tasks together into one lesson script that we feel might be effective. 

Challenges of a new cell

So... the challenges our CPD cell has faced thus far this year have been around keeping the momentum going from week to week and agreeing on a common purpose. There are five members of the group from two different departments and if one person, especially the one whose lesson is being focused on, is absent it is difficult to meaningfully engage with the learning aims and objectives that we are working towards.  Totally unforeseen circumstances in both cases!

This week a colleague brought a suggested template of an assessment rubric for evaluating a ‘final product’ – in his case, for Design Technology. We discussed the challenges of subjectivity in marking, whether it is a summative assessment (test/exam questions) or formative assessment such as assignments and class work. 

Careful work done on all rubrics and given to students at the beginning of a unit can be a way of empowering students to monitor their own progress. It can also give them a clear sense of what is expected of them in a particular skill area, through a given task, helping them to see the detail of what should be aimed for. 

We suggested that making exemplar work available to students, in order to illustrate what is meant by a particular expectation, would also help to develop confidence in the students to know that they are headed in the right direction. In time, it would also enable teachers to come to a common understanding of what Grade-appropriate standards look like in their subject as compared to other areas in the curriculum. It will take time for teachers to find a common language in formative assessment rubrics that everyone (teachers and students alike) recognise as they apply to particular standards of achievement in their subject.

Teacher guides English FAL students

The person who offered an observation lesson was not ready, as the unit still needed to be completed. As an interim plan, we agreed to find a video lesson to observe and identify good learning. We chose a Grade 6 English lesson for the 1^st additional speakers. The lesson dealt with the introduction of similes and metaphors for use when writing good quality short stories. The lesson was well prepared for the purpose it was intended.

The following good things were observed:

• The teacher communicated instructions very clearly to the students
• The teacher prompted the students using leading phrases
• She used gesture and spoke slowly
• She used examples that the students were familiar with
• She timed their group work and kept encouraging by asking questions that forced them to think deeply

What was most impressive was seeing one boy in the group, who seemed not to follow what was happening, explained how his grandfather pressed his piano "elegantly and softly" - the words that describe what his grandfather did. Even though his face didn’t show the excitement when he was praised, he just nodded several times to show his understanding and that he was on the right track!

Concrete tips in the IP for thinking lessons

This week we had numerous video clips to view but some of us did not realise that the way one positions the iPad actually makes a difference so we had upside down clips, which took time to flip! The teachers focussed on the clips that showed the product which guided the discussions about levels of thinking. Although most students in grade 4 and 5 are on the early to middle concrete level, and function at that level during episode one, we did notice how the thinking progressed as they developed systems whilst organising the match schedule in grade 4 and the strength and club choice to make successful hits in a golf game.

Overall we decided that their learning taught us:

• To ensure we arrange student groups according to the type of lesson i.e. near ability vs mixed ability.
• Only do as much vocabulary that will relate to the part of the lesson that will be covered within the time on a particular day during the concrete preparation stage.
• Scaffolding will be required to get all students to understand episode one so that all have a fair chance at episode two.
• Most lessons take longer than the manual suggests and one should not force the process.
• It is wise to have material available for students to plan on or draw ideas as they think and develop ideas so that they remain engaged.
• The video clips improved but we still need to improve on our filming skills, transferring the clips onto our lap tops and the dissection of the process clips.

Mentor and mentees document their expectations

The Reception and Grade 1 teachers brought the documents they had been working on, which will compiled as a set of expectations for taking our Lebone mentoring process forward with our resident co-teachers and teacher-interns.

We now have a Lebone FP  Mentorship programme documented.

The mentee’s will do the self-assessment this week, based on the Marshall Memo, and pick out three areas on which they wish to concentrate. The agreement including the identified area will be signed next week 

Sciences repeat lessons to two groups: adjusting expectations and strategies

The PCR (Protein Chain Reaction) lesson will be taught by two different teachers to two different Groups, A and B. The first lesson with Group A had already been taught prior to our Monday cell meeting. Some of this lesson was videod reflection. A brief reflection on the lesson already showed that the learners enjoyed the opportunity to work at  their own pace. The point of why PCR is necessary was slightly lost on the learners, but that will be covered again in the second lesson of this lesson study.

DNA (Deoxyribo Nucleic Acid) replication- the knowledge component of this topic should rather be covered before this activity is done with the learners. The lesson will be repeated, with amendments,  by another teacher, using students in Group B. The second lesson of this lesson study is will involve a case study on PCR, which will be done in groups. Observations of colleagues teaching these lessons will also take place.

Languages: relationships, fun, rigor and relevance

The cell again reinforced the importance and foregrounding of honest, safe relationships in the classroom. It was also felt that the success of our cell was largely due to members trusting one another and feeling comfortable with observation and feedback. It was also emphasised how important having fun is in a learning environment. Making the curriculum both rigorous and relevant is a challenge which has to be constantly addressed. The constructive collaboration of the cell and pooling of ideas and good practice is paying dividends as evident in Richard’s Poetry lesson.

Languages: memorisation of idioms

There is content that needs to be learnt and memorized and teachers need to be creative when preparing and presenting these aspects of the curriculum. Amanda presented a very interesting lesson on idioms in Afrikaans. She made 5 groups, with each group including 1 of the 5 students in the class with mother tongue Afrikaans speaking skills. That did not in any way influence the students understanding of idioms as these are learnt and are not easily used in everyday language. Each group had explanations of all the idioms and they had to guess which idiom goes with which explanation. Prizes were given to the group with most points and the rules had to be obeyed. It was a very engaging, exciting, thinking and a collaborative exercise. The students learnt the idioms and will not easily forget them!

Next we will find a series of videos where adverbs are taught in the first additional language scope. After this we will try to implement some of the broader lessons we have observed. These include: 1. Identifying the ‘aha’ moments, 2. Noticing how teachers and students react to these 3. Find the best ways to catch such moments. The next observation lesson will be Gala's.  

Arts cell: building lessons around learning styles

This week was our reviewing and reflection time. We had the privilege to see a unit being taught over 3 lessons. The video material presented very interesting discussion points with regards to student engagement, student behaviour, classroom management and learning styles of different students.

The video material presented a chance to see at least four different ways in which students learn:

• watching and listening
• writing and taking notes
• interacting with one another and asking questions
• kinesthetically by creating a mime to explain the content in the Art lesson. 

We were intrigued to see the different engagement levels of students, the different energies and the different responses of students. They were presented with several ways to make sense of the content and this seems to have promoted a very positive learning environment. Further discussions included classroom management techniques, student discipline and behaviour management strategies.