adapted from Staathof, 1999, p132,  L Frances-Rees, 2004

Action Research 2, 2013

RESULTS

Of the 5 boys in question, one was particularly motivated by his project and was self managing, reflective and innovative throughout the project.  Although usually, he does not go out of his way to get his writing to a sufficient standard, on this occasion he made the effort to review his writing with a view to reaching the standard in content and structure as well as language and surface features.  He did reach the standard.

Three of the remaining boys showed writing in the same time period which met the standard.  Although motivated by their projects, no-one else was sufficiently motivated to improve their writing, during the project.  Actually, writing is not normally too much of a difficulty as the students know their rubric and clearly know what they have to do to achieve and most will make the effort to make that happen.  On this occasion, if anything, they were less motivated to write to a good standard.  This observation led to the next part of the action research which can be seen on action research 3.

Visit to Myross Bush School

Our senior learning team visited Myross Bush School in Invercargill in week 2.  We were interested in their school because they have a "traditional" school building but they have not let single-cell classrooms hold them back.  We were very grateful to them for the visit and we saw lots of interesting things.  Overall we have some very similar things happening, such as using SOLO, BYOD, and Google Docs.  We were really interested to observe how they use spaces for team teaching with one space used primarily for workshops and the other as an independent working space with a supporting teacher.  The key to making all of this work is having transparent learning progressions for students to use and a variety of robust (and dependable) means of students to evidence their learning.

One thing I'm going to change is I thought we would need to use a Google site for planning and lesson guidance as I've been doing with my class.  However, I can now see that all of that could happen as Google docs - good because can personalise them and share them with students very easily through Teacher Dashboard.  Then Google docs can be inserted into a site which will be publically available.  It means that most of the planning work can be in docs rather than a site which everyone says they prefer.  The blogs will link in to an overall Google site so they can still be a prominent point of sharing.

Myross Bush School - similar learning environment to our school (very nice sandpits and adventure playgrounds) and using their spaces creatively to engage students in active learning, through team teaching.

Tools for Deep Learning at St Joseph's Oamaru