Is Modern Learning a Fail? - Reclaiming Student Agency at St Joseph's

Is Modern Learning a Fail? 
- Reclaiming student agency at St Joseph's

In the years 2012-2015 at St Joseph's we formed a very clear idea of the skills and competencies we wanted our year 8 leavers to have.  The following two videos give some good examples of what this looked like:

Joel and Rhea explain Innovative Learning (2015)

Our students were raised on a consistent journey from year 4 to 8 where the senior teaching team had stable and well established practices of:

• key competency development, 
• individualised learning,
• collaborative learning, and 
• learning to learn strategies.  

The year 8 classes of 2015 and 2016 exemplify the success of this long term development.

The practice itself led naturally into the MLE-type changes in teaching and learning in 2015 which people have called "the hubs."  Unlike many schools which have MLE-designed buildings but have not developed the pedagogy, we had the pedagogy but not the buildings.  We chose to work around the buildings and do the best we could with them.

Children had a big say in designing how they would use their learning spaces.  The 2014 year 7 class designed them in Minecraft.  They set up their own Minecraft server and shared world which was our learning world for maths - measurement, direction and scale.  Here they talk about the design of the intermediate area for 2015:

What Happened?

Collaborative teaching and learning and flexible environments had been happening for several years already in our school but at the start of 2015 we had a tipping point with more staff ready for them than not and the decision was made to do it schoolwide.  Unfortunately it corresponded with a time when key staff moved on for promotions.  By mid 2016 the whole of the senior leadership team which had enabled this practice, including the principal, had changed, all securing promotions or sought after positions.

The outcome for teaching and learning by the end of 2016 was generally agreed to be a "fail."  The fail had nothing to do with learning environments or how the learning was structured.  All of our evidence over the period shows when key competency, collaborative learning strategies, and student understanding of learning rubrics, learning progressions and SOLO are in place, the students exemplify well managed, self-sustaining life-long learners who thrive in flexible environments.

I returned as principal at the end of 2016 and the community, teachers and many students were very vocal in letting me know the system had failed.  Just looking at it, I agreed.

I was able to establish through staff surveys, interviews and observations that what was really lost was:

• key competency development, 
• individualised learning,
• collaborative learning, and 
• learning to learn strategies.  

Without which there is no point attempting innovative learning.

So called "hubs" which we actually called Engaging Learning Spaces, evolved to meet the advanced needs of our learners and the pedagogy of some of our teachers.  Maybe the mistake we made was that it didn't suit the pedagogy of all of our teachers.   There was certainly sufficient in-built scope within the system as it was initially set up, to meet the needs of all of our learners.

Our 2015 and 2016 year 8 classes who had been well coached in these systems were a huge success for 21st century learning capacities.  This video shows how the children reflect on their readiness and how we structured the environment to support growth in self-management without forcing it past its limits:

In 2013-14 we worked closely with St Kevin's College in the Learning and Change network.  It has been inspiring to reopen these conversations with St Kevin's in 2017 and see how much they have taken from our learning practices at St Josephs.  They tell us these practices are highly successful for them and that they came directly from our collaboration in 2013-14.  Once again, these are to do with tracking the key competencies, knowing each learner individually, focusing on skills and processes and integrating curriculum.  All the things we are focusing on in 2017 for our rebuild.

Trish and Mannix present about our learning to teachers at St Kevin's College (2015)

If anyone doubts the necessity for collaborative learning and teamwork in the 21st century - have a look at my blogpost analysis of the requirements of the world's top employers: Its what we do together that sets us apart

These videos (with thanks to Jenny Jackson for taking and storing the videos) show this type of learning works for children who have been well-schooled in 21st century skills.

However, if these skills are weak, this type of learning system is not at all appropriate.

I am sharing this not because I have any intention of bringing back the "hubs" as people saw them.  We are talking with the diocese at the moment about a complete physical remodelling of St Joseph's and we will not be attempting to use our existing buildings as MLEs in the forseeable future.  We will not be attempting to do anything "out there" with our practice either.  But we will be bringing back the key things we have lost. We will always use our environment as an innovative learning environment though, as innovative learning is what we do once we get our key skills back together again.

At the moment we have children sitting in desks, in rows in many cases, well controlled by the teacher, and device-use limited.  This is a big step back towards 20th century learning and one we hope is temporary.  The needs of the moment dictate this response.  We need to start again.

I know that we can get back to the place where we can have children engaging thoughtfully in the environment beyond the school, where they can engage in meaningful self-directed projects and where holistic, cross-curriculum learning reflects our Catholic worldview on social justice.  As our charter summary shows:

2017 - Consolidate Embed St Joseph’s curriculum and pedagogy Knowing our whakapapa: being a Dominican school High achievement, future-focused, making a difference, being Catholic

2018 – Platform for growth Using technology,, design processes, critical thinking and creativity in transformative ways,  to engage with a relevant, active, purposeful curriculum

2019 - growing Making a difference to our community and world through solving problems that matter

It is staggering to find how quickly good things can be lost and how hard we have to work to bring them back and rebuild a team which can do this together.  Luckily and, I believe thanks to extensive prayer, we have an amazing new team and we just need to continue to focus our energies on the task ahead:

Term 2 Science Inquiry

Term 2.2016 Science Inquiry

BIG QUESTION: God gave us the earth and all that is in it.  Our job is to look after the earth.  How do we look after our earth?

We are using a traditional inquiry model with a SOLO twist to help us support the children's independence

First 3 weeks

 Second 3 weeks

Third 3 weeks

Student Agency - a starting point

Our March 2016 staff meeting.  Student agency is the underlying focus of our inquiry/SOLO based learning and our digital PLD in 2016

Comparison - traditional versus collaborative teaching

From: alisiaecameron.wix.com labelled for resuse

Here’s a scenario that my 14 year old son and myself made up to illustrate the difference between a traditional teaching model and a collaborative teaching model.  The difference that we were discussing between traditional and modern teaching is the traditional is based on the “one to many” model and the collaborative is based on “many to many” teaching, where the students themselves are teachers.

There are many shades of difference that we could have put in between the models and probably ones that go way beyond the “many to many” we’ve described.

This could be a level 4 social studies achievement objective: Understand how people participate individually and collectively in response to community challenges

Teaching Activity	Traditional – “one to many” model	Modern  - “many to many” model
Setting up the learning intention	We are learning Kate Shepphard’s role in shaping New Zealand culture through campaigning for women’s suffrage.	WALT identify effective responses to challenge and apply them in our own lives
Pre-lesson preparation	Teacher finds out about Kate Sheppherd.  Prepares work activities that help students learn about her life.  All the information will come from the teacher in the form of oral instruction, projected digital displays*, bookwork or worksheets. *The teacher may actually be a digital whizz and make fabulous digital learning displays but this does not necessariy make them a teacher who supports collaborative learning.	The teacher will spend time teaching the students how to: Do effective Google searches, Identify useful information etc according to my previous blog post: how to find information Then establish with the students some criteria for what useful information will look like in this context.  This will include some discussion on characters who have shaped history through responding to challenge. Students will be encouraged to follow characters they personally find interesting.
Seating plan	The students will need to get their information from the teacher so they will have to sit in rows or desks groups, or in a mat area where they can all clearly see and hear the teacher ie. traditional class structure.	It won’t matter where or how the children sit as they will be accessing their information from their devices. Their environment may well look like a café.
Where will the teacher be?	At the front	With the students.
Who will the teacher interact with mainly?	The whole class Individuals on an ad hoc basis	Individually as once the students start gathering the information via their devices the teacher will have access to their thinking processes beyond “real time.” In groups as students will be grouped to learn the skills (linked above) according to their needs.
Once the information is gathered/learned what will happen next?	There could be a test to find out how much the students remember about Kate Sheppherd. Or the students could make a presentation to share their learning.  This will be the re-sharing of information in a different format.  The most likely choices would be a poster, or a Powerpoint. There is some element of many-to-many learning if the students share their information back with their peers.  But not much because they all had the same information.	The teacher will move the children into “relational” thinking. This could be by identifying some challenging circumstances that people identified as shaping history have faced and comparing them with circumstances they have faced or could face in their own lives. The teacher could initiate this by modelling the process with a challenge from their lives. The children would need to be given tools to do this sort of comparison e.g. a venn diagram in digital format, or a Popplet where they can brainstorm and reorgnise information. They would need to be able to categorise aspects of a challenge – eg. People, conflict, physical hardship etc. At this point students would be accessing each other’s learning online and giving constructive feedback to each other according to co-constructed criteria.
And after that….	Summative achievement data is entered – students know x amount of information about Kate Sheppherd. The next unit is being planned.	Students will identify an area of challenge in their life.  If they can’t come up with one, their challenge could be about self knowledge – they don’t recognise challenge, or avoid it – the teacher might have to be a bit creative when helping these students. They can make a resolution to change one aspect of their behaviour based on what they’ve learnt and see how it affects their challenge. Extended abstract: They could then set up a challenge helpline or coaching service for younger students.  They could publish guidelines for identifying the aspects of challenge and giving strategic advice on behaviours which will help to meet different challenges.  This could be run through a blog.  Or it could be run in person on the playground like a peer mediation program. Or they could set up a challenge counselling program for their own class. Or they could identify a problem in their own school or community, analyse and categorise its components and use what they have learnt about people who shape history to apply positive action to the problem. OR they could write an app where people can enter information about their challenge.  The app will categorise aspects of the challenge and then analyse how historical heroic characters have met similar types of challenge and give feedback on strategies they can apply to their problems.  They could make a game app along similar lines. They could then sell their apps to Google and retire before they even finish school.  :)

Presentation to South Canterbury R.E. Cluster

I was stoked to have the opportunity to present to the SC cluster and I hope that many productive conversations come out of what we covered today.

SOLO Development 2013, St Joseph's School Oamaru

There is a saying, "Knowledge is power."  That used to be true when only certain people in certain situations had access to knowledge.  It is no longer true.  Knowledge is freely available through the Internet.  It is no longer a significant currency.

What matters now is what you do with knowledge, how you gather, analyse, create and evaluate.  What difference does it make?  This is why we have been working with a cognitive taxonomy - a way of helping our students get beyond the facts and opinions.

It doesn't really matter what taxonomy we use as long as we are consistently and systematically challenging our students to go beyond.  This page shares some of the things we have done with the SOLO taxonomy in Religious Education in 2013.

Some comparisons (relational thinking) from year 1:

Some extended abstract thinking from our year 8s:

This You Tube Video shows some of the extended abstract work our intermediate students did about what it means to be like Jesus in our world today.  They looked at peaceful ways people can protest about injustice and one of these was by using protest songs.  So we learnt to play and sing a protest song.

Year 7s think about their Young Vinnies community visits:

The Terrific Thursday's group is our New Entrant class and our visiting 4 year olds.

YEAR 6 - extended abstract questions about the God of the Old Testament

Why does God of the Old Testament change?
Why would God ask them to sacrifice and kill animals when he created them?

First and Second Order Change

We seem to be undergoing a lot of change at St Joseph's in Oamaru.

Actually, we are not changing at all.

Underlying everything at St Joseph's is relationships.  Prior to the time I was in the school, Jenny Jackson and the team, helped by our RTLB teacher Linda Schofield, underwent focused development on positive relationships for learning.  This was before PB4L but essentially, it was the same thing.  Since my time, we've consistently focused on our vision for learning - lifelong learners in the Catholic Faith and also on our Charter Goal which reads:
in 2012: Every child engaged in learning
in 2013: Every child engaged in learning for success
in 2014: Every child engaged in deep learning for success.

As each year went on we focused more and more deeply on what we actually wanted for our learners.

There's no way anyone decided - "Hey let's do digital learning or team teaching or buy some bean bags (only 4 per class) or whatever, just because everyone's doing it and its so, so modern!"

What we DID look for was examples either through research and theory, or through experience in other schools - good examples of ways teachers were engaging students in deep learning.  Plus we used our teaching as inquiry process - our own processes of teacher action research to investigate what actually did make a difference to student achievement in our school.  For myself I have found that systematic teaching of the key competencies of the New Zealand curriculum, combined with learning to learn strategies, makes a huge difference to student achievement and that has been going on for quite some time now, since at least 2008 - so nothing new there.  Combining these with digital technologies and flexible working and teaching spaces - has not, in my investigations, improved achievement which is already high but it has improved depth of achievement.  Children are more able to take the next step into making the learning their own and applying it in new situations.  To my mind, this is the most elusive aspect of teaching and learning.

In about mid 2013 we had sufficient information to make some decisions.  We decided we wanted our senior years, at that time we thought year 5+, now after listening to parents we think year 6+, to have the benefit of one to one devices - or as close to it as we can make it, from the beginning of 2015.

To the degree that individuals and/or stakeholder groups in the school or school system hold conflicting values, seek different norms, have different knowledge, or operate with varying mental models of schooling, a proposed change might represent a first-order change for some and a second-order change for others.

Waters, Marzano, and McNulty, 2003, page 7 from: http://instep.net.nz/Change-for-improvement/Sustainable-change/Four-views-of-change/First-order-vs-second-order

“First-order” change is change that is consistent with prevailing values and norms, meets with general agreement, and can be implemented using people’s existing knowledge and skills. A change becomes “second-order” when it is not obvious how it will make things better, it requires people to learn new approaches, or it conflicts with prevailing values and norms. Second-order changes require leaders to work far more deeply with staff and the community. 

The change we are presently experiencing - from the teacher's and the student's perspectives, is first order change - it does not challenge our beliefs about learning (look at the previous post below  - A Machine for Learning to see what the children think about learning).  An analogy for what is happening is it is like a snake shedding its skin.  The creature is the same in essence but it has grown and it needs to shed its skin in order to take on its new dimensions.

We have worked very hard to bring our parents along with us in this change process.  We have had parent learning huis where we have talked about SOLO and deep learning and why we need to make the practical and organisational changes we are presently going through.  We have also had a lot of discussions along the way and we have listened to our parents.  For example we first thought year 5+ for digital learning but listening to our parent feedback and concerns we have decided in 2015 we will be looking at year 6+.    But I acknowledge for many, outside of the staffroom, this is second order change.  It appears to be a change in values and beliefs.  A change in essence.  It is not.  Our essence is - every student engaged in deep learning for success.  How they get there is a moot point - it will be different from 1957, 1997, 2007, and it will be different again in 2017 and 2027.  Yet I imagine the essence of what we are trying to achieve will not vary so very much.