Thinking of coming along? Just fill in a couple of brief  details and you’ll get a link to my presentation. Three parts to this workshop:

1. Listen – I’ll share some background and use of tools in my experience as an Across CoL teacher
2. Discuss – share some thoughts with others about how to best evaluate digital tools
3. Do – have a play with all the tools mentioned then we’ll crowdsource an evaluation of some common platforms.

EdTechTeam has expanded it’s offering of Summits to three in NZ. This is the third one I have attended in Auckland and they are also great value and a good chance to connect with other like minded educators.

Here’s my notes from the opening Keynote.

Link to photo’s from the Summit

Link to summit website

Keynote notes

Link to Jamie’s twitter profile

“Education disrupts poverty”

“The impact of a teacher goes on for generations”

We’ve had tech for generations (movies in 1900s, TV in 1950s, Computers in 1970s). Now we understand the science of learning AND technology is part of our daily lives.

Generation Z – just go and learn, we needed some one to teach us.

Tech is changing our world

Skills needed in a technology world.

Source – The Economist

What problem do you want to solve?

Iteration is the result of critical thinking. Don’t assess with a grade, that is feedback that doesn’t help the student get to the next level.

Collaboration is how problems are solved.

Convert information into intelligence.

Original Google servers

Google Servers now

Current latest technology is the worst technology a 5 year old will ever now.

Remember these? My first type of phone.

Professor David Hopkins was hosted by ACEL for a one day workshop in Auckland that I was fortunate enough to attend. David has had a range of educational experience as both a researcher, civil servant involved in policy and as a practitioner. It is this combination of experiences and the work he has done as in the English educational system with the Blair government that makes him an authoritative voice on education.

Key learnings from the Workshop:

Session 1 – School and System Reform

Under pinning all efforts in education is a moral purpose. Every student can reach their potential (Equity)

Under the right conditions, every student can achieve. Those conditions include having the task the student is presented with being in their Zone of Proximal Development:

School development happens in Phases. Each phase needs different ‘ingredients’ and management styles. Successful strategies include:

• Bottom up target setting
• Inside out change

Session 2 – Teaching and Learning

Use instructional rounds (see a description by Robert Marzano) to deprivatise the classroom. Use these to identify ‘theories of action’. Over many of these instructional rounds, Hopkins identified 10 common ones:

Theories of action for the whole school
1. Prioritising high expectations and authentic relationships
2. Emphasising enquiry focused teaching
3. Adopting consistent teaching protocols
4. Adopting consistent learning protocols
Theories of action for the teacher
5. Harnessing learning intentions, narrative and pace
6. Setting challenging learning tasks
7. Framing higher order questions
8. Connecting feedback to data
9. Committing to assessment for learning
10. Implementing co-operative groups

What good teachers do – assign students appropriate and engaging learnings tasks within their ZPD (in an average class this may be 4 different tasks.

Think like a doctor – diagnose the problem, apply a suitable treatment.

Improving outcomes for students is linked with shifting teachers to increase their ‘circle of competence’. The driver is intrinsic motivation which is made up (according to Dan Pink) of autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Five conditions for building intrinsic motivation among teachers

1. Maintain structures for scaffolding teacher development
2. Make peer coaching ubiquitous
3. Create protocols for both teacher and learning
4. Incentivise teacher teams
5. Ensure classroom observation focuses on learning

Peer coaching:

• In triads rotating around turns at doing the observations
• Theory-> Demonstrate->Practice->Feedback->Coaching
• Example of Pat Cash coaching Shane Warne:

Session 3 – Leadership

The playbook for success:

• get early wins
• decide on non-negotiables (related to the moral purpose) and secure resources
• install capable and like minded people
• deeply engage with stakeholders

The narrative + a credible plan + moral purpose = action

Strategic acumen: the actions you take tomorrow as a leader contribute to where you want to be next year

Leadership style – varies with what stage the organisation is at.

So this article about the ‘only brown kid in the room‘ has been shared by a couple of staff  at my school and, combined with this article about how a NZ student still experiences racism got me thinking about that whole thorny issue of ethnicity in education.  I don’t claim to be an expert and be able to offer the silver bullet, but I do know that my understanding on these types of issues gets deeper when I hear other peoples views. And often views that are contradictory to my own deepen my understanding the most.

If I look at data from my school, we can produce evidence that support the view argued in the NZ Herald article that there is an achievement gap if we disaggregate by ethnicity.

Graph shows Ethnicity vs Total credits gained with the red line being that magic figure of 80 credits.

We can see that the median for Maori is less than for other ethnic groups (and yes, I’m quite happy to be challenged on the use of total credits as a measure of academic achievement – there are holes in the data used but I think it shows a trend). But what about if we combine this data with socio-economic factors?:

So, when we look at the data this way we see that there is quite a spread of achievement across both ethnicity and decile (socio-economic rating). It is not only ‘rich’ kids that achieve, and it’s not only ‘brown’ kids that fail. So what am I trying to say? Ethnicity and socio economic status don’t really tell us that much about a student. I’ll try and explain this point in a different way. Below is an excerpt from an email a tutor sent about a new student joining one of my classes:

“XXXXXXX will be starting in the Inquiry class at the beginning of Term 4.  His family have just moved up from Christchurch.  He has sat our Entrance Test and tested as well as any student that has sat the test, admittedly a year later than most of them.  He was also very methodical in his approach doing the test.

He knows absolutely no-one at the college, so might take a while to settle.  Please help him to do so.  He says he did not enjoy the ‘open-plan’ environment of his last school in Christchurch.  This may have been due to new schools, teachers, systems as an aftermath of the earthquake.  He was initially concerned that the Inquiry class would be the same.  However, he is prepared to give it go.”

All very useful information in getting to know this student before I taught him. I think most of you would agree that this is very appropriate information sharing, and the tutor was communicating the important information that will be useful to a teacher. But notice what’s missing. No mention of ethnicity or socio economic status. Imagine if all this tutor had passed on to me was like ‘he’s a poor European’, or ‘he’s a rich Maori student’. This information is really of no use to me to getting to know the student as a learner. Yet we hold these categories (ethnicity and socio-economic status) so dearly when we are trying to measure student achievement.

I reckon we should stop categorising students by ethnicity. It is not a great predictor for success at school and can lead us to making assumptions about a student that are not accurate. Let’s focus more on indicators that are more meaningful (achievement data from previous school, diagnostic testing, learning preferences, topics the student is curious about etc.) and getting to know our students as individuals.