Beginning my Manaiakalani Innovative Teacher Journey

 First MIT Hui 2023

Our first MIT Hui was held in the stunning Omaha, a hop, skip and a jump from the beautiful beach.  Omaha means 'bountiful food' or 'great resources' in Māori. This proved to be very fitting because we were treated to plenty of delicious food, thanks to the wonderful Jenny.

It was great to finally meet everyone who would be on this amazing journey together. I was feeling a bit apprehensive before the hui, but due to the amazing process that we were led through by Dorothy and Matt, I am feeling a lot better about it all and can see what an amazing opportunity I have found myself a part of.

I enjoyed getting to know the other teachers in the MIT 2023 - Essie, Jayne, Gabe, Maiken and Crystal. I can tell that they are going to be a great source of support and knowledge over this year. We worked hard over these first couple of days together and I look forward to meeting up for more of the same throughout the year.

Getting Started

The main reason for applying to be part of the MIT is to solve a problem or challenge you are experiencing.  I was concerned with students not having the vocabulary or sentence structures to have the extended discussions needed to extend their learning in all areas of the curriculum.

We began the first morning with a role play.  Jenny was the Principal of Omaha Area School, Dorothy the Board Chair, Matt a 'surprise' ERO representative and the rest of us were parents of children attending the area school.  We were given specific roles to play, so you had to think carefully about what that person might be interested in, might get upset by and play your role as best you could.  The meeting was to highlight to the community the challenges that the school or students were facing.  It wasn't until after a few challenges that I realised that these were OUR challenges, our Moonshot Proposals that we had posed in our initial interview to be part of MIT 2023.  This was such a powerful way of sharing our proposals and alerting us to the fact that they were perhaps too wordy, that there were several challenges wrapped up in the one challenge and that they weren't clear enough to actually go about solving them.

Next it was our turn!  We buddied up and worked out how to share, using role play, what our challenge looked like for the learner and the teacher.  I worked with Gabe and as we chatted about my challenge he very quickly knew what he needed to do, as the student, to share what this looked like.  I was his student in his role play who was having trouble understanding what the maths problem was actually asking me to do.

I even made a cameo appearance in Essie and Jayne's role play!😆

Design Process

The first step in the design process involves learning as much as possible about the problem by understanding both the context of the situation and understanding the problem at hand from the perspective of the 'user'.  The role plays helped to get us thinking about our users and the impact on them.  The users in my case being myself as the teacher and the student who is experiencing this challenge with oral language.  During this process you can really empathise with each user to understand someone's experience through answering 4 questions:

1. What does your user do?
2. What does your user say?
3. What does your user think?
4. What does your user feel?

Working through this process the biggest revelation to me was that both users would have very similar feelings and I felt they would be ones of confusion, frustration and helplessness.

Interpretation - How Might We? - HMW?

We now needed to define our problem or challenge.  My initial challenge was very wordy and clunky:

"Students do not have the vocabulary or sentence structures to have effective extended discussions to improve their learning and understanding in all areas of the curriculum."

Through sheer grit and determination, some wonderful interjections from my fabulous colleagues and being given the magic of, HMW it transformed into:

"How might we explicitly teach students to effectively communicate their ideas?"

This was my stand out moment of the work we did in Omaha.  My wordy, clunky, quite negative sounding challenge turned into a positive sounding opportunity.  An opportunity that made me feel excited to get started on.

We took a break from thinking about our own opportunities and made suggestions on our colleagues' charts.  We were given some very handy sentence starters to frame our suggestions for each other.

Who?

Who does this Moonshot project involve?

Who am I collaborating with on this project?

Who are my team?

Who has a voice in this project?

It was interesting to really reach out and think about who could be valuable to me in this project.

Ideation

Our last activity, before we left the beautiful Omaha, was something called the Crazy 8's.  You had to think of 8 different ways you might solve your challenge.  You could be as original and creative as possible.  The idea being that the first few ideas would be easy to come up with and then it would be harder and harder to fill the last ideas.  

Once you had completed your ideas, you then shared these back to the group so that then they could come round and sticker or stamp their favourite options.  As a final round we had to go back and sticker or stamp our one favourite idea from each Crazy 8 presentation.  This meant we ended up with 1 or 2 clear favourite options.

This was so useful to start thinking about how I might solve my challenge and what other people valued as good ideas as well.  

What an amazing couple of days!  We covered so much, thought a lot, talked a lot and got so much achieved.  I can't wait until we meet up again at the end of the month in Auckland😊