Manaiakalani Innovative Teacher Project Update

Kia ora, I am Michelle Wilkinson, a teacher at Belfast School in a Year 5/6 class.  I am currently on the 2023 Manaiakalani Innovative Teacher journey.  At the end of last year I applied to be part of the Innovative Teacher Programme.  I was very excited to be successful in my application and at the beginning of this year we started the year long process.

Through our first hui at Omaha, which you can read about in my separate blog post here, we followed a very well structured process that ensured we left at the end of this time with our, "How might we...?" question created.  We were also able to brainstorm ideas on how we might go about creating solutions to answer this question.

My question is:

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

My next step was to create a prototype of my solution to check with a wider audience as to the usefulness of the toolkit I was thinking about creating.  I received some very valuable feedback and some very positive comments about how useful people would find my toolkit.

My major take-away from this process was how big this solution could actually get, so I needed to be careful to be designing the solution for me first.  I also needed to be thinking about how best to organise my resources etc. in my toolkit so that when others are using it, it is easy and clear to find what they need. I am planning to create my toolkit with a range of strategies and activities to get students talking, build their confidence in oral language and make it a normal part of our school day.

I have made a start on my finished product. Here is a sneak preview of what it will look like and what it will include.

Keep checking back for updates and how successful I was in creating my Talk the Talk toolkit.