KPMG Hui #2

It was great to see everyone again.   Once again it was Lawn Cafe for breakfast and then the short walk to the KPMG building where we were greeted by the lovely Justine.  The space that we get to work in at KPMG is such a wonderful environment to be in.  It works so well for the different ways you might want to work, a variety of seating spaces and wonderful big windows, so you still feel connected with the outside world.

Our session was a chance to each share our projects and where we were currently at with them.  Wow, there has been some amazing thought and time going into these solutions.  I am really feeling like I need to give my solution some serious time to ensure I am continuing to move along the path towards it being something that will be useful in my quest to help the students in my class become more confident in the way in which they share their thoughts and ideas.

I shared my prototype with my colleagues at school and I received some positive feedback and then some good ideas on how I could go about creating my toolkit.  I need to keep in mind what solution I am trying to come up with first and foremost.  

Maiken and I got to chat together about where we were on our journey and what our solutions are at this stage.  That was a great chance to see the amazing work that Maiken had already put into her solution.

I must admit I felt quite relaxed presenting to the group.  I feel like we are definitely on this journey together and I always feel supported and know that if the group has any suggestions they will definitely share them with me.

So onwards and upwards, I need to start creating this toolkit, keeping my teaching and my students front and centre.  Keep tuning in to watch my progress.

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.

KPMG Hui #1

Reunited once more!  It was lovely to catch up with the group again at Lawn Cafe for breakfast before our first KPMG session on Monday 27th March.  We were greeted at KPMG by the lovely Justine and shown to the wonderful facilities that we will be using at each of our Auckland - KPMG sessions.

We began with a quick WWW to warm ourselves up and get our thinking on the right track.

• What has emerged to add clarity and confirmation to my thinking? Loving my HMW question to really focus in on what solution I might come up with.
• What has challenged or confronted my thinking?  Is what I am perhaps wanting to create going to be of use to anyone other than me? Are the assumptions I have made correct?
• What HMW question am I currently confirming?  How might we explicitly teach students to effectively communicate their ideas? 

Next we each shared our Prototype Planning slides that we had completed before this meeting.  This included our potential features or how the solution might work, what the solution might look like and checking our assumptions.  It was valuable to share and talk out loud, sometimes the things we have written sound quite different when we actually have to share them verbally.  I am left wondering if my solution actually matches up with my HMW question.

We were then given time to start working on a prototype of our solution.  This will be shared far and wide to get as much feedback as possible before we invest a good portion of the year creating our final product.

I am asking for feedback via this Google Form, if you happened to be interested enough to invest a little bit of your time and let me know your thoughts.😊

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😊