Mentor Meeting Minutes - Term 2 & 3 2017

Staff Meeting - UOI5, PD Review & Exhibition Part 1 - Tuesday 1st August 2017

Staff PYP Professional Development Day - Concepts - Friday 21st July 2017

Connecting provocations and wonderings - Understanding the types of engagements that will result in deeper and more enduring learning.

Thinking about what is essential to include in class - eliminating nice to dos. Student are excellent at accessing new knowledge through their use of technology so we need to think critically about what we will include in class - there must be a good reason.

How do you open up so that students have a voice in where the inquiry will go?

Rocket Writing - 1 minute to write
What is knowledge building?

How can you engage all students in the first 2 weeks of the unit?
How can you make units meaningful/purposeful for students?
What is the piece of the unit that the students are going to personally engage with?

Related concepts give you the direction of the unit and it will be these that you can use to engage the students.

Neil deGrasse Tyson - The Most Human Activity

How do you get in the way of student discovery?

How is this learning engagement going to take the students deeper in their understanding of the conceptual ideas? - Learning engagements can serve as a formative assessment.

What does documenting look like?

How curiosity changes our brains

Primary resources - People, places and things

Investigation to engage with something.

Using books is inquiry for information NOT inquiry for meaning.

Inquiry-Based Learning: From teacher guided to student driven

Authentic and purposeful experiences that are trans-disciplinary.

Real-world contexts.

"The greatest enemy to understanding is coverage" - Howard Gardner

Which are concepts and which are facts?

Concept - through the lense of...

You have to be connected for you to validate prior knowledge.

Provocations are key to help students connect their prior knowledge.

Look into: Upside-down drawing

UOI Review - Conceptual Unpacking

Provocation

Curiosity and Wondering Activity

What concepts may be focussed on in each provocation?

How could you adapt and change these to suit your on UOIs?

Resource Ideas - Austral Ed - Glee Books

Science Literacy: Sparking curiosity and solving real-world problems

Professional Readings - Learners in the driving seat

National Standards and the NZ Curriculum

I have found this image very useful when analysing my e-asTTle writing samples. It have helped me to gauge what level the students need to be at at this point in the year. This has therefore aided me to make my Overall Teacher Judgements for this term.

My students and I have been able to work together to set relevant next steps for writing based on these new writing samples. The students were able to clearly identify where they are at and what they need to work on using the rubric shown below.

Staff Meeting - Tuesday 20th June 2017

Staff Meeting - Tuesday 6th June 2017

Assessment is for learning rather than of learning?
- Can this be both??
- Are Summative Tasks for learning or of learning or are they both?
https://readingpart2.wordpress.com/2013/02/16/assessment-introducing-the-pyramid/

John Hattie - 8 Teacher Mindsets

Who is the change agent?

How does the PYP connect to the Point of Balance?

Which assessments are Formative and which are Summative?

Does it depend on how they are used?

The Argument for Feedback

- HOW? Verbal/Written - Specific.

-WHEN? In the moment - more meaningful. Often.

- WHERE? In books/verbally/small groups

- WHO? Teacher/Peers/Self-assessment

Numeracy - Observed by Regan Aspden - Term 2

Feedback/Forward by Regan Aspden

CoL Meeting - Tuesday 16th May 2017

Tuesday 16 May 2017

Hillcrest CoL Meeting - Tamahere Community Hall

Ponderings : Across school roles… more observations? More pressure?

Lots of collaboration, discussions. Time has been taken in order to make the CoL effective and fair for all involved

Evidence  guiding…

Positive

Out of class. Effect?

Here's what:

So what?

Now what?

How can we harness the power of the collective?

What does this mean for our leavers?

What is success for our learners throughout the pathway?

Learning progressions

How can we move more students from at to above?

87% of students moving through to Level 4 (tertiary education).

Achievement challenges that are similar across schools.

In school roles/across school leaders will meet about these and discuss common targets.

Joint PD.

The biggest educational change since tomorrow's schools.

What Next?

Blog with regular updates to keep informed.

Aim is that Waikato Uni helps growth in leadership.

FMG Stadium - Expo 16th May

How can we impact positively on our learners?

http://padlet.com/stuarta2/hillcrestcol

Writing Book Monitoring - Thursday 30th March 2017

Monitoring of a random selection of Writing Draft Books from Room 8.

Observation - Literacy - Wednesday 22nd March 2017

Staff Meeting - Student Support - Part 2 - Tuesday 21st March 2017

Waiata

Physical Altercations
Disclosure - abuse out of school
Agencies

Staff Meeting - Tuesday 21st February 2017

Assessment

- Using scale scores vs. using stanines

- How can PAT results be used to effectively inform Overall Teacher Judgments?
- Use of scale scores to track students achievement over time

Staff Meeting -E-Porfolios - Tuesday 14th February 2017

Notes:
- Slight changes to the POB
- A lot moving out of UOI books to E-portfolio
- Assessment page for student print out of PAT student report pdf - can email this to all students, Goals, Reports (in future), Standardised testing.
- Permissions discussion re who needs to see assessment data
- New Assessment folder in all students Google Drives.
- Could use simple concept of Making Connections video with class? Similar to String Activity. Begin in primary school groups and then move to discuss with other groups.

Professional Readings - Assessment in the Inquiry Classroom

Professional Readings - Teaching For Conceptual Understanding

My Thoughts:

Having students comment on their original work allows them to identify their own learning and promotes student agency. As it states in the article it allows them to 'know what they know'. I would like to try this strategy with my new students this year beginning with UOI1. I think that the age group that I teach would be more than capable of commenting on their own learning. It will help them to connect prior ideas to new knowledge, which is a useful skill for them to be able to apply in all areas of the curriculum.

Mentor Meeting Minutes - Term 4 2016

Measurement Workshop - Wednesday 23rd November 2016

Resources:

Probability Workshop - Wednesday 16th November 2016

Activities

Staff Meeting - POI Review Part 1 - Tuesday 15th November 2016

Looking back at our Programme of Inquiry for this year and reflecting on what worked well. Now that we have completed these inquiries what could we change/refine?