Don't Be A Wolf!

This year, we had the idea to do a "homegrown, local, keynote extravaganza" as the launch to this year's summer institute, ReFresh, which was held yesterday.

Several of us, from our own board, volunteered to speak briefly, with a personal slant, on the topic of Collective Efficacy. John Hattie has identified this attribute as the one with the single highest effect factor, and we wanted to focus on several aspects of Collective Efficacy, based on a recent book by Jenni Donohoo. Below are my remarks...

Good morning everyone! My name is Anne Shillolo and I am the TELT contact for the east and west, and a program coordinator. My topic, as part of our amazing local keynote extravaganza, is Culture of Collaboration – Focus on Instructional Improvement.

FIRST SLIDE - ME

Let’s begin with a look at me, early in my career. As an aside, this is probably the first known selfie of me. But I could just as easily have depicted myself as this:

SECOND SLIDE - WOLF

I totally admit that I was a lone wolf. Uh, next, I was going to say, raise your hand if … but I won’t:) Because, I know this room is filled with people who harbour a small part of themselves that totally loves the independence of the job. We take pride in the work we put into our program, into making personal connections with individual students in order to learn how they learn, our intense work to do our absolute best by each and every student we teach.

THIRD SLIDE - ME

So over the years, there certainly have been some changes for me, and not just the picture! Looking back, I can easily pinpoint two projects that turned me in a 180 as far as my approach and beliefs.

FOURTH SLIDE – EDUBLOGS LOGO

My first experience where I felt that I was truly working as part of the team was about 10 years ago, as a member of a TLLP project on blogging. I was sort of the project leader. This was because I had approximately five minutes of experience with blogging. I had responded to someone’s blog - once. So as you can imagine we were all more or less on an equal footing!

However, what changed my outlook as a lone wolf for once and for all was the fact that TLLP paid for our group to meet once a month. This helped us learn together, share our questions, brainstorm about solutions, and come up with creative ideas for the use of our amazing school blog. People became comfortable with the collaboration that was going on. It helped us take some very big strides forward with educational technology. And by spring, other teachers in the building were asking for access to our blog site, to incorporate these activities into their own practice, because they could see both the pedagogical value of what we were doing and the level of student engagement. PAUSE In hindsight however, I can really see that we were at a disadvantage by not knowing the CI structure.

FIFTH SLIDE

But, a few years later the next big project that we undertook at our school was a killer CI, if I do say so! Of course, it was not perfect, as it was our first one. But it was truly memorable for all of us. For me, once again it was the availability of release time for co-planning and a timetable that accommodated co-teaching that made all the difference. As well, because the focus was on writing, and the room was full of very experienced writing teachers, the exchange of ideas from a planning, teaching and assessment perspective was tremendous. With all that insight, based on years of experience, we also had a strong sense of our goal and what an improvement in student achievement would look like. Our discussions were certainly not framed in an academic sense by the concept of "collective efficacy – culture of collaboration focused on instructional improvement," but that is exactly what we were doing, and, to me, why the project was so meaningful.

SIXTH SLIDE - WOLF

So, in conclusion, I challenge you all to kiss your inner wolf goodbye. I also challenge you to do better than I did. Ten years have gone by since that first TLLP and we can all benefit from what we have learned during that time. Be more intentional than we were. Gather more data. Join many professional learning communities, both in person and online. But above all, each year, value your school-based colleagues and dream big - together!

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What Is Primary Writing?

I will state up front that I have never taught a Primary language arts class.

So how’s this? I’m now going to write a blog post about teaching writing in the Primary grades, as an Intermediate teacher!

This is why I feel I am qualified to do so: many of those little primary learners eventually ended up in my grade 7 and 8 classes. I would have liked them to have had a “do-over”… a second chance at gaining expressive skills, and building on success from year to year.

My reason for writing is to muse and wonder about the use of technology in day-to-day writing classes in the primary grades:

• At what age or grade do we start supporting students with technology as an integral part of their program?
• What is the value of restricting children to printing or writing by hand, especially those with an identification?
• How much time should be spent on that, relative to learning effective technology-based writing tools?
• Considering the the SAMR model, is writing in primary something we should measure against SAMR? Or not?
• Is it time to go multi-modal in all aspects of literacy? Will that help us as teachers foster the 6Cs of 21^st century learning?

In writing this post, I got interested in comparing the SAMR model (substitution, augmentation, modification, redefinition) to the way we foster writing skills in the continuum of grades from K to 8. Can we re-define writing, and still have it count as writing?

Here are some results of a simple definition search for the word “writing.” They range from very limited, to definitions that are open to 21^st century interpretation.

Here are two old-school definitions:

·      Google: the activity or skill of marking coherent words on paper and composing text.

·      Merriam-Webster: the act or process of one who writes, such as: the act or art of forming visible letters or characters.

But personally, I was intrigued by the following definitions.

·      Free Dictionary: The act or process of producing and recording words in a form that can be read and understood.

·      Wikipedia: Writing is a medium of human communication that represents language and emotion through the inscription or recording of signs and symbols.

I know that for some teachers, this topic is old news, and something they have examined in their own practice over a period of years. For example, one of Aviva Dunsiger’s posts that I have cited below is from 2010… However, I believe there are many other teachers who have not reflected on this, or who hold strong beliefs on methods of teaching writing without technology. This means that our schools are taking a wide range of approaches, and I’m not sure that students en masse benefit.

Is it still a valid teaching strategy to have a whole class of grade 1 or 2 students write a journal entry in a notebook every day? Is it really necessary that young, identified students struggle every day with their pencil and paper? I know they certainly struggled in grade 8, in the years before classroom technology.

Based on my Grade 7 and 8 students, my observation is that this kind of routine is not the best way to build a confident writer. It builds a school-hater instead.

I frequently saw the results in Intermediate - the students arrive still unable to formulate a written piece longer than a sentence or two, or maybe a paragraph. Even worse to me was what I called "self-limiting" or "self-censoring." This what occurs when a student who struggles with written output learns how to write the absolute minimum to avoid having the teacher tell them to complete their work. These well-informed, articulate and opinionated young people would simply write the shortest sentences in the shortest paragraphs, in order to pass under the radar. And then be able to shrug off any suggestion to extend their thinking. As they were also moving into grades where marks count and permit access to some careers, this was heartbreaking on a number of levels.

These were bright kids, full of creative ideas. In Grade 1 or 2, we might say that they were unable to get this onto the paper. By grade 8, they are unwilling as well as unable.

I found it extremely difficult to reverse this mindset and raise ability levels in the course of one year, for the following reason.

For me, the worst realization of all happened when we began to see the availability of SEA laptops and iPods and audio recorders for some students, combined with more computer lab time. Even with new tools available, the self-limiting was so ingrained that they still struggled to express themselves in a grade-appropriate manner.

So my final question is: why are we waiting "until they are older" to provide daily tech support as an integral part of our students' programs?

I think it would be great if primary students were able to use speech-to-text apps or audio recorders as a matter of course, to support not just their day-to-day learning but to build patterns of thinking and expression that are a true reflection of their capabilities.

Not to mention the wide range of multi-modal apps such as Adobe Spark that truly open up the “writing” experience.

Here are a few inspiring and thought-provoking sources:

Beth Holland, Redefining the Writing Process With iPads

Edutopia, November 26, 2013

With what we'll call Writing 3.0, students and teachers can:

·       Organize and draft through handwriting, drawing, text and voice

·       Collaborate and incorporate multimodal feedback

·       Create a final product that demonstrates mastery and communicates understanding beyond the literal confines of paper

Dr. Kristi Meeuwse, Using the iPad for Writing in Kindergarten

 iTeach with iPads Blog, February 16, 2016

Aviva Dunsiger – Is It Writing?

Living Avivaloca, April 11, 2015

Aviva Dunsiger – Redefining Writing

Living Avivaloca, January 16, 2010

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