Week 17 -

2. Professional learning / Akoranga ngaiotanga

Inquire into and reflect on the effectiveness of practice in an ongoing way, using evidence from a range of sources

Me patapatai, ā, ka whakaaro i ia te wā, ki te tōtika o ngā mahi mā te whakamahi i ngā taunakitanga mai i ngā tūmomo mātāpuna.

Whakataukī

Mai i te kōpae ki te urupā, tātou ako tonu ai.

From the cradle to the grave, we are forever learning.

Overview of the Two Online Courses and their Assessments for the Next 16 Weeks

During this 16 weeks of the online part of the programme, your learning will centre around a teacher inquiry, for which you will carry out a small-scaled cycle. Completing each step of an inquiry cycle in such a short timescale is obviously a challenge, so keeping up with the weekly tasks is important.

The Research and Community Informed Practice (RESEARCH) course over the next 8 weeks will, as the course title suggests, help you design a teacher inquiry that is informed by community needs and relevant research. This course will provide you with relevant information and tools to help you decide on your topic of interest, find useful resources and engage with the literature to write up a research essay based on your chosen topic. Then, based on insights gained from your topic investigation, you will plan for the take action phase of your inquiry.

The second 8 weeks of the online programme will cover the Applied Practice in Context (PRACTICE) course, where you will take action (implement your inquiry plan) and write a series of reflections on the different aspects of your inquiry, then use your collected evidence/data to evaluate your inquiry, and finally reflect on your experience of the whole Digital and Collaborative Learning programme.

Throughout these two courses, you are expected to interact online and submit evidence of your online professional conversations as part of your assessments. You’ll find this explained in each of the 4 assessment rubrics in more detail.

Now would be a good time to have a look at the assessment criteria and rubrics for the RESEARCH 1 (Research Essay) and RESEARCH 2 (Action Plan), so that you’ll know how to scope your learning during these first 8 weeks.

How Could You Document and Share Your Teacher Inquiry Journey

We recommend that you create an eportfolio as a place to keep the records of, or links to, all of your assessments. You might realise from last week that the Ministry of Education (n.d.) encourages the use of an e-portfolio as it is a platform to record work, reflect on learning, share learning and receive feedback and feedforward. And as we mentioned on week 16 in class, this might help you to share your process later as part of your appraisal or just keep your community informed.

Making a Copy of the Research Essay and Action Plan Templates

At this point it would be good for you to check that you know where your Research Essay and Action Plan documents are. The easiest way is to copy these Research Essay template (a Google Doc) and Action Plan template (Google Slides) and save hyperlinks to those documents into your eportfolio. If you need help for this, you’ll find it all explained in the Week 16 LEADERSHIP Class notes. You can download the templates and use those with Microsoft products too, or you can choose to use other formats.

Your Spiral of Inquiry

These 16 weeks are structured around one cycle of the Spiral of Inquiry model (Timperley, Kaser & Halbert, 2014). However, please note the Spiral of Inquiry is meant to be a continuing process, the end of this cycle of the spiral may open up a new cycle. Timewise, we try to fit the 2 courses into one cycle of the spiral of inquiry. Therefore, depending on your context, your inquiry should be carefully considered in terms of its scope so that you can carry out the inquiry within the 16-week time frame. It is not practical to do a full inquiry cycle in 16 weeks at the level of detail that you normally would in your practice. We do believe that going through each step of the cycle quickly can be a valuable first step.

If you need to recap on the Spiral of Inquiry, check the materials from week 15 of the LEADERSHIP course. You may also find the Spiral Playbook: Leading with an inquiring mindset in school systems and schools, useful to understand specific parts of the inquiry cycle during these 16 weeks.

Choosing Your Meta Topic(s)

To find a topic that both relates to the Digital and Collaborative Learning programme and your own passion, look at this list of these metatopics you studied during the first 16 weeks, as you already have a general idea of these topics or even have trialled one of the pedagogies in your practice (by metatopic, we mean a broad topic, as opposed to a specific topic that you will focus on in the context of your own inquiry). This time, you will have the chance to dig deeper and be more research informed. If you would like to revisit the content of the first 16 weeks, you can access the DIGITAL and LEADERSHIP course content via the Briefcase icon on the portal.

Your school or CoL might also have provided the scope for your possible inquiry topics for this or next year, so you can use those meta topics too as a starting point.Or remember in week 16, you are asked to ideate and add to the Inspiring Teacher Inquiry Questions / Subtopics padlet, revisit the padlet and consider if you would like to follow through with the topics you have added in or want to change to another direction. It is also good to know if there are other peers who share a similar interest so that you can start connect with them to share ideas, resources later in the following weeks.

Scoping the Meta Topic to Digital and/or Collaborative Learning

Since you are running this cycle of Inquiry through during these next 16 weeks, it is crucial that you narrow your topic to the scope of Digital and/or Collaborative Learning, or Leading Digital and/or Collaborative Learning.

Your chosen meta topic could for example be Agency, and the more specific one that meets your students’ needs and fits the scope of the Digital and Collaborative Learning Programme could be “Digital Technologies to give students Agency in their Collaborative Writing”.

As another example, if the meta topic that you are passionate about is Leading Online Discussions your topic could be “Using collaborative tools to lead online discussions with staff relating to the implementation of the Digital Curriculum”.

You should now ideate a few initial topic ideas to your eportfolio.

Scanning the Needs of Your Community(ies)

The first stage of the Spiral of Inquiry is scanning, and it relates to part of criteria 1 of the RESEARCH 1 assessment. 

For this RESEARCH course, the scanning stage is not only about finding out what is going on with your learners, it is also about trying to understand what relevant community needs are. A community in this context is a group of people having a particular characteristic in common.A community in this context is a group of people having a particular characteristic in common. You may want to learn from one or more communities for example, from community of students/ whanau/colleagues/ leadership/fellow Mindlab students, etc about what their needs are in relation to your inquiry. You may recall from week 8 of the LEADERSHIP course that we talked about education stakeholders comprising “students, families, community members, practitioners, policy-makers, society at large. Therefore, at varying levels, for effective change within the educational system reform efforts must incorporate or build on the beliefs, values, vision, and needs of each of these stakeholders.” (Zion, 2009).

Halbert explains in “the importance of scanning video” (supplementary) on Education Leaders (2018) how teachers often have “opinions” about their students but need to have a deep understanding of what is really going on, by testing out those opinions with evidence.

It is important to keep in mind that scanning is not seeking evidence to reinforce the status quo, or just looking at aspects of academic learning that can be easily measured. It means taking a wider perspective on learning and finding what your stakeholders think and feel about their learning. (Timperley, Kaser & Halbert, 2014)

Timperley, Kaser, and Halbert (2014) also mention that it can take up to 2 months for the scanning phase. However, as the online courses last only 16 weeks, you need to make sure that the scanning process for the inquiry you are working fits within this week.

Later on, we’ll collect and analyse even more data from your community(ies), but this week you should check that your community needs are met by testing those topics with the community(ies). Naturally, online learning makes it possible for you to delay this a bit if needed, but make sure you plan this week how and when to do scanning, as explained in the next section.

How to Scan from the Community(ies) and How to Record the Insights in Your Essay 

In order to understand the needs of your community(ies), we suggest you use either one of the information sources from conversations with the members of the community(ies), observations or surveys of their opinions towards the topics, or a combination of all three if you can, to have richer information. You can also use any other available data that you have already had such as student assessments, teaching reflective notes, student portfolio, etc as long as the data would provide useful information about the needs of your community(ies). 

Please note that week 23 will have more information about data collection tools, but those are used in the checking phase, later in this course, in which you evaluate to what extent you have achieved the outcomes you expect. In this week’s scanning phase, the tools are more need-based exploration. Therefore, in your conversations or surveys, you may ask questions about the community needs that relate to your chosen topics, for example, “how much choice/ownership do you feel you have over your learning?”. Or you can observe how, for example, students use a digital tool when they write.

If you need an example, on pages 24-25 of the (supplementary) Spiral Playbook (Kaser & Halbert, 2017), the authors explain what is involved in the scanning process and provide a case study of play-based learning inquiry.

You can record the feedback from your community(ies) in your eportfolio but you don’t have to include the collected information you gather from scanning the community needs in your Research essay (RESEARCH 1). Rather, in the essay, write down your insights gained from the information about the needs of your community, and where possible, support your ideas with quotes (from conversations with the community).

When you look at what you learn from scanning your community, you might find that you need to modify your original inquiry topic to better meet your stakeholders’ needs.

Is This Really a Good Topic?

Some of you might now wonder if your topic is a good one for the next 16 weeks. In short, we can be confident that it is good enough for now if it:

• is relevant to your practice and something you are passionate about learning as an educator and 
• relates to Digital and/or Collaborative Learning, or Leading Digital and Collaborative Learning and
• meets the scanned needs of your community

If you are unsure if your chosen topic is narrow and clearly defined enough you can email onlineteachers@themindlab.com - but most importantly it is good to keep in mind that it will anyway change as you research and run through the spiral of inquiry.

As this week’s Whakatauki suggests, “Mai i te kōpae ki te urupā, tātou ako tonu ai. From the cradle to the grave, we are forever learning”, you will be learning through the whole inquiry journey, so now you just have to have the courage to start somewhere.

Next week we ask you to find relevant research, so the more defined your topic ideas are, the easier it is to find research that helps you to move and define it further. There is no right or wrong topic of interest. However, as criteria 1 of the RESEARCH 1 assessment states, you need to “justify how the topic addresses the needs of your community”.

Integrating the Principles of Kaupapa Māori into Your Teacher Inquiry

Now you have narrowed down your topic of interest, it is time to consider a Kaupapa Māori approach in the process. The RESEARCH 2 assessment requires the principles of Kaupapa Māori Research to be integrated into your inquiry. Therefore, we would like to raise your awareness about this right from the beginning.

According to the Katoa Ltd website the potential of Kaupapa Māori is based upon six intervention elements or principles:

• Tino Rangatiratanga - The Principle of Self-determination (This week’s focus)
• Taonga Tuku Iho - The Principle of Cultural Aspiration (This week’s focus)
• Ako - The Principle of Culturally Preferred Pedagogy
• Kia piki ake i ngā raruraru o te kāinga - The Principle of Socio-Economic Mediation
• Whānau - The Principle of the Family Structure
• Kaupapa - The Principle of Collective Philosophy

Your Action plan template (RESEARCH 2) lists these principles and each week on this RESEARCH course, these class notes will look at one (or more) of the principles and provide some relevant questions, as examples that could relate to your own inquiry. You should then write your own notes to your eportfolio to answer these questions so that finalising your Action Plan becomes an easier task at the end.

This week we encourage you to look at the first two, Tino Rangatiratanga - the self-determination principle and Taonga tuku iho - the cultural aspirations principle, using the following questions:

• What relevance does the topic of interest have to your Māori students?
• Have you taken into account the ways your students think, understand, interact and interpret the topic of interest? How would you know?

You can, of course, select any other principle and raise your own questions as well. 

Tools for Individual Online Participation and Collaboration with Your Peers

As we reminded on the beginning of these Class Notes, you are expected to interact online and submit evidence of your online professional conversations as part of your assessments. This interaction has to be individual, even though you are able to work in a group with a maximum of 3 members for your Research essay (RESEARCH 1) and Action plan (RESEARCH 2). Whether you choose to work individually or in a team, it is helpful to share ideas and resources and seek feedback from other people.

Even though the main G+ Community or your location specific communities may be your preferred communication channels, some suggested alternatives are below with other tools that you can also use to communicate with each other, or manage and share resources.

Remember that only written conversations on online forums (such as G+ and the alternative communication channels listed on the left above) can be used as evidence of online participation (refer to the RESEARCH 1 and RESEARCH 2 assessment description for more detail). But other tools might also help you keep in contact and provide support to each other when needed.

For a start, how about sharing ideas about your topic of interest on the July 18 Google+ community under the ‘Research Essay’ category? And if you go and give productive feedback/feedforward for someone else’s post that could be your first online participation done? You could remind and provide ideas about the scope and community needs if necessary, since having the courage to narrow your topic of interest is crucial at this point. You can always change and widen it if necessary. But have the courage to ideate and start with narrower and meaningful ones this week.

Checking You’ve Done All That Was Required for This Week

The Tasks-list on the next tab helps you to check you have done all the required activities.

REFERENCES

Educational Leaders. (2018). Judy Halbert: Importance of scanning. Retrieved from http://www.educationalleaders.govt.nz/Leading-learning/Spiral-of-inquiry-leaders-leading-learning/Scanning/Judy-Halbert-Scanning

Kaser, L. & J. Halbert. (2017). The Spiral Playbook: Leading with an inquiring mindsetin school systems and schools. C21 Canada. Retrieved from http://c21canada.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Spiral-Playbook.pdf

Kaupapa Māori Research [Web log post]. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.katoa.net.nz/kaupapa-maori

Timperley, H., Kaser, L., and Halbert, J. (2014, April). A framework for transforming learning in schools: Innovation and the spiral of inquiry. Centre for Strategic Education, Seminar Series Paper No. 234. https://educationcouncil.org.nz/sites/default/files/49.%20Spiral%20of%20Inquiry%20Paper%20-%20Timperley%20Kaser%20Halbert.pdf

Zion, S. D. (2009). 'Systems, stakeholders, and students: Including students in school reform'. Improving schools, 12(2), 131-143.