Week 32 - PRACTICE: Key Change in Reflective Practice

What?

According to Bolstad and MacDonald (2016), the aim of reflective practice is to develop in teachers the agency needed to impact change in our curriculum and not merely passively adopt handed-down models. This aligns with Robertson’s (2016) work in leadership coaching whereby the reflection allows one to move from observing change to being part of the change to being transformed by the change.

Within my practice, one such transformation is around the area of flexibility - from the 13 key concepts arising from the Hack Education research (Patston & Nash, 2017). As I reflect on the changes I have made, I can see this notion of flexibility actually encompasses a multitude of areas and has pervaded much of my practice, including flexibility of:

• student groupings
• learning experiences
• teaching approaches 
• physical learning spaces
• leadership styles
• disposition (as I make peace with the notion I don’t need to have all the answers).

So what?
Flexibility in student groupings felt like an important issue to address from the outset. I had made changes to my maths programme to accommodate our school’s adoption of collaborative problem-solving pedagogies, however, I had retained elements of traditional literacy programmes, with students in set groups. I also wanted to develop greater agency within the class; they relied heavily on me to tell them what to do, when to do it, and why.

To find patterns in behaviour, and check my assumptions, I placed learners in different kinds of groupings and observed the following:

• greater interaction with peers when groups were selected by students
• higher levels of task ownership when learning experiences were chosen by students
• greater ease of planning the learning journey as they knew where they wanted to go

According to Christine Rubie-Davies in NZC Online (2017), teachers with high expectations for all learners use a wide variety of groupings that may change daily; this avoids the pitfalls of learners being stuck in groups for a long period of time that they begin to wear like a label. NZC Online (2017), adds that these high expectations empower all learners to achieve to the highest levels. 

Bearing this in mind, I attempted to implement a range of different types of groupings, with as much student input as possible. I developed some set buddies for my students with learning difficulties, akin to a tuakana-teina model, to provide consistency, and to ensure when larger teams were being formed, they had a close bond with at least one team member. I also explained that working with our friends would be acceptable but this could not happen all the time.

First observations revealed that my learners were unable to create a group with anyone, other than their closest friends, without teacher input. Boys would join a group that had girls, if I told them to, but they would NEVER suggest this themselves. Initially, I would step in and try to manage the situation but after a week I decided to simply observe...the first time it took 27 minutes of students staring across the room at each other like some sort of Mexican stand-off. I was a bit wiser the second time and suggested they would owe me any time it took over 2 minutes. That helped!

What’s next?

Now that we’re actually able to form a group, we are working on developing strategies for productive talk in collaborative situations. My ultimate goal is for my students to be able to coach, not tell, and use the skills of reflective questioning with their peers to encourage deeper thinking. Next term, we are starting with the GROW model...watch this space!

References

Bolstad, R. & MacDonald, J. (2016). An analysis of participant blogs supplemented by teacher interviews. Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research.

Patston, L.L.M., & Nash, S. (2017). Spaces and Pedagogies: New Zealand Tertiary Learning and Teaching Conference 2017 Proceedings. Auckland, New Zealand: ePress, Unitec Institute of Technology.

Robertson, J. (2016). Coaching Leadership: Building Educational Leadership Capacity Through Partnership. NZCER Press.

The New Zealand Curriculum Online (2017, September 12). Raising the bar with flexible grouping. [Web log message]. Retrieved from http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/Curriculum-resources/NZC-Online-blog