Meet Team Māori – at CORE

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Whare

Tēnā koutou katoa ko te whānau Māori o CORE e mihi atu nei

CORE Team Māori has grown significantly over the last 2 years. The team is spread throughout CORE and we are thankful for the opportunity we have had to meet regularly and support each other across our different areas.

These hui are primarily about whanaungatanga where we can get together in a Māori environment and discuss issues that are affecting us professionally and personally. We are known to sing and laugh a lot.

As Kaihautū Māori it is important we have a whānau to guide us and keep us safe in the leadership roles that we have. With this whānau as a backbone we are then able to be more effective across the wider CORE whānau in providing support particularly pertaining to Māori issues.

The sharing of responsibilities is best evidenced in the thinking that has gone into ‘tātai aho rau’. Beth Dixon, Daph Papuni and Justin Roberts have led this discussion and they have presented to both the Team Māori whānau and the CORE Senior Leadership Team to refine that thinking.

Te Marautanga o Aotearoa, Te Marautanga o Aotearoa Online, He Pikinga Reo, Māori Medium Publishing are the contracts the bulk of our team are involved in. However Māori facilitators are also gaining in numbers in the CORE Blended e-Learning team. Te Manawa Pou is another important contract. We also have whānau in CORE Admin and Digital Media and Research.

The Pasifika team are also a valuable presence within our whānau hui and as their numbers grow we are able to support each other.

The cultural support that we can give across the wider CORE whānau is important to all of us whether it be reo, tikanga, waiata or Māori student achievement. We are always happy to support even if it’s just a skype call to task questions.

The Māori team, like all at CORE, is based around the country and many have tribal responsibilities within their iwi. These responsibilities add value to our professional roles particularly in terms of the wide network relationships and indeed the whanaungatanga that we bring in to the CORE environment.

That basically means we can get a good feed in whatever part of the country we may be visiting.

The opportunity CORE leadership have given us to work in a way that is appropriate to our needs means we can put our best foot forward in supporting our CORE colleagues and wider into the kura that we work in.

Nō reira e te whānau whānui o CORE tēnā tātou katoa.

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Modern Learning Environments: Not ‘any colour as long as it’s black’

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Learning hub, Stonefields School
Learning hub, Stonefields School
Breakout spaces offer flexibility

When Henry Ford said of his Model T cars ‘You can have any colour you like… as long as it’s black’, he could just as easily have been talking about high school when I was young. Apart from a few amazing teachers who were as inspiring as they were enthusiastic, most lessons were pretty black and grim. For the most part we sat down, faced the front, and copied down notes from overhead transparencies. If we were lucky, once or twice a year we might do something interactive or practical.

Thankfully, Henry-Ford-style learning has disappeared from most classrooms, but there’s no escaping the fact that we ask many of our best teachers to inspire and engage young people in buildings designed around the time Henry Ford was making cars. Unless you’re lucky enough to teach in a classroom that’s less that 10 or 15 years old, it’s a fact that the design of your school was not informed by a good understanding of how the brain learns. We’ve made huge strides in cognitive science over the last 15 years, and this has resulted in pedagogies that embrace the nature of learning: they are personalised, socially constructed, differentiated, responsive (and often initiated by the students themselves), and connected to authentic contexts and the world outside.

Student learning

So if we were to design physical learning environments that matched and supported what we know about learning, what features would they have?

  • Flexibility: the ability to combine two classes into one and team-teach, split a class into small groups and spread them over a wider area or combine different classes studying complementary learning areas.
  • Openness: modern learning environments traditionally have fewer walls, more glass and often use the idea of a learning common (or hub) which is a central teaching and learning space which can be shared by several classes. The ability to observe and learn from the teaching of others, and be observed in return. Access to what other learning areas and level are learning so that teaching complements and builds on
  • Access to resources (including technology): typically a learning common is surrounded by breakout spaces allowing a range of different activities: for instance some students reading, some engaging in project space or using wet areas, reflecting, presenting and displaying or learning in a group. There is often a mixture of wireless and wired technology which means students have access to technology as and when they need it, within the flow of their learning.

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Learning Common, Hobsonville Point Primary School

Teacher learning

So modern learning environments promote better student learning, but are there other advantages? Well the big one is teacher learning. More open and flexible spaces also create more collaborative communities of practice for teachers. Having access to the teaching practice of one’s colleagues; to model and to be modelled to, supports the development of effective teaching practice far more than teaching in an isolated, private space. This ‘de-privatisation of practice’ means that honest exploration of teacher strengths and weaknesses can take place in an open and supportive environment.

Beginning and provisionally-registered teachers have far more support around them in open learning spaces. Their progress can be monitored, supported and celebrated by their more experienced colleagues and ongoing low-level mentoring is easy to put in place because they have seasoned professionals to the left and the right of them.

Note: this blog post contains extracts from a CORE Education white paper on Modern Learning Environments.

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CORE Ten Trends 2013: Personalisation

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Education, at its heart, is about personalisation.

Schools provide a safe environment to nurture their students’ talents and make the most of who they are. We’ve moved a long way from the old approach of everyone facing the front and writing down the same thing at the same time. That model became popular, in part, out of necessity—we didn’t have the technology to set a class 15 different tasks at a range of levels of difficulty. Technology has meant that we can personalise learning and make a real difference for each child.

Drivers for this trend:

  • Social: rise of the free-agent learner; peer-to-peer learning
  • Technology: adaptive and assistive technologies
  • Educational: agency in learning, adaptive learning, individualised education plans (IEPs), tudent initiated learning and pathways

The personal process of learning

The more we learn about learning, the more we see that it’s a deeply personal process. If you and I are learning exactly the same content for the same course, we’ll bring very different sets of prior knowledge, experiences, attitudes, and contexts to our learning. Because of that, we’ll engage with the material in different ways: you might be faster than me, but I may be better at applying it to real-world situations. We are learning similar things, but in personalised ways. Technology is enabling us to cater for that difference in ways that makes learning more effective for individual students, as well as make life easier for teachers. For example, there are publishers now who are releasing textbooks that enable every person who uses them to progress through the material differently. Faster, slower, more difficult questions—all customised to the individual, based on their responses to previous activities.

There’s some interesting research out at the moment that shows that if children initiate a learning activity, they’re more likely to learn more from it. Of necessity this is very personal. We have to give students space to initiate their own personal learning.

Bring your own device

Increasingly, schools are offering students the ability to bring their own devices, and the ones making the most of this new opportunity are looking beyond what we’ve traditionally done (having most students do similar tasks most of the time). They realise that, if there are 10 or 15 devices in a classroom, then there can quite easily be 10 or 15 different activities taking place meeting different learning needs. And often it doesn’t require more work on the teacher’s part, it just requires them to be open to the opportunity, and comfortable with students being more active in guiding their own learning.

Adaptive learning

A really important trend in education at the moment is adaptive learning, or taking data about how students are progressing and using it to personalise learning. We have lots of data about student progress but what we’ve been lacking, and what’s emerging now, are the tools to use that data to personalise learning, adjusting for individual strengths.

E-portfolios

Tools like e-portfolios allow us to personalise learning with no greater work required by the teacher. A well-designed learning activity allows students to gather their own evidence for how they have met the requirements of the task—students can bring their talents from basketball, reading, the environment, the science lab, or computer gaming to their learning. The technology helps students to bring who they are to their learning.

Learning is a social process

Another thing we know about learning is that it’s really a social process. The act of sharing is at the heart of learning, and as technology increases our ability to communicate, it increases our ability to share. It’s this idea that has given rise to projects such as peeragogy: a massive facilitated connection of people who want to learn something with people who can teach them it. No longer are students dependent on the expertise in their classroom for their learning needs.

And so, at it’s heart, it’s about putting the ‘person’ back into personalised learning.

Implications:

  • To what extent does the use of digital technologies feature as a strategy for personalising the learning experience for students in your school?
  • When students use e-learning in your school, how often does every student do something different?
  • What use are we making of learning analytics to predict and advise on learning through the applications we use?
  • How might an adaptive web environment be beneficial to schools, for example for personalising learner spaces, interactions with parents and community etc?

These are great questions to be asking in your school. But we’d love to hear about your thoughts on this matter. Here’s another one: What technology have you used to personalise learning for your students?

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YES! YES! YES! An enterprising scheme for secondary school entrepreneurs!

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Educators often talk and theorise about the need for real-life and engaging learning for students. Well, my first year as the YES (Young Enterprise Scheme) Canterbury co-ordinator has proved to me that it works!

In this year-long programme, senior secondary students have the opportunity to form and operate their own businesses, taking innovative ideas and making them into real products and services. Personal achievement and excellence is encouraged through competitions, workshops, and public trade fairs involving business and the community.

Just recently, I received a copy of a letter from Emily Tasker, who was a member of Rangi Ruru's Flatpack Farming team in 2012. The letter was sent to the YES organising team. Her sentiments say it all. Here’s a couple of excerpts from her letter:

Because of my new experiences over the past 12 months, I would like to say a huge thank you to you and your YES team for all the enthusiasm and effort put into the Scheme. I recognise that without the dedication from people such as you, real business education like this would not happen.

I was introduced to Young Enterprise at Rangi Ruru Girls’ School … at the start of 2012. My intent was to make a few friends and any profit would go towards my dream of flying. However, what I did not realise, was that a whole new world of opportunity would redirect my dreams out of the clouds and back down to earth. Despite the discovery that Young Enterprise was not solely about making a huge profit, the challenges it gave to established friendships amongst our team, and the steep curve of testing my negotiation and communication skills – I now believe that, provided I continue to put my heart and soul in, YES will be the making of me.

2012 has witnessed Flatpack Farming achieve:

  • Highly Commended in Presentation, Marketing and Winner at Dragons Den
  • Canterbury YES Co-ordinator Award for Business Practise
  • Science Alive Innovations Award
  • Regional Runner-Up in Canterbury
  • National Awards – The Youth Development Award for Commitment
  • National Awards – The MOVAC High Growth Potential Award.

As for my team ‘Flatpack Farming’ – we are no longer a “charity” but now a registered business, continuing with the goal of helping farmers safely transport their tools on quad bike around their farm.

Thank you once again for all the work you put in behind the scenes. Please know you have made a difference for me.

Emily Tasker

Reflecting on the YES Canterbury year 2012

Let’s have a look at the programme as I found it over the year, and see for yourself just how enabling and empowering this programme is.

E-Day:

The YES year kicked off in March with the annual E-Day. Over 250 students from around Canterbury who had chosen to take up the YES programme in 2012 came to hear a variety of speakers talk about what is involved and expected during the year.

YES Canterbury Region E-Day 2012YES Canterbury Region E-Day 2012

An important part of the programme was the mentoring session, which gave students valuable time with a variety of business people. They were able to bounce ideas and receive informed feedback. Students left this day with a lot of ideas buzzing around their heads, and the hard work was about to begin!

Teams, directors, business plans, brainstorming, market research, and…

Once they had formed their teams and chosen their directors they then had to decide on the product or service they wished to develop over the coming months. Teams that made this decision quickly were able to knuckle down and formulate their business plan. Teams who needed some start-up cash fundraised within the school and wider community. The remainder of Term 1 was spent brainstorming and evaluating their ideas, and carrying out market research to see if their idea was a good one. At the end of this term the team could produce a business card and enter the competition which would see the winner receive free business cards for the year!

Getting “investors” to buy in

YES Canterbury Region Dragon's DenTerm 2 was all about action, and for those teams that had a workable business plan in place their business could begin to take shape. If they had a prototype of their product then they were encouraged to hold a “product launch”, either at school, or somewhere in their local community. The culmination of Term 2 was the Dragons’ Den (or Business Presentation Competition). Teams had five minutes to pitch their idea to a panel of local business people. This competition was hotly contested with a variety of prizes sponsored by local businesses up for grabs.

Trade fairs, sales—and annual reports

For the companies that had worked hard and pushed things along in Terms 1 and 2, Term 3 was all about reaping the benefits of their toil—with sales! A trade fair was held at Northlands Mall, where the teams displayed their product or service in a live environment.

By the end of Term 3 each team was required to submit their annual report, which summarised their progress through the year to the YET (Young Enterprise Trust) in Wellington, where it was marked by a team of independent judges.

…and success!

Term 4 was all about celebration with the Regional Awards ceremony held at the University of Canterbury in October. At this ceremony the Regional Winner, Runner-Up, and a variety of other awards were presented. The Regional Winner (Romulus from St. Thomas of Canterbury College) then went to Wellington at the beginning of December to compete for the National Awards, along with Flatpack Farming from Rangi Ruru Girls’ School, who ultimately won two excellence awards at the National Awards.

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St. Thomas's team: Romulus

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Rangi Ruru's team Flatpack Farming

Now, let YES 2013 begin

Now that I have a whole year under my belt I am looking forward to 2013 with much enthusiasm—and I’m a YES advocate through and through! YES helps develop real-life skills that student’s will take with them into their careers. I look forward to, hopefully, having even more Canterbury students take part in 2013, and I hope teachers will encourage their students to participate all around the country. We owe our students this kind of learning. Put the theory into practice.
 

Interested in looking at this model and the YES programme?

 

CORE Education coordinates the Young Enterprise Scheme (YES) on behalf of the Young Enterprise Trust for Canterbury. YES is a national programme of the Young Enterprise Trust, developed for secondary students.

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CORE’s Ten Trends released for 2013

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CORE Education 2013 Ten Trends: showcasing the future from CORE Education Digital Media on Vimeo.

CORE's Ten Trends 2013 launched at ICOT

The recent ICOT conference in Wellington provided an excellent forum to launch CORE's Ten Trends for 2013, with an audience comprised of educators from around New Zealand as well as a number of international delegates.

Approach to the ten trends

This year we have worked hard to develop the trends further, attempting to distinguish them from the 'predictions' published by many other groups and sites. Rather than focus specifically on particular technologies or 'fads' in and of themselves, we've used these things to help illustrate our trends, and to provide examples of how we see things developing. Thus, our Ten Trends headings describe broad, yet significant movements that are impacting on our work as educators.

A useful way of thinking about this is to consider a photograph of a river. A snapshot will provide a clear focus image of the river, captured in a particular instant of time. A time exposure provides you with an image of the pattern forming as the water flows. We want our trends to be more like the latter, providing teachers and school leaders with ideas and examples to enable them to begin thinking about the impact that some of these things may have in their particular context, and, more importantly, to be thinking 'ahead of the game' in terms of how they might respond to these things as the trends continue to evolve and become mainstream.

Nothing to be scared of. Let's discuss the trends and their implications

The trends are not intended to provoke alarm or reaction, rather, they are intended to provoke discussion and future-focused thinking. The examples and illustrations provide a mix of future-focused thinking with examples of things that are happening currently in schools that are leading the way in some of these areas.

Please feel free to use the Ten Trends slide show, the videos, and the matrix in your staff meetings or more widely with community groups and students, and if you'd like to have any of the CORE team come and provide further input, please don't hesitate to ask.

Unfolding detail and resources

During the course of the year we'll be publishing further information about each of the trends, with more examples and illustrations, and an opportunity for you to contribute your thoughts and ideas through the forums we'll be hosting online. In addition, the Ten Trends will be a focus of CORE's breakfast sessions in regional centres around the country, providing an opportunity to engage in discussion in these forums also.

It's important to remember that these are not predictions, they're trends. We'd really love to hear from you about things you consider could be used as examples or illustrations, or of areas that you consider we should be thinking about as we develop our trends in future years.

Further information:

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