Today was our third KPMG day in Auckland. No agenda was shared with us so we were all a little excited (and nervous) as to what was in store for us.
When we arrived we were greeted with the fresh smell of coffee (and tea) and we set ourselves up for the challenges we knew were ahead of us.
Today’s session had been devoted to listening to each MIT participant shared the progress you have made within their inquiry and also with the tool that each were making. Following this we were asked if we would like to cross blog our feedback - Of course we said YES what a great idea.
So we then used a random name selector to determine whose tool/inquiry we would comment on. I was very lucky to draw Danni and interestingly she got me as well.
Danni’s inquiry started off focusing on literacy learning in years 7 & 8 and how that school and cluster data was showing that the rate of learning in many senses was stalling or dropping. Her inquiring focused totally on what she could do to prevent this in her classroom.
Today Danni started out by sharing her site - a resource bank of texts she has created and used in her classroom. This was broken into different pages relating to Text Analysis exemplars, Writing Techniques and Connecting Reading and Writing.
This provided us with rich examples and questions based around different genre/examples. This looked like a fantastic tool at a glance. When we delved deeper it appeared to be even more of a rich tool.
One of the challenges that Danni had been having is finding/accessing examples of text that will support this resource, some suggestions were made as to who could help including
Aaron Wilson
During the morning we had discussed her inquiry informally and part of this discussion highlighted how many of her shifts in student achievement was related to her high expectations of her children both in what they will achieve and also in the contexts in which she teaches these through. We talked with Danni about adding a page on high expectation.
As discussion wound up we also discussed possibility adding in how you might use these resources Multimodally (showing links to resources and sites that she and others used.. An interesting point was also raised about ESOL strategies being something to consider within her resource.
Reflections on my own inquiry were huge. I will cross share Danni’s reflection here and then add to it my own thoughts.
Thoughts going away from KPMG today…
Learning together is empowering - and connecting with those outside of our normal realm of teaching extends our thinking. As Zac put it “team work is dream work”.
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