Cultural Responsiveness

Examine how indigenous knowledge and cultural responsiveness (IK&CR) are informing the way you are taking action.


Step 1: What is your understanding of indigenous knowledge and cultural responsiveness and what area mentioned above do you want to focus on for discussion?


Indigenous knowledge is knowing everything about that culture and a group of individuals. Cultural responsiveness is being able to learn and be respectful of your own culture plus the culture of others. I think I was looking at our community needs during the take action planning process of the inquiry.


I had already had the children prior to this inquiry working together collaboratively on Google Docs using a Tuakana - Teina relationship. We had parents/whanau involved and being informed all throughout this process. We asked for feedback and we listened to their ideas and feedback and shared this with the children. I was always respectful to all tamariki and whanau.


Step 2: Examine how indigenous knowledge and cultural responsiveness are informing the way you are taking action.


Understanding the Culturally Responsive Practice for Maori Scale is something that we should be putting doing in our teaching practice everyday. I strongly believe that Whanaungatanga: building relationships was an integral part of our inquiry as we needed to have relationships with our students and their parents/whanau to have a successful outcome. Bring parents/whanau into the learning environment is so important and children having that authentic audience brings more meaning to them when they are doing a piece of work. In our school, we have a learning showcase each term. This is when parents/whanau come into the hub and their child or other children show them through their learning through the term and get feedback and praise for their learning. This is a time that we can build relationships with many of these families.


Step 3: What might you need to consider or take action on to move up to the next level of cultural responsiveness? What are the next steps?


I think my next step is to be thinking about what I can do to know everything about the cultures of all students in our hub. I need to make sure that these families/whanau are available to be part of our school community. In my home base I have a wide range of cultures and what I would love would be a day where they can come and talk to the hub and share some special traditions, and or special occasions that they think others should know. I want them to be fully engaged in our school community as well as all children to be informed about how to be respectful to all cultures.


References


(Source: Asil, M. (2017). A School-Based Measure of Culturally Responsive Practices. Frontiers in Education

2(17), 1-7. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2017.00017)

Context of different audience members and their perspectives for your inquiry.

Create a reflective entry to discuss how you are addressing the context of different audiences (local, national and/or international) and their perspectives for your inquiry.

The audience that I will be focusing on in the blogpost is the parents of these children in our learning space. We also have other teachers at my school and in the wider community which involves our cluster. 

I think that the other teachers in our school and in the wider community including our cluster would be the most supportive and onboard of this digital change and they would be early adopters in any kind of change like this. They would be interested in these changes for my inquiry as it is part of the skills that the children need to be successful 21st-century learners.  Early Adopters get on board and would be there to support you through any part of the inquiry.

I feel until the parents have seen progress and change in their children's learning but they are still going to be the Laggards in this inquiry. The parent's perspectives and attitudes towards children using digital tools is an interesting topic. The feedback that I most commonly get is that the children will not be able to handwrite like they did. However, there is more behind their concerns. I think that they need to be well educated and at my school, the parents are always welcome to be involved in their child’s learning. The Senior Leadership Team always have seminars showing parents how to use a variety of digital tools and use our digital reporting system.

The theme that I will be looking at is:

The role of current and emerging technologies. This model shows that for your practice to change all these four strategies need to work together.

Linked strategies needed to support educational ICT innovations

When my colleague and I first started our Mindlab journey we had so much support and advice from our colleagues. Our colleagues and cluster members were accepting of our inquiry and were accepting and positive about us scaffolding digital learning for the children.  We knew that our Laggards (parents) would be the ones that would need extra support from us. We have been showing them through the process with their children and what would be involved throughout the inquiry.  We knew that the parents were apprehensive but we have shown them step by step how they can be part of their child’s digital journey. They just need to be open and willing to listen and learn alongside their child. 

References

Bolstad, R., Gilbert, J., McDowall, S., Bull, A., Boyd, S., & Hipkins, R. (2012). Supporting future-oriented learning and teaching — a New Zealand perspective. Report prepared for the Ministry of Education. Retrieved from https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/publications/schooling/109306

Reflection

Rolfe’s Reflective Model

Step 1 (What): Describe something that is significant and has happened during your Inquiry so far.

Our inquiry question was: 

How can we best use digital tools to engage boys in authentic writing? 

The most significant thing that has happened so far has been the engagement that I have seen with these children and not just the boys that I have been focusing on. Walsh (2010), says that there is a trend that children are moving away from engaging with print but at home would use their leisure time to engage with digital technologies. This is something that I truly saw happen during this inquiry. I have seen boys go from writing nothing on a regular basis to share with their peers something that they were proud of. We are a PBL (Project Based Learning) school. This gives the children many opportunities to share their learning with other teachers, peers and family/whanau. This engagement happened in the taking action phase of the inquiry cycle and I was really surprised how quickly the children got on board. 

Step 2 (So What): Evaluate the most interesting/important/useful aspects of this event.

I think that the most important aspects of this event were the full support that we had from our colleagues, The Senior Leadership Team, and the parents and whanau of these children.  I think that this can be explained through all the interviews that we had with many of the Year 4 boys and the information and research that we presented to the audience that was going to be part of this. It was really important to have evidence and research that suggested this was going to be successful. Many of these children's parents were not fully supportive of their children using digital tools so early on in their schooling and not using a pen and paper to write. This is when my partner and I needed to inform and educate these parents about 21 Century Learning in a positive way.

Step 3 (Now What): Analyse the implications from this event to the rest of your Inquiry.

I feel like so far our action plan has been working well for the children. I would like to try and get all children in the year level I work in involved in this inquiry as I feel it would benefit so many of them. Next time I would make sure that I had more time to show the children all the different digital programmes and apps that they could use. I feel like that was slightly rushed and they didn't get all the benefits of many of the digital tools that were offered to them. I learnt that you need to fail to succeed but as long as you get up again and keep trying it will all work out for you. All of the digital tools that I offered the children were the ones that allowed them to share with an authentic audience and having an audience gives their writing a purpose. This was my main goal in this inquiry.

References:

Otago Polytechnic. (n.d.). Reflective Writing. Retrieved from: https://www.op.ac.nz/assets/LearningAdvice/Reflective-writing.pdf

Walsh, M. (2010). Multimodal literacy: What does it mean for classroom practice? Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 33(3), 211–239.

Mind Lab Week 2

Week 2 Mindlab

So I was feeling quite overwhelmed about Mindlab and all that is involved but have overcome that and I am really enjoying what it has to offer me for my professional development.

The new skills that I have learnt in the last 2 weeks are overwhelming as we start to prepare to have our first assignment completed before school finishes.

Last week we made a video about one of the 21CLD Learning Activity Rubrics. We choose collaboration. It was great working with Rebecca and Angela who I don't usually work with. 

What do you think of these rubrics? They are so easy to use.

Faith In Action

The course about Social Justice that we took this year was a great way to show the See, Judge and Act process in our hub with our science unit last term.

See

We saw that there was a need for this issue to be made aware of in our school. We were seeing destruction and lack of respect for our common home. There was always rubbish in the playground, in the gardens and in the children’s lunchboxes. In light of us coming to know more about Catholic Social Teachings and Social Justice, we knew that now was the time. We all know that the environment is God's gift to us and we needed to show the children that if we didn't do our part now it may look dim for their future. The children knew that they needed to make some changes and were on board to help. They knew some good starting points that they could change to help look after our common home and the first initiative my group took was to have rubbish free lunch boxes.

Judge

This situation exists for many different reasons but the main ones that I will briefly talk about are, apathy on behalf of society around care for our common home, children not knowing, ill-informed parents and the convenience. So, we know that society has a lack of interest in the situations around us and we also know that they are not doing much to help them.

This is when we can use our children to give them the knowledge that they need to pass on to society, parents, whanau and caregivers. These members of society are the future and the changes they make now will be positive for the common home.

Act

Here we can show the ways that we actioned our unit of work with the children. We had a commitment to the Religious Education programme and how we used these curriculum objectives to show our commitment.

God is present everywhere in the world through creation. (AA6. Yr3, AO1)

Show love and respect for God’s gift of creation, accept responsibility for the environment and recognise the tapu sacredness of whenua land. (AA6. Yr4, AO2).

We also used the science curriculum and looked at Planet Earth and ways that the sustainable solutions we taught the children had a positive impact on our society. We were able to use the teachings from Laudato Si and incorporate this into our unit. We looked at pollution, green infrastructure, waterways and renewable energy. Using Science we taught these four topics with reference to Laudato Si throughout. We informed our parents about Catholic Social Teaching in particular Stewardship which was our focus. We also put information on our blog. We had a lot of parent interaction in our hub with this topic. The children were engaged and taking what they had learnt home, and putting it into practice. Each home base made an action plan and we made these real and achievable for the children, who were all engaged. At the end of the term, all the children wrote letters to Pope Francis about what they had been learning and putting into practice. Next term the green infrastructure team will be planting a vegetable garden for the community to use. The whole hub has made so many changes and we will continue these for the remainder of the year showing our commitment to our common home.

Term 2 was a great way to incorporate Laudato Si into our programme. The children were engaged and the goals were achievable for all. We are continuing to action the plan that we put in place and it's real and meaningful to the children.

Behaviour Management

Behavior management is something that I need to focus on in the classroom. I need to make sure that when I deal with a behavior, that I follow up on it. 

Last week there was a student who was on rubbish duty for bad language, but chose not to do it. I was informed later in the day that the student chose not to do this duty. This is when I should have followed through, made sure that they were set up with all the resources needed to do the duty and taken them out to the teacher on duty. If you are the one that has given the duty not following through is going to make the student think that they can get away with things with you. 

This is not something that I want with year 7/8 students, they need to know that you will follow up everything otherwise they will take advantage of you. I am going to make sure that this is something that I always do in the future.

I feel that a better relationship with this student will improve their respect for me. I need to acknowledge when I see them doing the right thing rather than always pulling them up when they are off task and not doing the right thing.

My professional goal this year is going to be focusing on behavior management within the classroom. I know it's something that I will always need to be working on and I am going to do some research and find out some different strategies that I can use to improve my practice. 

Do you have any suggestions for readings?

Peer Mediation set up

Week 2:
The last few weeks have been used for setting up the Peer Mediation program in our school. 

Alongside the Assistant Principal we have researched and set the students up to run this successfully in the school. The students have had one session talking about expectations and have been given skills to help them solve simple problems that they may come across in the playground. The students are aware that with bigger problems they need to get a duty teacher. 

The students will be out in the playground as of today and we are hoping that we have some positive interactions with the younger children. 


Throughout the year the students will be given many opportunities to show their skills and earn peer mediation badges.This will be set up over the next term and introduced to the students over the course of the Peer Mediation sessions in class.

Week 3: Update.
The students have had one week out in the playground, I have had some really good feedback about individual students who are doing a great job.

The Deputy Principal ran a session on Restorative Practice and the steps to use to resolve the problem. The students responded well to this and will be able to hopefully this week will put it into practice in the playground. This session was great for my own learning as well and well and made me think how important the Restorative Practice is to our school. 

I have learnt that this process is a great way to make sure that all students get to have their say and that they are heard. When I am out on duty now I will have more confidence using this process and this re cap was just what I needed.