Teacher Only Day(TOD) 13 May 2021

 The May 2021 Teacher Only Day focuses on two of the seven changes to NCEA: Mana Ōrite mō te Mātauranga Māori and Strengthening Literacy & Numeracy and Te Reo Matatini me Te Pāngarau. This follows TOD 1 from November 2020 which introduced the NCEA Change programme and will be followed by TOD 3 in August 2021 which focuses on the Review of Achievement Standards (RAS).

 Through an online Learning Management System provided by the Ministry of Education, schools will be provided with a proposed structure and additional materials and resources to support rich school level discussions around these topics. Within this structure, the ordering and pacing of the day can be decided by schools. The planning for the second Teacher Only Day in support of the NCEA Change Programme is underway. The focus of this day will be on Mana Ōrite mō Te Mātauranga Māori and Strengthening Literacy & Numeracy and Te Reo Matatini me te Pāngarau.

1. Welcome and Overview This module introduces the day and provides an update on the wider NCEA Change Programme and current state. It then provides an overview of the TOD2 materials and structure.

2. Resource Kete (self-selected) This module is a collection of materials and resources related to the Mana Ōrite mō Te Mātauranga Māori module that might provide a stimulus for wider-ranging conversations (such as Aotearoa NZ Histories, Te Ao Haka or Ka Hikitia). The intention is to provide a selection of resources that may help guide and focus your discussions, and which you can engage with as needed. 

 3. Mana Ōrite mō Te Mātauranga Māori This module is designed to describe the changes to NCEA in both English and Māori mediums driven by the principle of equitable treatment of Māori bodies of knowledge. The module provides space and support to discuss what these changes could mean within your context - English medium schools may want to include local iwi in this discussion and offer them a place to present their view, while Kura Māori will have dedicated time to discuss the changes within their context. The module ends with some exercises designed to solidify thinking around implementing the changes in practice. This will be an opportunity to explore in more depth why this change is important, consider some of the real-life successes in supporting Mana Ōrite in secondary schools and korero about where your school is currently sitting on its own journey.

4. Literacy & Numeracy / Te Reo Matatini me Te Pāngarau This module focuses on providing concrete information on what the changes are and why they are being made, followed by an in-depth look at the standards as well as the assessments. The module ends with specific, practical support for implementing the changes. There will be a focus on what the core curriculum changes are and why they are important. There will be opportunities for you to discuss what the changes to Literacy & Numeracy standards will mean in your school and what tools and supports you might need to aide your school’s change journey.

Design thinking( AKomanga Kaihanga)

 Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. Involving five phases—Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test—it is most useful to tackle problems that are ill-defined or unknown.

Stage 1: Empathize is the first stage of the design thinking process. Design teams conduct research to get personal grasps of their users’ needs. They set aside assumptions to obtain insights into the users’ world by observing and consulting with users. This way, they can understand users’ experiences, motivations and problems. 

Stage 2: Define—State Your Users' Needs and Problems: It’s time to accumulate the information gathered during the Empathize stage. You then analyze your observations and synthesize them to define the core problems you and your team have identified. These definitions are called problem statements. You can create personas to help keep your efforts human-centred before proceeding to ideation.

Stage 3: Ideate—Challenge Assumptions and Create Ideas: Now, you’re ready to generate ideas. The solid background of knowledge from the first two phases means you can start to “think outside the box”, look for alternative ways to view the problem and identify innovative solutions to the problem statement you’ve created. Brainstorming is particularly useful here..

Stage 4: Prototype—Start to Create Solutions: This is an experimental phase. The aim is to identify the best possible solution for each problem found. Your team should produce some inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the product (or specific features found within the product) to investigate the ideas you’ve generated. This could involve simply paper prototyping.

Stage 5: Test—Try Your Solutions Out: Evaluators rigorously test the prototypes. Although this is the final phase, design thinking is iterative: Teams often use the results to redefine one or more further problems. So, you can return to previous stages to make further iterations, alterations and refinements – to find or rule out alternative solutions.

Overall, you should understand that these stages are different modes that contribute to the entire design project, rather than sequential steps. Your goal throughout is to gain the deepest understanding of the users and what their ideal solution/product would be.

Genomics introduced to Level 3 Biology students(AS91602)

 Genomics is a rapidly growing field with a rich history and an exciting future. Take advantage of our ready-made teaching tools to present the foundations to your students and help them understand the impact of genomics in their lives. This year we planned to Introduced GENOMICS to level 2&3 biology students. we are collaborating with Dr Thierry lint who is PhD. in biology and specialised in genomics.  He encouraged us to introduced genomics and let students familiar with this concept. In this way, students know about role of genomics and genes in the health of an individual and how diseases vary in different ethnicities. To introduced genomics in our school, we invited Dr Thierry into our classroom so that he can talk with students and answers students questions. This lesson was awesome. Students showed interest in genomics and very excited to work on it with their next internal standard AS91602. 

Dr Thierry talked about Genomics as the study of whole genomes of organisms and incorporates elements from genetics. Genomics uses a combination of recombinant DNA, DNA sequencing methods, and bioinformatics to sequence, assemble, and analyse the structure and function of genomes. It differs from ‘classical genetics’ in that it considers an organism’s full complement of hereditary material, rather than one gene or one gene product at a time. Moreover, genomics focuses on interactions between loci and alleles within the genome and other interactions such as epistasis, pleiotropy and heterosis.

WAYS TO ENCOURAGE MORE STUDENTS TO TALK

 As a teacher, I tried the following method to encourage my student to talk and participate in the class. Because participation in class discussion is very important for their knowledge and learning.

1. Find Out Why Students Don't Participate

When I asked my students what kept them from participating, I got the usual responses: I don't know the answer; I hate being wrong; Someone else knows a better answer; I wasn't prepared. Noticing that these reasons centred around the concept of failing, I led a discussion about why it's acceptable to not be perfect. I shared the story of Ragish and the school egg drop contest. On the day of the event, in front of the entire school, Ragish's egg cracked wide open when he dropped it. Instead of moving on to the next student, the teacher judging the contest suggested that Ragish do some reading and try again the next day, which he did—and then the next day and the next after that. Finally, his project ended up among the top five champions. He eventually took that lesson in bouncing back from failure to MIT and then to Khan Academy, where he now works.

2. Show Students Their Fears Are Unfounded

Once I knew that the fear of failure was keeping my students from participating, I began demonstrating subtle failures in class. I gave the wrong fact, acknowledged my "mistake," modelled how to resolve the situation, and moved on. This removed the fear associated with being wrong and gave my students permission to make mistakes. I transformed my classroom into a safe space for trying, failing, and trying again. I could almost see students' relief as they realized that if their teacher made mistakes, they could too.

3. Create an Atmosphere That Encourages Participation

I knew I needed to reset students' expectations for in-class discussions, and they had to stop limiting themselves by thinking the only way to participate was by knowing the right answer. As a class, we reviewed our policy for maintaining a safe, collaborative space and came up with the following rules:

Be respectful.

Speak loud enough so everyone can hear.

Listen to classmates.

Don't interrupt who is speaking.

Build on your classmate's comments with your comments.

Use participation to not only answer questions but to seek help or ask for clarification.

4. Assess student's prior knowledge and tailor your lessons to build on what students already know. Students will feel successful and be more engaged when new content is linked to what they already know.

5. Allow for student collaboration. Well-timed opportunities for students to work together or even discuss a concept mid-lesson can be great for engagement. Turn and Talk is a great strategy where students are given a discussion topic and time to turn quickly and discuss with a partner. The 123 Teach strategy is also great for reviewing content. This works best for material that needs a lot of reviews–more knowledge level content. For this strategy, the teacher names the concept to be reviewed (e.g., the definition of a vocabulary word) and after counting 123 the students turn and review the concept with a partner as many times as they can until the teacher calls time.

Teacher Only Day (Last day of the Term 1) Reflection

 Today is the last day of term 1 and we have TOD in Glen Taylor school. All Manakalani school Teachers gather at Glen Taylor to share their knowledge, ideas, actions, strategies and experiences. I am very grateful I was a part of this day and grasp a few new strategies and ideas for my kids. Today's focus was on supporting teachers in implementing a range of approaches that will help students to develop the knowledge, strategies, and awareness required to become effective readers across curriculum levels and learning areas. Developing teacher capabilities to use a range of deliberate acts of teaching inflexible and integrated ways to meet the diverse literacy learning needs of our students. Today's speaker was Dr Rae Si'ilata. She talked about Pacifica learners and their educational achievement in Aotearoa New Zealand. Educational inequality in Aotearoa New Zealand on the basis of socio-economic class and language background remains persistent and endemic.

There is a still relatively limited pool of research that directly addresses Pasifika bilingual education in Aotearoa New Zealand. This research ranges from Spolsky’s initial study into the potential for Samoan bilingual education in the 1980s to more recent case studies of (mainly) Samoan language programs, as well as related studies into the benefits of bilingual programs for Pasifika (and other bilingual) learners. 

The implication of best practices is Funded specialist bilingual teacher education pathways for Pasifika bilingual education in both initial teacher education and at in-service/postgraduate level. Targeted in-service professional development support for teachers in Pasifika bilingual education, as well as updating and expanding existing related research and professional development resources. Additional Pasifika language and literacy resources, and related assessment measures, to support the ongoing consolidation and expansion of Level 1 and 2 Pasifika bilingual education programs in primary schools, as well as the expansion of NCEA Pasifika language subjects in secondary schools. A related community (and wider public) dissemination strategy on the attested benefits of Pasifika bilingualism and bilingual education, along with the limits of English monolingualism in an increasingly linguistically super diverse Aotearoa New Zealand.

10-year action plan for Pacific Education launched (Reflection)

 A new educational action plan focusing on ensuring Pacific learners and families reach their full potential was released in New Zealand. The Action Plan for Pacific Education 2020-2030 responds to the feedback of Pacific communities from across the country and outlines the shifts they want to see in the education system. This action plan is a blueprint for transforming outcomes for Pacific learners and families and is a key part of our wellbeing programme. It will drive systemic change in and across the education system to support the education and wellbeing of our Pacific children and young people. Pacific students, educators, teachers and parents discussed experiences of racism and bullying and challenges to their well-being being impediments to their educational success. The action plan guides education agencies to work collaboratively with Pacific communities over the next 10 years, and signals how early learning services, schools and tertiary providers can achieve change for Pacific learners and families.

There were five key shifts that were recognised by the Pacific communities in New Zealand:

1. Working reciprocally with diverse Pacific communities to respond to unmet needs, with an initial focus on needs arising from the Covid-19 pandemic;

2. Confronting systematic racism and discrimination in education;

3. Enabling every teacher, leader, and education professional to take co-ordinated action to become culturally competent with diverse Pacific learners;

4. Partnering with families to design education opportunities together with teachers, leaders and educational professionals so aspirations for learning and employment can be met; and

5. Growing, retaining, and valuing highly competent teachers, leaders, and educational professionals of diverse Pacific heritages.

The Ministry of Education currently has a cultural competencies framework for teachers of Pacific learners called Tapasā. Tapasā is a tool designed to help improve the way teachers and leaders engage with Pacific learners and to extent parents, families and their communities.

DNAiTECH WORKSHOP AUCKLAND - 30th March 2021 Reflection

 

The cool thing about DNAiTECH is that you do not need a specialized laboratory environment to operate this technology. Last week, DNAiTECH ran a training workshop for teachers in a community hall in Kohimarama, Auckland. 

These were one-day workshops for teachers around the country, and each workshop consists of an introduction to the theory of isothermal DNA amplification, hands-on use of the DNAiTECH instrument, analysis of an unknown E.coli DNA sample and extraction and analysis of E. coli microorganisms from a local stream, river, or beach. 

As councils grapple with implementing the Governments new freshwater policy and targets for swim ability, we as a nation must face the reality that our waterways in Aotearoa are not as clean as we would like to think they are, and the clean green mantra is often a fantasy. This map of the country’s waterways from the Ministry for the Environment shows vividly that in the areas of most intense population and intensive farming, our waterway quality is often in the zone of fair to poor.

DNAiTECH empowers students to determine the levels of E. coli and toxic cyanobacteria in their community waterways. There is no better way to engage students with science and technology than to give them the tools to test real-world samples. Let them be part of the collective social conscience, reminding us when we care for the land, we care for its people. 

DNAiTECH combines android smartphone technology with a simple Bluetooth connected handheld instrument that uses isothermal DNA amplification chemistry. Popular isothermal methods include loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP), rolling circle amplification (RPA), recombinase polymerase amplification (RCA), helicase dependent amplification (HDA). Avoiding expensive on-board optical systems and thermocycling DNA amplification, DNAiTECH makes DNA technologies affordable for secondary education so that cool experiments can be done to complement the teaching of NCEA 2/3 science, molecular biology, environmental studies, and technology. The instrument is robust and lightweight. The smartphone captures many images during the DNA amplification process and the App processes the Evergreen dye incorporation into DNA product in real-time. For more technical information on how the DNAiTECH works to measure DNA concentration go to our in-field testing page. DNAiTECH is a versatile in-field instrument for education and the science community. It is lightweight, portable, and can be battery-powered, making it perfect for that immediate rapid result in the field.  Real-time quantitative DNA amplification is yours for a fraction of the cost of current DNA reading technologies. We support teachers by running regional workshops as well as selling instrumentation and classroom science kits and easy to use tests for specific environmental assays.