Category Archives: Uncategorized

E-Learning as a part of Effective Pedagogy

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Finally it seems to have happened – people are looking at e-learning as part of effective pedagogy!

Devices, technology, browsers, e-tools, apps whatever you want to think of as e-learning are not a separate entity and should not be viewed that way. For quite some time now I have been having discussions with people about technology in education and have been frustrated by how often the conversations focused on the what rather than the why. Last week it seemed to me that a major corner has been turned. Continue reading →

Mapping, Hacking & Designing

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I haven’t posted in the last week due to being deeply involved in mapping the New Zealand Curriculum to enable us to hack it into a better design for learning. This is still an ongoing process so I will blog about it in depth later on but here’s a few photos that may give you an idea of what us Specialised Learning leaders have been up to:

A New Design?

A New Design?

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Walking the Talk

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We have been spending the last couple of weeks talking about our vision for what dispositions (or Hobsonville Habits) we would like our students to develop. These have included things like Integrity, Contributive and Purposeful. Discussions have also included our core principles such as ‘Inspire through deep challenge and inquiry.

Then I heard about the event “Live Below the Line” and decided it was about time I started to ‘Walk the Talk’.

I saw a news article about the event and got interested so looked up the website and found:

The challenge?
Spend 5 days feeding yourself with $2.25 a day – the New Zealand equivalent of the extreme poverty line.

The reason?
To give a glimpse into the lives of 1.2 billion people who have no choice but to live below the line every day – and who have to make $2.25 cover a lot more than food…

Live Below the Line is an initiative of the Global Poverty Project, an education and campaigning organisation whose mission is to increase the number and effectiveness of people taking action against extreme poverty.

Now this to me was all about deep challenge and being contributive. If we can sit around talking about these dispositions, we certainly should be role modelling them as well! So, I have now signed up and have also convinced some of the others here at Hobsonville Point to sign up as well.

$2.25 a day will not be easy, but I really look forward to working out how to meet the challenge! It would be awesome if you joined in as well but also great if you would sponsor me and my efforts here: https://www.livebelowtheline.com/me/stevemouldey

A Principled Leadership Structure

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The last few days has been all about leadership. Starting from the whole leadership vs management binary, through educational leadership models and into what the leadership structure here at Hobsonville Point Secondary School will look like.

As a group we set about trying to place characteristics (such as develops a team culture or maintains stability) under the headings of leadership and management. Interestingly, we quickly fell into negative connotations about management while placing positive aspects under the leadership heading. Eventually, however, we realised that there were important aspects that needed to be placed under the management heading. At this stage, our conversations turned reflective as to why we had such negative feelings about management.

We realised that we associate management with bad management or micro-management and forget about good management all together. My personal reflection on why this occurs, is that when management is functioning well it slips into the background, becoming almost invisible and lets the rest of the organisation get on with their functions. Management is critical for a school (or any organisation) to function effectively and leadership simply cannot function without it. Maurie reminded us of the saying “Leadership/vision without management is simply an hallucination.” I think it is really important for us to remember this as we move from our big picture thinking into our work setting up the structures that will allow this vision to flourish. Continue reading →

Moving from the Big Picture to Teaching and Learning Practices

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This week has seen us continuing our big picture thinking but also now starting to focus in on what that will look like in the classroom.

On Monday we had a team trip into town for a mystery day out. The ferry ride through the rising fog was a good metaphor for what we would be going through over the rest of the day.

After breakfast together we were split into 2 teams and given a map of checkpoints and clues to decipher. Basically it was a 2 hour adventure race around town finding the checkpoints and taking interpretive photos to represent what we found. The checkpoints all turned out to be pieces of art around town and afterwards we found out that it was actually the Auckland Waterfront Sculpture Tour. Our team then made this video to represent our interpretations of the sculptures:

After a quick bite to eat we then headed to New Zealand Trade and Enterprise for a Design Thinking workshop with Peter Harrison from the Better by Design team. Walking onto their floor we got a hint at what was coming by the large poster on the wall giving tips for creative conversations:

Tips for Creative Conversations

Tips for Creative Conversations

This was an awesome 2 hour workshop introducing us to the ideas of Design Thinking. Continue reading →

Ensuring Values Endure

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Yesterday was a day where thoughts of making our educational values endure was in the forefront of our minds. We had Mark Osborne visit as one of Hobsonville Point’s critical friends. All the Leaders of Learning (LoLs!!) introduced ourselves to him and welcomed him with our ukuleles before we got stuck into the big thinking.

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Open Spaces Filling Up

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Yesterday I had the joy of visiting 2 open learning spaces: first of all as a team, the Leaders of Learning visited Albany Senior High School and then in the afternoon Maurie and I joined a group from the Ministry of Education in visiting the construction site for Hobsonville Point Secondary School.

I have been to Albany Senior High School before, but that was for Ignition Unconference in the holidays so this was the first time I had seen it full of students and in full swing. Anyone who struggles with the idea of how open the modern learning environments are should visit a school in action. The noise level is in effect lower than what you would find in many classrooms as the staff and students are aware that any loud noises they make will have an impact on lots of others and so self-regulation seems to emerge.

More importantly, I was impressed by 2 major factors here: the tutorial system and how research driven they are as a staff. We arrived half way through one of their 2 one hundred minute tutorials that occur each week. In this time each teacher (including DPs) is with their 15 student tutorial group – 5 yr 11, 5 yr 12 and 5 yr 13. This time is like a study period for the students where they decide what they are working on but the tutor teacher also uses it for catching up with individual students. The small nature of the groups means that strong relationships emerge and tutor teachers can track, challenge and nurture the students in their group.
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Deschooling and Time as a Resource

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According to wikipedia, deschooling “refers to the mental process a person goes through after being removed from a formal schooling environment, when the “school mindset” is eroded over time. Deschooling may refer to the time period it takes for children removed from school to adjust to learning in an unstructured environment.”

In this case it is the time for teachers to adjust to that unstructured, no bells environment where we don’t have to rush our thoughts in amongst catching a cup of tea while moderating an assessment, preparing a lesson and chasing up a missed attendance all at once. I should have been prepared for this to hit as Claire Amos had signalled it earlier in the year when she started as DP here in blog posts such as this and the other Leaders of Learning who started a week and a half before me had warned me I would hit this stage as well.

It is just such a foreign feeling for teachers to have the privilege of time to truly reflect, plan and think deeply that I was itching to rush a task along today and caught myself becoming frustrated with the (perceived) lack of progress. Today I have really struggled with deschooling and really taking the time the time to develop what are actually very important matters that deserve time.
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Curiosity and my brain

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Today we were lucky enough to have Julia Atkin spend the day with us at Hobsonville Point Secondary School. First of all working on articulating our core learning values and then discussing our results in the Hermann Brain model.

This diagram shows the model that we used with Julia to develop a clearer articulation of our educational values:

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Working through this model gave me a clearer picture of why I have seen value in Guerrilla Geography over the last 12 months. Initially I thought this looks really interesting and a fun way to engage students with their learning but I intuitively knew there was more to it. Today I finally drilled down to what is underneath this idea that gives it such value for me.
Continue reading →