Have you ever had that sense of belong the odd one out? Not fitting in? As my children start new schools and I navigate new situations, I am intensely missing our international school experiences. It is interesting to me, how warm my welcome has always been in a new international school, it is one of my favourite things about them - people will quickly form friendships and be welcoming to newcomers.
I am so curious about this, my assumption is they have both been in this situation themselves before and empathise and also are likely without those extended family ties and friendships that can blinker people to those who are new and alone.
As we experience this, it has got me thinking about the ways I can support those who feel shy, are new or feel different to just 'belong' because of how much of a difference it can make to people's experiences. I have always checked in on students, tried to find out about them to be able to assign them a buddy who might be a good fit for their interests and personality. I will approach new families, new students and new teachers slightly differently now with this fresh experience. My goal has always been to create a family buddy system and this will be something that would help sell a school to me and if not in place, something I would strongly advocate to establish.
Feel free to add your ideas to the ideas on the AnswerGarden above.
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I was recently chatting with a teacher friend of mine who was sharing she had a child of a single dad and her frustration in the lack of book to represent this family structure. The child had confided in her they wished they could see themselves in stories and my friend had asked me if I had any recommendations for her, but sadly I had only a few to share which got me reflecting. One of my passions and foundational beliefs as a parent and an educator is the salience of a diverse bookshelf. I am always looking to use stories to discuss world issue with my own children and this is a strategy I employed in my classroom as a teacher. Within the comfort of a story children can ask questions, understand world issues and address assumptions and stereotypes. I am lucky to have worked with an excellent Librarian, Phelia who has dramatically overhauled the books available in our library and showed students multiple representations in her library lessons. Whilst we may want a story that focuses on specific issues faced by others around the world, such as a muslim girl wearing her hijab such as the Proudest Blue or a trans girl's first experience of school, as in Phoenix Goes to School, stories can be a fundamental way to see minorities encountering similar problems and having comparable experiences as the reader themselves, which can be a significant way to reduce stereotypes. Resources I have used to diversify my bookshelf is the Sustainable Development Goals Book Club list - see the website here and a PDF of their resources in multiple languages here. I have also just come across this Inclusive Books for Children website that groups books into specific categories to help representation, particularly for younger readers.
Personally, I still want to ensure I have a wider selection of neurodiverse characters in my bookshelf, we can always do more to be inclusive, but I am proud of my youngest child who has been reading books like this from a very young age and is very much an activist. My little piece of action research considering my children shows the impact books can have - a tool to build compassion - something in my opinion this world is severely in need of developing. AI is currently a controversial tool in education. Maybe it will be viewed as a tool like Google when educators have got to grips with how and when it could and should be used. Initially, we banned students from using ChatGTP, exploring its use with educators. Luckily for us, my amazing colleague Natalie shared some ways we can engineer prompts to make the output of ChatGTP much more through and suitable for our purpose using the 'PREP framework' 1 - Prompt it AI needs precise instructions as it does not understand human nuance. 2 - Give it a Role This ensure that it knows how to approach the request you make. 3 - Give Explicit Instructions This ensure you get the information you need from the outset, reducing the need for foLlow up refinements. 4 - Precise Parameters This ensure it outlines the scope of what you are looking for. I have tried this formula to great effect, give it a try yourself. What do you feel is the role and the parameters of AI in education?
We identified the need for provision for highly able students because, as in many schools, we had not got explicit opportunities to address their needs. Whilst teachers differentiated, having a specific program is preferable.
At AISL we had begun to implement a Multi Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) program. Our initial steps were addressing the needs of those students who had dipped just below grade-level standard - Tier 1 - and needed that small boost, which we named Tier 2. Following the organisation for their needs we had the opportunity to allocate a space to those at the opposite side of the continuum - those that were easily meeting grade level standards, what we called Level 2. Many factors go into the implementation of new programmes and the use of Implementation Science supported our plans. Knowing the way we could navigate the change meant we could anticipate hiccups and plan more effectively. I collaborated closely with the director of Student Support Services to prepare our team for these changes. When you consider provision, firstly you need to see who you would like to support, but balance this with the realistic logistics of providing this provision. This relates closely to your definition - who are you providing for? Who does the terminology you use encompass and exclude? In our setting we focused on the provision for mathematics and reading. We had clear data for these students from our MAP assessments, we had already identified these as areas for our students who needed a boost - the Tier 2 students - and the same teachers had opportunities to flip flop to support those higher fliers without retraining another set of educators. In an ideal world we would be addressing all areas musicians, artists, athletes, scientists and more but one clear route to failure is expanding too fast, too soon so we focused on the core of reading and mathematics. With the students to target the teacher giving the provision and the data to select students identified, we had planned for the foundations. Having the opportunity to attend the Challenge for All Summit (Highly Able and Gifted and Talented) was an absolute privilege, providing huge amounts of food for thought. Hearing about others' effective programmes - such as the well established programmes at Colegio Nueva Granada, American School of Bombay and KAUST - was fantastic, as it gave us confirmation we were headed in the right direction, time to ask questions related to our wonderings and opportunities to consider other exciting future possibilities. Our program took a number of months to plan for and perhaps will take some years to reach its full effects but every journey starts with the first step. I am excited to see where the programme goes and the feedback we continue to receive to take into account as we evolve and develop. One thing we know from current best practices is the importance of having an authentic audience. Sometimes we get stuck for ideas on how our students could share to the world. I created this extensive list for just those moments, perfect for when we need some ideas in a planning meeting!
It has been a hard few years; even though the worst of COVID is behind us, the after effects are still reverberating around the world, especially in the education community. Many teachers are feeling burnt out and dissatisfied with education. My writing and thinking partner, Fanny Passeport and I decided to capture some strategies to counteract these issues in our piece. Read the article here on ISS's blog.
In our move to the Toddle platform at AISL, we have had some wonderings about our unit planning template. To support clarity I decided it might help if we have a simple UbD checklist. Take a look and let me know what you think, what have I missed? My goal is to curate a set of slides with more details for a self-paced / FAQ style help. We we lucky enough to have a set of PD sessions with Sagda and Amin from Indigenius Teaching & Learning focusing on the Critically Conscious Educator and serving as an introduction to Culturally Responsive Pedagogy. They presented four sessions: Power Privilege Purpose, Valuing the Authentic Identities of Students, Learning Environments and Report Writing. These important sessions raised my awareness about my own culture, identity and privilege as well as giving practical tips about how to create inclusive learning communities. Following this session, the MSHS Principal and I agreed many of our classrooms could do with some TLC on a physical level as well as the 'hidden' aspects needing attention. I adapted their environment checklist to create an AISL specific checklist and created a series of PD sessions on classroom learning environments resulting in many classrooms being overhauled.
Fanny Passeport and I have been discussing education, namely, faculty professional development. We felt that in too many cases, educators have no input into or decision-making power in Professional Development. We offer a number of suggestions that schools can easily apply. To find out more, read the article here.
Having just begun my position as the new MSHS Learning Coach at AIS Lagos, I was lucky enough to be a part of the training for the World Languages department - a department that often does not PD specifically targeted to them. We learnt from Lori Langer de Ramirez and through two sessions that were revisions for the language experts but extremely helpful for myself as a non expert, we created a philosophy and a set of language agreements.
We also begun a huge revision of our language teaching by deciding to make the shift to the ACTFL standards instead of the AERO standards for World Language as we felt this was a much better match for our transient population here in Lagos. The use of ACTFL levels helps meet each student where they are and provides 'I can' statements to support student learning. I am excited to see how the department will progress with their new plans!
This course is amazing, and I would recommend it to anyone, it is a lot of work but great value for money - you have a built in community, get test and try your ideas and have research and readings to back up the practical tips. In a practical sense, while our Making Learning Visible course started out physical, it had to transfer to a virtual setting for the 'classroom' due to COVID. This posed challenges for me as a learning coach as I was unable to interact with a class in the traditional sense. Using my best educator ingenuity I decided to test my ideas on my own children. I had been admiring the work that my friend and colleague Graham Laing had been doing with his students on the learning assets and wanted to take his ideas further. I was interested in the concept of engagement (who wasn't during COVID!) and initially thought about a star including the points: committed, attentive, enthusiastic, diligent and see value. These aspects were important but the idea of a star was not at all user friendly. After feedback from my 'class' at home I refined my idea to an engagement triangle where I combined some elements to simplify the ability to place students' learning ON the triangle. With a triangle I thought it could be interesting for students to see how they felt about activities when they are learning and use this as a reflective tool. I will see if I can find a class to use it with, I have a Grade 5 exhibition class I will be working with next year and this will hopefully be a useful tool in Seesaw - making it an easy to complete end of lesson or end of week reflection.
I spent the year studying coaching best practice with Eduro Learning, culminating in this video to summarise my learning.
Following a multi-year relationship between ISG and Steve Barkley, he asked me to create a guest blog post to document our learning. ISG had been considering how to use 'SMART' goals and peer coaching to support teacher growth. Read the post here.
I have been working like a crazy person on my ADE application the past two weeks, I know, I know, I should have known better than to finalise it close to the deadline. My reasons were that I was waiting for the site to open and I thought that it would not take that long to make the video - HAHAHAHA! Who was I kidding, to make a great video takes a LOT of editing. I also realised that I was not quite as good at this as I thought. Luckily I had recently seen Apple's Everyone Can Create series and with a little help from the Video guide, some Apple forums, YouTube and by pressing some buttons, I figured out pretty much most of what I wanted it to look like. It was pretty much impossible to cram everything I wanted to say into two minutes and so with some creative editing and harsh decisions on cutting content, I finally made a video I'm pretty happy with. If only I had not also been trekking up a mountain in Nepal and sick with a stomach bug!
On the plus side, I enjoyed making the video so much I have agreed to run a Video ASA to share these skills with the students - I can't wait for them to discover their inner cinematographers. After a successful coaching collaboration with the Grade 2 team at ISG Jubail, where the teachers completely redesigned the unit and pushed themselves to new limits, the teachers and I wrote up our experience for NESA Educators magazine to share our growth. This was a wonderful example of coaching - we collaborated and created an amazing integrated unit that we would never have been able to create alone. The students thoroughly enjoyed the unit and it became 'the' unit the new Grade 2 looked forward to.
This year I have pushed myself to offer after-school activities (ASAs), both to give students extra opportunities to use technology and to try things out as I do not have my own class.
This second trimester I have used Apple's Everyone Can Code guide and started a coding club. The students tried the initial activity of being robots - I needed to give clearer instructions as they filmed themselves walking to a secret spot, oops! - and we have been working through different activities the past couple of weeks. As they are younger students we are starting with Scratch Jr. Next stop Tynker. Have you used Anyone Can Code? Do you have any tips to share? I'll add another post at the end of the ASA to reflect on how others could use these resources. From a number of day's training, one of the biggest takeaways for me as a coach is supporting manageable systems to support conferring. Each teacher is different and colleagues of mine use notebooks or Evernote as reading records. As a Google fan I decided to attempt a time saving form for collecting reading data. Here is the link to the existing form. Here is an example of the completed spreadsheet - I have added formulas to group the data onto a new tab for each child, ready to write reports, review data or in conferences.
What are your top conferring tips and tools?
I had the fortune to be (and put in the hard graft to prepare for!) a chaperone for our Middle and High School Week Without Walls Trip to Nepal. Following this amazing experience where our students connected with the Centre for Disabled Children's Assistance we were interviewed by a student reporter who published her piece in TIE magazine, you can read it here.
Sarah Fleming - this great talk resonated with me, I feel exactly as she described. Sometimes you are just not part of the tech club, you have never hear of the app or program that they are talking about and that can incite incredulity. This talk reminded me the main goal of the tech coach is to improve learning; I don't need to have all the answers and it's better for my students if I don't. It is OK to make mistakes and be vulnerably, fear of risk can be our biggest mistake.
Niki Hambleton - using visuals in learning. This is something I should do more of despite my ideas that I am no good at art so I can't present my work visually. Watch this space for a test of visual note taking. Jeff Utecht - spread a growth virus in schools by knocking down walls, model the good behavoir by failing publically and intentionally celebrate great work This session focused on reaching out to those students who may not learn in the "normal" way and strategies we can use to adapt our teaching for their benefit and the benefit of all of our students. We covered some aspects of SEN (useful link for you if you are in Asia - SENIA), consider our 'outlier' students, explored our own learning styles through quizzes and then focused on platforms we can use that give alternative ways to communicate alongside some amusing poses from go noodle!
My group began to explore exit ticket and then we shared the apps / programs that can be useful strategies for different students. Our summary was: + provides feedback over time on individuals + allows you to personalise instruction based on feedback + a variety of assessment tools (and you can use others' tools) - takes time to set up accounts - you need a 1:1 environment or BYOD for the students to be set up and using it regularly enough to get useable data - not a "pick it up and run" kind of app, it takes time to play around with it and figure out the opportunities. For more information about the session have a look at Michael Boll's website here. I managed to catch this session at the first online Google for Education summit live, due to the time difference, and got some great ideas to share with my colleagues about using video in class. What caught my attention at the beginning was his comment that research has found that one minute of video is equal to 1.8 million words; couple this with the ability to learn at your own speed and you have a fantastic tool for individualised learning.
Chris had 5 top tips for using video, illustrated with examples.
Twitter is not like email, it is limited to 140 characters so it needs concise comments and is used by educators for PD despite some people using it to update the world on their breakfast! It is a way to find things to take away from it that are relevant to you. A tweet is the message in 140 characters or less; a twitter username is a handle, a hashtag helps sort posts into topics, if you follow then the posts made by that user come up on your newsfeed. Hootsuite and Tweetdeck are ways to manage your content. You can find a list of hashtags on http://cybraryman.com/ and you can follow these to see what your peers are sharing, you can also join online chats. This has been a great recap for me about how to use Twitter and is something I will share with my colleagues. The O-MAN follows the Hague International Model United Nations model and information can be found on http://www.onlinemodelunitednations.org/ This website contains all the necessary information including calendar dates and information for debates, there are over 50 dates schedules each year. The sessions are hosted on Blackboard where the students can vote on resolutions, raise a “placard” and become more aware, active global citizens. They use Mighty Bell as a research site curated by students, which you can get invited to. There are badges for delegates based on engagement, and there is a blog to promote student voices that really gets to the heart of what O-MUN is. There are stories of how MUN is giving opportunities and insights to young people from all around the world. Students also have opportunity to mentor other students. This is a great project and I am sharing this with our Humanities teacher so our students can become involved.
Louise has a blog (http://www.frugalteacher.com/) describing the ways she has been using technology in her clasroom. She was initially inspired by a live cam showing an eagle nest http://www.farmyou.com/falcon_cams/decorah_eagle_xcel.html. This spread throughout the school, it inspired the students and made them interested and excited by learning. This led her to develop the use of a variety of tools:
Other projects than provide global links - Hello Little World Skypers (https://sites.google.com/site/skypershello/) - Flat Charlotte (http://www.flatstanley.com/) - Dot Day (http://www.thedotclub.org/dotday/) - Travelling rhino project (http://saveourrhinos.wikispaces.com/HOME) She rounded off the presentation by discussing the SAMR model which can be used to measure the impact of computer technology on teaching and learning (https://sites.google.com/a/msad60.org/technology-is-learning/samr-model). This is extremely useful for my Master’s critical study so thank you Louise! Taru Malhotra - Integrating technology in primary classrooms: from the learning theories (19/11/13)6/12/2013 During this session Taru presented her research into technology in classrooms. She described how technology is being increasingly used in education but teachers often do not integrate it into their teaching. A key educational theorist that can be applied to this area is Vygotsky and his key ideas can be summarised as collaboration, scaffolding and the environment. Taru explained how teachers also need scaffolding to move to the next level, their beliefs need to be transformed through training that provides scaffolding and collaboration so teachers change their pedagogical belief and understand that technology can be effectively used as integral practice, not a time consuming “add on”. She stresses that with appropriate support our teachers can be effective in modelling the use of technology, motivating our students. This is significant for me as I am currently developing technology within my school and it highlights the most appropriate way I can support my colleagues.
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AuthorEmma Ahmed is a learning coach and curriculum coordinator at International Schools. Archives
September 2023
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