Wrapping Up

As we near the end of the school year, it's time to reflect on the rollercoaster ride that has been PLT. When I consider the highs and lows of my year in general, most of these have occurred within this group. It has been rewarding, often frustrating, and definitely kept me awake at night.

Some thoughts (in no order whatsoever): 

• Students got to work with like-minded people they might not otherwise have met up with until the senior school
• Some students embraced the opportunity to further personal interests
• Some students did not cope at all well, and are still unable to work independently 
• The students who seemed best suited to independent learning were not taking part in the group (GATE students) which meant that the others did not benefit from the modelling 
• Behaviour was more difficult to manage than in a classroom setting, because:
• ALL the difficult students are together and automatically group themselves together
• the expectations of teachers tended to vary, as did consequences, so students were often playing one off against another

Things I think are important for the future:

• Staffing is very important ie
• consistent staffing (the same teachers there all the time, with few relievers)
• if at all possible, it's good to have people with a range of different skills outside their curriculum areas
• In addition to planning meetings, there should also be short meetings after each session with a focus on students - who is doing what; how we will address problems etc, and stick to what is agreed
• Make sure we model good time-keeping and efficient procedures.
• Students need to work in allocated groups, with a teacher responsible. With students doing individual projects it is too easy for some to go several weeks without doing anything.
• Although our environment is designed to be flexible, it should still be considered as a working area. Students need to be where we can easily see what they are doing - get rid of the couches.
• There must be more accountability and feedback. I still feel the blogs are a good way of doing this, but only if all teachers are encouraging their use and reviewing posts. 

Rugby Shirts

The last activity in our Rugby World Cup project was to design and paint an original rugby jersey for our country. Here are a few of them:

Google Mapping

As part of our Rugby World Cup country study, our students have researched local attractions. The information and photos were then used to create our own personal Google 'My Map'. These were then embedded into their blogs. This is surprisingly easy to do, with the connectivity between the Google products. For this activity we used a Google sheet, Google My Map, and Blogger which all work beautifully together.

Here is Shakira's map.

Rugby World Cup 2015

During the second half of Term Three, we gave students the opportunity to work on their own projects again, but only on presentation of an adequate plan. Three small groups took this opportunity and are managing well on their own.  The remainder have been divided into small groups who each represent one of the 20 countries participating in the upcoming Rugby World Cup.

We then allocated each 'pool' to a teacher who will be overseeing these groups throughout this project. We began with an information gathering exercise where students worked individually to find information about their country and team. A lot of this information is to be used for future parts of this project eg mapping local attractions, designing a new shirt, cooking an international dish, learning a little of the language.

Go the All Blacks!!

Year 9 Magazine

Our first projects in Term Three had a literacy focus. Students opted in to either create (write and illustrate) a children's book, or contribute an article towards a teen magazine. The students who chose to write magazine articles also received a crash course in using Publisher and were able to produce high quality articles. Interestingly there was an immediate increase in the engagement level once we moved from paper drafts to computer and we were very pleased with the final result. Here is a copy of our finished magazine.

Knit-a-Square

It's so much more than just knitting :)

As an off-spring from our fundraising projects, we started a couple of students knitting squares for Aids orphans in Africa, as part of the global Knit-a-Square project. We found some needles in a charity shop and people donated wool. I started off a large number of squares so people could just pick them up. I took them with me to PLT, and left a basket-full in the staffroom. Within a week not only did we have a large group of students knitting, but also more than half the staff. Some of the staff members had not knitted before, or had not done so since they were children. 

My favourite moments:

• having one boy who had achieved very little to date, and was regularly in trouble, sitting quietly chatting with me while he knitted his square - nobody else was allowed to do this one!
• the girls who took theirs home and brought them in each day for their form teacher to help them fix mistakes
• the quiet staff member who seldom comes to morning tea, now joining us and learning to knit
• and last, but not least . . . watching the boss attempting to crochet.

Details the original response to do something positive and take direct action to help the vulnerable and deprived children of South Africa.
Posted by Knit-a-square on Tuesday, 29 April 2014

Knit-a-square Song 

Participating and Contributing

Participating and Contributing was the overarching theme for this round of projects. Our keen group of 'scratch' programmers / electronic whizzes carried on with their previous projects, plus incorporated the design of a model designed to withstand an earthquake.  

Several groups focused on ways to help in their local, or national, community with projects such as:

• raising money to buy colouring books and pencils for the children's ward at our local hospital
• rejuvenating our vegetable garden at school
• organising suitable games to include our supported learning students in some special PE sessions

My group was keen to raise money to send to Nepal. We made a valiant effort selling hotdogs and garlic bread (out of the leftover hotdog buns), and a "lolly-lottery", and tried desperately to get donations of goods. We were pleased with the positive responses from the businesses we approached - although they did not work out well in terms of helping with our fund-raising, in almost all cases they explained that they choose to support one charity themselves. It is good to know that so many people are doing something. 

As a school where many families are struggling financially themselves, it was very difficult to sell our goods and we decided that the amount of effort required for a minimal return was probably not worth it. We then thought about other ways we could help. We heard about another school who have been knitting for knit-a-square.com and decided we could have a go. Although it wasn't for Nepal, we decided that the most important thing is that we all do something to help those less fortunate. This project appealed to the students as it directly assists orphaned children. More about this soon. 

Pet Project done and dusted

Term Two

We have now begun the teacher-directed projects (see 'Projects' page) which seem to be going well. Based on our experience with this group last term, and also on the Maths and English testing undertaken at the start of the year, we agreed that these projects would share a focus on Time Management, and Mathematics.

The projects were introduced to students, and they then graded them in order of their preference. Luckily for us, the numbers opting for each project were quite even so everyone got their first choice. Hopefully this also means that we selected a suitable range of topics for this group. In addition there were students who wished to continue with projects from last term - without exception they were good self-managers and have been allowed to continue. We simply asked them to outline where they intended heading with their projects, before giving our approval.

These projects are all designed to be completed in four weeks, at which time we hope some will be ready to undertake individual work again, and others will be offered a further selection of teacher-directed projects.

Unfortunately our environment isn't working as well for this type of work, where a teacher needs to interact with a group of students rather than individuals. We desperately need better 'break-out' areas - although we can move furniture around, we don't have any sound-proofing. As most teachers do, we'll just have to do our best with what we have.

PLT Newsletter April 2015

Lego Animation

What's working, and what needs to change?

After four weeks of project time, we now have a much better idea of student capabilities and are beginning to see some exciting work. As expected, some students have taken to this idea like a duck to water, and are working on very meaningful projects. A couple are a little too excited, and trying to run before they can walk. They require careful handling - we do want them to slow down to ensure a quality product but we also need to be careful not to dampen the enthusiasm too much.

One example of this is the lad who's dead keen to create a movie and arrived at school with camera and tripod in hand, and was determined to start filming. He had begun a plan of his project, but did not have any planning for the film. We have directed him to some resources about preparing for a film and hope he will now come up with a script, shotlist, and storyboard.

For many students, the one-on-one conversations we are having with them are adequate and we are able to guide them in the appropriate direction. We have also been able to begin sharing projects with the whole group (completed and in progress) - we do this once a week and it is clear that not only are they genuinely interested in seeing each others work, but it also helps them to visualise the many ways a project could develop. Prior to this, teachers modelled possible projects to the group.

We are beginning to see a natural collaboration between students with similar interests, and we are encouraging partnerships between some others that may have been less obvious. For instance the girls interested in photography are helping Jack to photograph his parkour project, and we have suggested that Billy (with an interest in art) might be able to help the girls with their Maori Language project, by creating original borders for signage.

We can now see more clearly who will be needing more structure and guidance, and next term we will be introducing a small number of projects which will be much more teacher-directed.  We had a lot of discussion about whether or not we should have started the year like this, but as we did not know any of the students we decided to give them all an opportunity to show their worth first. This has generally worked well - it is apparent that academic ability is not the most important factor in self-directed learning, but rather motivation and self-management skills.

Thinking ahead to next year, with the same group, we will have a lot more personal knowledge of these students and will likely organise things differently, at least at the start of the year.

Lead India - The Tree

Ever think that the things that you alone do are small and can't
possibly make a difference???? Watch this video and think again!

Blogging

We've been busy this week setting up our personal blogs. On here we will talk about our chosen topic / question, record our progress and, for some, present our final products. Please take a look at our blogs and feel free to add comments.

A pep talk from Kid President

As easy as 1, 2, 3 ...

Week 4: We finally got started on our projects. We had a slightly delayed start, partly due to the late arrival of the furniture for our new space. However, we also needed this time to get to know our students, who had all just started at our school. We spent time on 'getting to know you' activities, and then began to think about learning, and what it means to each of us. We started to develop questions - for some students this is the most difficult thing of all. Those who were struggling were encouraged to immerse themselves more deeply in their chosen topic first, and hopefully "I wonder..." questions would come naturally out of that.