Mindcraft - Building our Learning Community in 2016

We have started 2016 with our own version of ‘Minecraft’, a computer game our children love to play!  When the children arrived at school, they noticed signs saying ‘Mindcraft’. The children completed a player profile at the start of the day.  The furniture was stacked in the classrooms and the walls were empty.  Our children are going to be fully involved in building a successful learning community in their classroom.  Children will get to know each other, be actively involved in setting up their environment for learning, and develop an understanding themselves as a learner. 

The big idea of our integrated unit in Term One is ‘Hauora’ (Well-being).  Throughout the term our children will develop an understanding of the four dimensions of Hauora (Physical, Social, Mental and Emotional, and Spiritual).  All four dimensions together make us strong, healthy, and happy.  After morning tea, the children played a game of ‘Mindcraft’. The children had to complete challenges from each dimension of Hauora. Each class was set the challenge of designing and building their learning space by incorporating the dimensions of Hauora.  By ensuring the children are part of the decision-making process, we create a learning community where our children feel a sense of belonging and ownership and establish a strong culture of learning. 

Our Year

It is really exciting to reflect on what has been a challenging and exciting year. As the year has progressed, we have been exploring...

• Creating a community of learners. 
• Valuing student voice. 
• Developing dispositions/competencies for lifelong learning. 
• Developing children’s ability to manage themselves and their own learning by giving them choice and flexibility. 
• Ensuring children are challenged by new learning - In the ‘Learning Pit’.
• Developing children’s understanding of themselves as learners. 
• Ensuring our learners continue to strive for excellence across the curriculum. 
• Reducing the amount of whole class teaching so we can effectively differentiate learning. 
• Providing authentic opportunities for critical and creative thinking and problem-solving.
• Using our integrated curriculum model to provide opportunities for children to follow their own lines of inquiry. 
• Developing children’s ability to collaborate. 
• Effectively using digital technologies as a learning tool. 
• Giving children the ‘power to act’ in order to develop their learner agency. 
• Using the flipped classroom approach to support learning and teaching.  

GRi11 Documentary

Check out the documentary the children in GRi11 created to help share how they are learning.

The Learning Pit

Lots of our children are very good at managing themselves and their learning on a daily basis but they are not self-directed agentic learners. Is this because we are not allowing them to be? We believe that we have some children who would be more than capable of leading their learning. We are currently planning the majority of the learning activities and the children do not actually have many opportunities or time in their day to direct and lead their own learning.  Currently, the main opportunity children have to lead their learning is when they are following their own lines on inquiry as part of our integrated curriculum model.

Prior to providing the children with this opportunity, we decided that the children needed to have a deeper understanding of The Learning Pit. We wanted the children to understand that if they were going to drive their own learning that they needed to ensure they were being personally challenged - that learning had to be hard if they were actually going to be developing and growing their knowledge and skills. Katie and Clive developed the children's understanding of 'being in the learning pit' through a series of challenges and rich conversations. One of the challenges was a balloon powered car and the other was a paper challenge. In both cases, the children were given the resources but no instructions. The children worked in teams and some individually.

While the children were completing the challenges they were asked to record what they were thinking and feeling on post-it notes. Katie and Clive then used the children's comments on the post-it notes to co-construct their understanding of 'the learning pit'. With the children's comments on post-its, Katie and Clive asked questions such as...

• "How did you feel when we first gave you the challenge?" 
• "How do you feel now? 
• "What Habits of Mind did you have to use to help you?" 
• "Is it good for our learning if things are easy? 

Katie and Clive arranged the post-its in a way that showed the children's changes in emotions and their thinking throughout the experience, to highlight the concept of 'The Learning Pit'.

When the children had visited Mind Lab in Wellington at the end of Term Three, they learnt about FAIL - First Attempt In Learning. This concept obviously really resonated with the children and they constantly made links between their learning at Mind Lab and being in the learning pit.

Following this series of challenges and conversations, Katie and Clive asked the children to re-assess themselves on their learner pathway. There were 17 children out of 58 who thought they could move to 'Driver'.

The Flipped Classroom

Andrea, Katie and Kristen have been exploring how they can use videos to support learning and teaching. Above are some of the videos they have created to support writing. Check them out!

Weekly Planning

Each week the children plan their week on a weekly planner (some do this digitally and some on paper).  At the start of the week, the teachers share their weekly planner with the children.  This allows the children to record their group sessions with the teacher, workshops, and other requirements. E.g. Writing support, sports coaching, music lessons. The children then plan when they will complete their learning tasks.  

It has been really exciting to see the children using their planners to arrange times when they are all available to work together on shared inquiries or to arrange a book club meeting when everyone can attend. The children are taking responsibility for managing their learning by selecting which learning task to complete, when, with who and where. They are responsible for prioritising their time on a daily basis so they can complete learning tasks before set deadlines.  

Conversations with individual children demonstrate that they have a clear understanding of how this system works and that they enjoy learning in this way because they like having the freedom to choose.  There are different support systems in place for children who need help with planning their day and prioritising their learning tasks.

Maths Learning

In the Senior Syndicate, we teach maths across seven cross-grouped classes from 9.00am - 10.00am each day.  We decided at the start of the year not to make any changes to our Maths programme in 2015 because we knew there would be lots of new learning involved in working in collaborative spaces for the first time.

As the year has progressed, some of the teachers have started to make changes to their maths programmes to reflect the learning and teaching approaches they are using in the areas of literacy and integration.

Andrea, Katie and Kristen give the children priorities they are required to complete throughout the week. These include: Basic facts practice, rich task problem solving, word problems, Mathletics, and strand related tasks. The children can complete the tasks in any order, on any day.

The teachers run different workshops throughout the week. Workshops may be focussed on number knowledge, number strategies, or strand based. The children worked alongside their teacher to develop an understanding of their individual strengths and next steps. This information has been tracked on personal goal cards for each child. The children use these goal cards to help identify which workshops they need to attend.

Andrea, Katie and Kristen have had to develop planning and tracking templates and systems to ensure that the children's learning needs are being met and challenged. They have adapted and developed these systems as the year has progressed.

Some comments from the children...

“I like it because we get to learn the strategies we don’t know very well instead of just learning a new one each week. Sometimes we needed more practise but the whole group had to move onto a new strategy.”

“If you forget how to do something you can go back to another workshop. If you go and then you realise you don’t need to stay because you know it, you can leave. It is wasting time if we already know it. We learn about things we don’t know.”

"Miss Gordon has workshops and we go to them if we need to and if we don’t go but Miss Gordon knows we need to go she comes and shoulder taps us."

Andrea shared the changes she has made to her maths programme with the Senior Syndicate teachers. Her presentation is below.