I’ve been doing another course with Dr Ryan Dunn and Dr Simon Breakspear. I’ve been deeply attracted to their model as it so closely aligns with my own view of how change in adult learning communities can happen. The detail of their thinking, experience and research gently precipitates into an elegant yet brutishly practical way-of-being as a leader.
I’ve adopted a dialogical approach to reflecting on what impact this course should have on my leadership thus far;
100,000 foot view down to 1000 view.
Q: What is the problem we are trying to solve by introducing Orthography?
A: Improve Reading and Writing.
Q: How do we know that Reading and Writing is what needs improving most?
A: Becasue we do better on NAPLAN in Numeracy.
Q: How else could we know? (ie: Are we in the right forest? re: Steven Covey)
A: – We could ask all the people involved in improving our students’ learning, the kids, teachers and families.
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We can look at their historical information.
Q: What historical learning information is available to look at?
A: NAPLAN, Teacher Judgements, English Online Interview.
Q: What about PM Benchmarks or reading comprehension tests?
A: Yes and no. We now have some PAT Reading Comprehension 5th tests. Some PAT RC, some PAT Grammar and Punctuation and PAT Spelling. There is a bit of ICAS data too.
Q: So if we are trying to improve VC Reading and Writing for our children, is this enough information to tell us where they are at and if they will improve in response to what we do or stop doing? Is it enough to tell us if this is a problem that needs solving?
A: My gut feeling is that that this is good enough to start with.
Q: So then what?
A: Well, we need to find ourselves a little plot of ground to test this cropping method on; ie:
Phase 1: Take action for the sake of learning of how to grow this crop here,
Phase 2: Take action for the sake of reaping a harvest.
This means
– work out what conditions we need to curate in order to sow this crop (the ‘crop’ being a metaphor for an improvement process in Litracy for our learners)
– learn how to skilfully create those conditions (Tune into the preconditions for change to occur.)
– learn how that crop might grow in these conditions (How will this kind of environment afford that kind of change?)
– work out if we curated the ground skilfully (How can we tell if we took the correct actions for this crop?)
– did we plant the right crop? (improving literacy for Learners)
Another way to look at this is:
Focus on the context to see the content. Look through the content to see the context.
So this is four phase process:
1. Curate artefacts including pedagogies, practice principles, protocols and policies. (ie: an assessment schedule)
2. Model attunements – how a perceived property of an artefact can be used to take action. (ie: grade five mean reading comprehension scores are below that of the reference sample for the last three years)
3. Design structures (rules and resources) that afford action. (ie: the grade five team and literacy coach use standup meetings to design, resource, implement and monitor reading comprehension improvement sprints for grade 5 students during term 3)
4. Build relationships that activate agency. (ie: the grade five students see themselves as better at reading comprehension. The grade 5 teachers see themselves as better at causing reading comprehension to improve)
So in order for my school to improve our students’ perceptions of themselves as readers we need a means by which we can judge their ‘reading’ performance in a meaningful way.
We need the training, structures, resources and rules in place to give us the power to take action on improving reading results.
Once we have that power, we need to take action in an intentional manner.
Then we need to work out if our intentions are being met through our actions.
So we have spent a couple of years looking at our assessment schedule, creating one, adapting it and refining it. We have invested in the tools we need to take assessment action. This includes PAT test access, Benchmark Assessment Program, GradeXpert. We’ve partnered with an expert in the area – Fiona Jackson who has introduced us to The Writing Cycle, Orthography, Writers Workshops, Anchor Charts, Mini Lessons and much more besides. All of this enacted through an ‘Agile’ framework.
The reason why I position the conversation in this way, is this: I’m looking for a philosophy of education that accounts for learner agency.
Thus, this is my attempt to draw on Giddens, Gibson, Harre, Bandura, Foucault, Freire / Giroux, Vygotsky , Heiddeger and others to posit a framework for a philosophy of education that accounts for learner agency.