Meta-reflection
What was the point of sharing my reflections almost a decade ago?
This week I’m facilitating a session for our Master of Contemporary Education students on sharing your practice. While planning the session, I was reminded of the blog posts I wrote throughout the learning journey towards my MEd qualification. I originally started writing my blog as I felt like I was shouting into a very long, empty corridor to nowhere at school. I was looking for someone (anyone!) to share what I was doing with the hope that I’d receive some feedback or an opportunity to build on my ideas and even support others in making a change in their practice. Almost ten years later, I’m looking at my blog posts and can clearly remember the thoughts going through my mind while pushing the boundaries of my learning. Exploring completely new areas and experimenting with exciting approaches with the students I was working with. I thought it would be valuable to share a quick summary for the session I’m facilitating this week of the original blog posts and where they took me in my learning, but also for anyone wondering if they should spend some time writing up and sharing their practice.
Links to the posts (which I’ve migrated from Blogger to here on Substack) are below, with a short summary under each one…
I’d been blogging since 2011 about the small changes that I’d been making in my practice but in the second year of my MEd, I was lucky enough to be selected to be a Tātai Aho Rau CORE Education eFellow (partly down to blogging and sharing my practice the previous years I think). This experience enabled a great deal of inspiration on how I could change my practice. I used the monomyth as a structure to construct the narrative along the lines of action research and followed the story of Star Wars to try and capture what I was doing!
In this first blog post, I write about the start of the journey and how I had begun to explore the concept of learner agency and how to foster it in my students. I co-constructed the concept of agency with my students and created an online learning community on Google+ (!) to further the conversation and interaction.
I was frustrated by the constraints and limitations, such as a rigid timetable and pressure from assessments, so I wrote about how I had attempted to move beyond these. Such as dedicating a specific time for students to pursue their own interests and using positive reinforcement rather than punishments. I also discussed learning how to balance agency with accountability and responsibility. Looking back on this now, I still talk with teachers who are exploring agency about how it is interpreted and enacted - what does it mean for you and your learners? It was valuable learning for me, and I’m happy to still have a record of it - although Google+ is now decommissioned (RIP!!)
Once we’d established what learner agency looked like in our learning space, we actually had to do something about it! I explored the challenges of understanding and adapting to the NCEA assessment system. The solution I came up with was to involve the students in co-constructing the curriculum and designing their own assessments - creating a bespoke path for every learner based on their preferences. This ended up creating more engaged, authentic and relevant learning experiences. However, I was also battling for structure and self-regulation in order to ensure effective learning. A large part of the reflection was based on the gaps in knowledge that some students experienced and begin to explore how to address these issues. This is still an area that we are exploring in classrooms. However, I have noticed it is being supported by more of the positive ‘learning language’ that is being used in schools with students - I’ve noticed this with my own children especially.
The summary was a great way to bring together my learning. Although I’d only had 12 minutes to present the work in the research strand at ULearn 2014, I indulged with a full 20 minutes in this video which was a real luxury. On the post, I linked every resource that I made throughout the inquiry, and that was very helpful when I was presenting at conferences or talking to other staff, as this was what people were most interested in!
Finally, after presenting my project and the cumulative learning I experienced at as many conferences, national curriculum groups, local educator group meet-ups, online ‘EdChatNZ’ webinars and through my blog, I was asked to summarise this again for an ‘EdTalk’ run by CORE Education. They weren’t keen on me explaining it through the Star Wars narrative, unfortunately (😆); however, the video is a good summary of my experience - I think we still show it as part of our digital and collaborative learning course. One thing that surprises me is how much my right eyebrow goes up and down when I talk, and reducing that has been a real focus for me over the last decade!!
What was the point of sharing all of this at the time?
Well, of course, it was to support my own learning and record the changes that were happening in my practice, as well as the opportunity to interact with others. I was genuinely so passionate about instigating change, especially as new schools like Hobsonville Point were just beginning with exciting and future focussed pedagogical models. I was worried that students in traditional environments would be left behind. I’m not sure if what I was sharing had an impact, and I haven't attempted to measure it, but the analytics show each post had over 3.5k reads, so hopefully, some read until the end and maybe considered their teaching practice. There have been some other benefits to develop from sharing my work online. The most important to me is that I met other people who I am still connected with professionally and personally; while Google+ hasn’t lasted the test of time, our relationships have! When you open up your personal thoughts and reflections, and someone else then reads them, you already have something in common when you connect with them either online or face to face, and this can be the foundation of a great relationship. I also used my blog as a professional portfolio, which helped me to showcase my pedagogical approach and reflective nature, and this has supported employment prospects and admission to further study.
You can tell I’m an advocate for sharing learning in open environments, so if you have a blog or reflection, feel free to share it in the comments, and I’ll try and contribute where I can.