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The Ever-Changing Role in Digital Leadership (Mentoring and Coaching)

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This blog is the follow on from https://www.iwb.net.au/the-ever-changing-role-in-digital-leadership-kotter-model-unpacked/

and https://www.iwb.net.au/the-ever-changing-role-in-digital-leadership/

Mentoring and Coaching

In my previous blogpost, I took you on a journey of my leadership in moving a school forward into the digital age. By using the John Kotter Model I was able to unpack the steps it took for me to move my sites forward. Today I unpack this further to help you to understand the way in which I utilised coaching and mentoring strategies to guide my staff as I supported them to take their first steps in harnessing digital technologies themselves and also with their students, embedding them within their teaching and learning programs.

First of all let’s unpack Coaching and Mentoring particularly from an Educational Leader’s perspective.

Coaching involves the educational leader and teacher working together to collaboratively look at classroom approaches, interpersonal relationships, or organisational and administrative issues: all of which contribute to the achievement of the whole school improvement plan, and improvements in students’ learning. It is not evaluating and judging teacher performance rather it should be a positive impact on any teacher regardless how long they have been teaching.

Mentoring on the other hand is intended to support the development of all teachers where the leader acts as a support and guides teachers through negotiated/identified issues. This then creates a partnership between the leader and the teacher whereby they work together to achieve the improvements in the classroom practice. Often this occurs through conversations and observations.

In my role as principal and as my site began to lurch forward with technologies it became quite clear that my leadership had to focus on mentoring and coaching of some staff to support them. Through attending the leading a digital school conferences over time I have been able to glean a range of understandings and skills to be able to support my staff with the use of effective digital technologies in their classrooms, specifically ensuring that their purpose was to improve student learning outcomes.

In the early days it was important that I modelled the use of digital technologies in my day to day life at school as well as strategically placing myself in classrooms to observe teacher practice and the inclusiveness or not of digital technologies. This provided me with the opportunity to have open conversations with staff and discuss the range of possibilities and opportunities where digital technologies could enhance the learning for their students within their teaching and learning programs.

I found it extremely positive to sit beside teachers in their classrooms and discuss their teaching and learning programs with them. Through this we were able to identify strategic opportunities where teachers could dabble in digital technologies with their students. This began with the extensive take-aways which were seen and heard at the leading a digital school conferences, not only by myself but the staff which I had previously included and participated in the conferences as well. As a site I encouraged all participants and myself to form a Techie PLC to spend time trialling and sharing the range of new practices learnt from these extensive conferences. Often was the case I would work with teachers in their rooms to model the digital technology tools with their students to begin the first steps forward.

In all good modelling and coaching scenarios it was important for me to learn with and alongside the teachers. This provided the opportunities for rich dialogue to occur and help my staff trust in themselves to take this risk with digital learning, knowing that their leader understood and supported them to ‘give it a go’!

For me as the leader it was and still is an exciting time to be a part of as each staff member trials, implements and later embeds digital technologies in their learning programs. As you can appreciate the journey is never ending as the face of digital technologies continues to evolve at a rapid pace but the great delight is now I have staff who face this challenge head on and continue to evolve themselves.

In summary, the 3 most effective strategies as a leader I have embodied over time have been

  1. A continuing consistent message to staff around the importance of embedding digital tools with students and providing connected professional learning opportunities for staff (Leading a Digital School conference annually)
  2. Modelling and coaching my staff at each point of transition by building a culture of risk taking
  3. Learning with staff and embedding resourcing for digital technologies annually in the school budget.

Once again I will be taking my staff to this year’s ‘Leading a Digital School Conference’ as we continue to enhance our students’ learning through digital technologies. I look forward to seeing you there and would be most happy to have a chat.

Check out the program @ www.iwb.net.au/digital/program

Rick Noack

Digital tool smashing – Learning can include more than APP smashing!

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So, your class has mastered Book Creator for writing a story to share with a real audience, they rock at using Do Ink for green screen movie making and they are all over SeeSaw for recording their learning. It’s time to integrate a few quality apps to take it to the next level.

App Smashing is the process of students utilising a core of quality apps that complement and enhance each other to create inspiring and engaging ways that not only demonstrate their learning but showcases it and allows you to assess their understanding and skills.  The term App smashing was coined by Greg Kulowiec (USA) in 2013. Laura Cummings has a great blog post about App smashing if you’d like to know more about setting parameters and supporting app smashing in your learning space. Whilst this post focuses on the power of combining iOS apps in an education setting, over time the term app smashing has also come to include the use of more than just iPads and at times more than one device type, for example using a Chrome book,  and an iPad to create a finished product.

Students intuitively explore apps long before we’ve had time as a teacher to offer step by step instructions and often find an apps limitations and special features before we’ve fully explored the apps learning and integration potential. Students also often soon realise one specific app doesn’t allow them to produce a final piece of work or product with all the features they need or want and intuitively experimenting with a variety of apps to create their final product.  They key to app smashing is the camera roll or the ability to save a photo, a video, an image you’ve sourced or created and importing it into another app to combine, manipulate to create something new that wasn’t possible to make happen in either of the other apps on their own. App smashing it more than utilising the features and functions of more than one app to reach an objective.

The power of app smashing is the transformation of projects into rich media creations and encourages the seamless use of digital tools for learning. The two key elements for success when app smashing with iPads are the camera roll and the ability to share your creations. When you first introduce the concept of app smashing to your class, depending on their age and familiarity with the apps, you may recommend and demonstrate how to utilise specific apps together to create a finished product. Eventually, however, the goal is for students to consider the assessment criteria and decide themselves which apps will work best for their learning task or project idea by considering what the various apps features are and which one, two, or even four apps would work well together to suit their needs.

Why App Smash?

  1. encourage creative and imaginative thinking
  2. Support collaboration
  3. Students have choice, control and ownership in their learning process
  4. encourage critical thinking
  5. help students construct knowledge and demonstrate deep learning
  6. help maximize the potential of digital tools by combining features and functions.
  7. Allows creativity to shine and allows students to demonstrate their learning in their preferred communication mode. For example, speaking (audio or video), writing (typing text or with a stylus) or drawing.
  8. Provides opportunities to purposefully create and share with a real audience
  9. Empower students to share their voice and showcase their learning.

Dr. Monica Burns (ClassTechTips.com) recently wrote an e-book How to use App Smashing as an assessment tool full of ideas for using book creator as a formative assessment tool.

Combining apps for innovative project ideas

  1. Create a multimedia book (topic/ theme can cover any curriculum or interest area)
  2. Podcast / radio show/ review (book, movie, TV etc.)
  3. Interactive comic
  4. Student created biography interview videos

A few of my favourite Apps

With links to Apple App Store. Those that I know are also available on other platforms I have identified.

Tips

  1. Communicate clear assessment criteria to your students.
  2. Make sure students know how much time they have to complete the task or project.
  3. Make it a clear and easy process for students submit to you finished work created digitally.

I hope that this post has given you enough ideas to start app smashing with your students, encouraging learning and creativity in your classroom. If you need more inspiration I recommend checking out Jornea Erwin aka @Savvy_Educator, or the #AppSmashing hashtag on Twitter.

I will be presenting about these ideas and others at the Leading a Digital School Conference this year, come along and say hi – www.iwb.net.au/digital/program

images
Flickr

Creating powerful learning in mathematics

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T Rex Meets R2D2 – using research and digital technology to create change in mathematics and STEM

Lora Bance – Catholic Education Canberra Goulburn Archdiocese
Keith Roberts – Principal, Channel Christian School Tasmania

Mathematics is an essential building block of STEM literacy. To support student participation and develop positive mathematics identity the three aspects of learning in mathematics outlined below: exploring problems together, visualizing thinking and using spatial reasoning, can be enhanced by harnessing the affordances of technology in the classroom. The enduring outcome of STEM education is the students’ ability to discover, create and use foundational knowledge in STEM in real-life. Quality teaching and learning experiences in STEM education are founded in meaningful real-world challenges, informed by a global perspective, and integrated within community and culture.

Mathematics should be learnt through experiences in solving sufficiently challenging problems, use hands-on learning strategies for exploring, and opportunity to share thinking. When designing and delivering lessons in mathematics it is important to give students opportunity to explore problems to demonstrate multiplicity of ideas. Exploring involves discussion, but too often the social aspect of mathematics is lost in a myriad of worksheets and questions to be completed in a limited time. Instead, to develop STEM literacy students should participate in investigations that are discussed together, in order to strengthen ideas. For this to happen students need to experience mathematics in groups, and mathematics through problem-solving. STEM involves rigorous understanding along with collaboration to reach that understanding, being a problem solver is hard fun and involves working with a community of learners (Pound & Lee, 2015).

Students need flexible thinking if they are to be good problem solvers. To increase a student’s capability to explore challenging problems they should be able to provide visual proof of their thinking through ideas of ‘Make, Say, Do, Write’ including drawing, modelling, and explaining (Boaler, 2015). Participating in problem-solving and improving mathematical thinking is more than manipulating abstract symbols systems, it requires sensory-motor action using patterning, abstracting, modelling and play in multimodal settings to support deep understanding (Mishra, 2012). By exploring visual components of mathematics, explaining processes and reasoning, students develop understanding from another point of view, developing empathy for how people see mathematical problems and increase curiosity – a key STEM practice.

Spatial reasoning improves the ability to visualize solutions and is a key contributor to STEM literacy as it is concerned with understanding and working within the physical world (Lowrie, Downes, & Leonard, 2017, p. 27). Using mental transformations, decomposing a pattern into component parts, using scale, estimations, mental imagery, comparison and sequencing are a few examples of elements of spatial reasoning that support student learning. The more opportunities that students have to show their thinking, to work in sense-making activities and discussion, the stronger their mathematical thinking, which supports problem-solving in STEM education.

Digital Technologies using Robots

Digital technologies can play many roles in supporting student participation in STEM education including games for exploring problems and understand thinking, and digital tools for sharing and explaining thinking.

Harnessing the requirement for students to undertake challenging mathematics problems, it is important to select games that are not based on drill and speed, instead select activities that give opportunity to fail fast, for repeated effort, to reconsider problems and collaborative effort.  Mathematics is not a lower order thinking task and memorization is less useful when problems become more difficult. Instead, innovative learning with technology uses higher-order thinking. Digital tools that allow for thinking give student’s opportunity to ponder without asking for help, without an expectation to finish a number of math problems in a short period time, where failure is not about failing to get stuff done, but not yet finding a way to understand the problem being presented, while applying the capability to persist using different possibilities. To develop persistence and reflection use tools that help students visualize their thinking, live drawing, video capable and utilizes feedback.

 

References

Boaler, J. (2015). Mathematical Mindsets: Unleashing Students’ Potential Through Creative Math, Inspiring Messages and Innovative Teaching. United States: John Wiley & Sons.

Lowrie, T., Downes, N., & Leonard, S. (2017). STEM education for all young Australians: A Bright Spots Learning Hub Foundation Paper, for SVA, in partnership with Samsung. University of Canberra STEM Education Research Centre.

Mishra, P. (2012). Rethinking Technology & Creativity in the 21st Century: Crayons are the Future. TechTrends, 13-16. doi:10.1007/s11528-012-0594-0

Pound, L., & Lee, T. (2015). Motivating Children – Problem finding and problem-solving. In L. Pound, & T. Lee, Teaching Maths Creatively (pp. 28-44). London: Taylor and Francis.

Screen time: curse or blessing?

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There is no longer much doubt that digital technology or “screen time” takes away from the time we spend on our personal interactions in favour of our online life. You have seen it – people in trains, in restaurants, walking along the street their heads hovering over the screen – not for seconds, not for minutes, but for hours. Do they want to speak to you or make eye contact with you? No way!

Overexposure and excessive exposure to the screen causes children to lose significant time on creative play and the time they spend on manipulating and mastering their physical environment. For young children, this is a dire situation as there is plenty of evidence to suggest that neural pathways that would be beneficial to them in later life will not develop.

For teenagers, excessive screen time can lead to sleep deprivation leaving them with all the physiological and psychological problems that it can bring.

This is the curse.

As school leaders and classroom teachers, can we hide behind this curse and use it as an excuse to do very little or even nothing when it comes to positively influencing learning with digital technology?

Let’s hope not!

As responsible educators, we must be aware and wary of the curse and treat it with respect. But we have an even more important job to do than that.

We must embrace the blessing of digital technology – and there is much to bless.

Screen time: curse or blessing?

Even though research on the impact of technology on learning is in its infancy, we are beginning to see a body of work emerge which points to many blessings.

For example, both research-based and anecdotal evidence points to students learning more in less time when they use digital technology well; students like their classes more and develop more positive attitudes when their classes include digital technology; students in digital technology-rich environments experience positive effects on achievement in major subject areas; and students who use simulation and higher order thinking software show gains in their learning.

Who can remember trying to grasp some complex concept at school using pen and paper only?  For example geometry and physics: we would have killed for the software available today to teach the complex concepts involved. We would have passed!
With such obvious benefits, it is our professional responsibility to seek the professional development we need to keep up with the advances in technology that will improve the way we teach and our students learn. We should also appreciate the facility our children have with digital technology and steer them in a positive direction as they try to master it.

There is no option for any teacher to deny a child this.

After these arguments, would you knowingly send a child of yours into a school/classroom where the prevailing attitude of the principal/teacher was that digital technology did not add much value to learning, with the outcome being that it was not used or not used sufficiently to improve the learning of your child?

If you knew that this was the prevailing attitude, would you want your child to stay or leave that environment?

Please don’t be insulted if you are “with it” as far as teaching with digital technology goes. We know heaps of you are.

We do however challenge those who have more to do.