Impactful PLD - none of us knows all the answers, but between us we know most of them

The trouble with a lot of educational professional learning and development (PLD) is that it is based on the assumption that you need an expert to come in and 'do it' to teachers. Lots of 'wannabe' consultants offer expertise that can turn out to be a chimera, an illusion, at the end of which you feel much as you might at the end of a week of eating potato crips hoping that would provide satisfying nutrition: rather empty and unfulfilled (and at times rather sick). Now don't get me wrong, there are also some outstanding providers of PLD, and at Hornby High School we work with a few of them.

However that's not how we roll all the time at Hornby High School, nor cross our Uru Mānuka kāhui ako. Today is a case in point. Today we ran our 'Teacher Summit '21' at which teachers from across the cluster presented a simple aspect of their work, their ideas, their best practice, to teachers from across the cluster, all focussed on our cluster wide focus on reading. Over 100 teachers from primary and secondary schools shared a piece of their best practice, and you know what? It ALL came from inside our Kāhui Ako. We knew all of this, and I have been privileged to witness some outstanding ideas that are stunning in their simplicity and their effectiveness.

This is not someone coming in and telling us our business, DOING PLD TO us. This was us sharing what we have established to be effective teaching practice, practice often the result of teacher inquiry. The fact that we are in this place, doing this mahi, is due in no small measure to our participation in the Manaiakalani kaupapa. The pedagogy and the support from Manaiakalai Education trust have enabled teacher and school efficacy and self determination, and the opportunity to improve our impact on learners. 

It is also a beautiful example of our "Learn Create Share' pedagogy in operation with our teachers. After all, if we are to be authentic in our use of the pedagogy, we ought to use it ourselves.

I picked up some very cool ideas, the sorts of ideas that make me wish I was in the classroom so that I had an excuse to use them. Big thanks has to go to all of the staff who so willingly participated, and to Kelsey our Education Programme Leader, who engineered the whole event.

Impactful PLD Aē. Impactful PLD because none of us knows all the answers, but between us we know most of them

Te Rito Toi 7 - cultural identity, creativity, and a language aspiration for Hornby High school

I wrote previously about the opinion I have formed that for creativity to thrive, learners need to feel culturally located , they need to feel safe and strong in their sense of cultural identity. There is lots of powerful voice out there about what that mahi looks like in kura, perhaps some of the most useful and transformative is that from Anne Milne with her work captured in her writing and presentation 'Colouring in the white spaces'.

There are many ways in which we can meet this challenge. I wanted to share this assembly address that I gave to both junior and senior assemblies at the end of term 1 2021. I hope you have the patience to read to the end, it's not too long.

Te Rito Toi 6 - creativity as a thread running through all that we do

I love flash mobs. You know, those things where a single person starts a performance in a public place, and then another person joins in, and then another, more and more people join in until you get this amazing  .. thing .. this 'happening'... performance.. you get the idea. This is one of my personal favourites, and if you know what they are you will no doubt have your own favourite from Youtube too.

So anyway, I had this crazy idea. We want everyone in our community to see themselves as readers. It was part of our thinking about how we promote reading in our community, with our tamariki, and how we get them reading. After all, the only way you improve your reading is by ... yep.. reading, right?

And that was how our 'reading flashmob' was born. The idea was that a large group of children from across our kāhui ako would appear at our local shopping centre The Hub, sit down, and read. Simple.  And that's what they did, about 150 of them. 

They read silently for a short time, and then they got together in groups for some reading aloud and story telling sessions. The City Libraries team were a hit with their interactive storytelling in Te Reo Māori, and Samoan.

The storytelling was variously in English, Tongan, Samoan, Te Reo Māori, and Tagalog, key languages in our kura.

The session finished with some amazing slam poetry (a live performance) from Dietrich Soakai. The quality of his work was astounding, world class, captivating, entertaining.. I know that I was personally spellbound by Dietrich's skill as a storyteller, a performer, a poet, a magician with words.

Dietrich Soakai performing some captivating slam poetry

We didn't film Dietrich on the day (we were too captivated by his powerful words), but here is a Youtube clip of Dietrich performing his powerful poem 'Cultural Turtle'.

The event was shaped with the idea of 'windows and mirrors' in mind. We want learners to see themselves in their learning material and experiences, like looking into a mirror, rather than see others, like looking through a window. As I said earlier, we want Hornby learners and whānu to see themselves as readers, because they ARE.

I also think that there is another way of thinking about the whole experience.

At Te Huruhuru Ao o Horomaka Hornby High School we aspire to be a centre of creative excellence. We want creativity to thrive in ALL aspects of our kura, not just the traditional creative arts and technologies but also in the ways we approach solutions to other problems. 

The reading flash mob, I like to think, was an example of creative problem solving. We took a couple of existing ideas, getting children to sit and read, and a flash mob, and we put them together in the simplest possible way to create something new. I'm not quite sure if this is true, but I've certainly never heard of a 'reading flash mob' before. The approach I reckon is also consistent with our Manaiakalani definition of 'Create' and our 'Learn, Create, Share' pedagogy. combining existing ideas in new ways. A centre of creative excellence, he puna auaha.

We aim to embed creativity in all that we do, we want creativity to be a thread that runs through all of our endeavour. Are we there yet? No. Are we on our way? Hell yes!! In our own way we are planting seeds in the best spirit of Te Rito Toi in our approach to problem solving.

The event was also part of the Learning City Christchurch Learning Days, an exciting body of work hoping to connect us all on Ōtautahi as learners living , working and learning. in a networked city.

Our special thanks to Jason Marsden, centre manager, and The Hub, for being such supportive hosts for the event. We were ably supported by the team from City Libraries who created a pop up library in The Hub, and also had several of their team members lead some mazing interactive story telling in Samoan and Te Reo Māori. We had other storytellers and readers, including a number of our very own senior stunts .. tuakana teina!!! I'd also make a special of our very own Nicole Sowman who organised the work on the ground. People like me who have grand ideas need people like Nicole who make things happen. Thank you, Nicole.

Te Rito Toi 5 .... cultural diversity, the sense of self, and creativity

We were in  Blenheim supporting our daughter running the St Clair half marathon (she managed a PB.. ka mau te wehi, Natasha!!). 

As we wandered in the vineyard area after the event I came across an artist in the process of creating art (painting) as people went about their business of celebrating, eating, and drinking. I plucked up the courage (I don't normally approach complete strangers quite like this) and asked her 'what do you feel as you paint? She looked at me, and I clarified 'not what do you think, what do you feel?' She replied "actually that's a really good question, I haven't thought about it quite like that before". As the conversation progressed it became clearer to me that she had thought about it before, but perhaps not in those terms. I also realised that I had perhaps asked a stupid question; this quote from 'Te Rito Toi Replanting creativity in post normal times' sprang to mind:

Gordon was trying to say the unsayable, struggling with thoughts that lay beyond the capacity of mere words to express. Pavlova, when asked what she meant by her interpretation of Swan Lake replied, ‘if I had been able to say it in words, do you think I should have gone to all the trouble of dancing it?’

(Clarence Beeby, Director General of Education, at the funeral of Gordon Tovey in May 1974).

I told her that, as best I could recall the quote (as a story rather than a quote, my memory isn't that good.)

Anyway, our conversation progressed, and she spoke in terms of her own inner self and her sense of self, how she 'felt' about herself, and life, about the world in which she lived, and her desire to say things that she couldn't say in words (in precisely the way that Pavlova is reputed to have done).

Professor O'Connor and his team have identified 11 dimensions that potentially activate creativity, and I have listed those before.

I have another 'wondering'. Whatever drivers we might be able to describe in our schooling systems, our innate creativity perhaps cannot be activated unless we have a level of self awareness, a level of confidence, in who we are. Specifically I wonder if we need to have a sense that we are culturally located, that we have at least some connection with our whakapapa, before our creative potential can be unleashed. I'm not suggesting that being 'culturally located, culturally safe', generates creativity per se. My wondering is if being in such a state and place is one of those 'necessary but not sufficient' conditions, and therefore if we could avoid some of the tendency to 'kill creativity' if we were better at this?

If so, this adds another dimension to the already overriding moral obligation on schools to ensure that they build and maintain culturally responsive and sustainable environments. Every child ought to be able to bring their cultural back pack inside the school gates. I'm sure all kura try. How well do we do? How well is Te Huruhuru Ao o Horomaka Hornby High School doing?

Is it also possible, in my own wondering, that creativity comes from an inner conflict as we struggle to see, to know, to come to terms with our own inner self, our place in the world, and our whakapapa? It was interesting to read in a recent edition of 'The Listener' (May 8-14 2021) about the role of conflict in creativity, particularly in group settings.

I'm not proposing that we set students up in conflict in order to generate creativity. It's just interesting.

I have also thought about the role of stress. I wonder if creativity is perhaps more likely to occur in some settings when we are close to the edge of our comfort zone. Is that the 'place' we have to be to find the motivation to seek new solutions, to find new ideas? Is creativity enhanced when we experience eustress (as opposed to distress .. "Eustress is a word used to describe stress that is positive, motivating, and enhances functioning while distress refers to bad and overwhelming stress that impairs functioning." https://www.choosingtherapy.com/eustress-vs-distress/#:~:text=Eustress%20is%20a%20word%20used,overwhelming%20stress%20that%20impairs%20functioning. )

I wonder if schools that support diverse cultural identity more effectively end up seeing higher levels of creativity from students (regardless of curriculum area or kura activity)? Is it possible that schools with more culturally diverse student and staff populations are more predisposed to greater creativity, assuming the other drivers of creativity are activated? How would/could we find out? Difficult, I suspect, if it is (as I suggest) one of those 'necessary but not sufficient; conditions. Mind you, could this be an interesting application of the CAST Creative Schools Index?

None of this is any sort of 'claim', there is no suggestion that any of this is some sort of truth. It is simply what I have 'wondered'. It also strengthens the case for the Manaiakalani pedagogy 'Learn Create Share', doesn't it? Our typically lower decile schools tend to reflect wide cultural diversity. Here's a thought: if any of my other wonderings are true (IF), then are our more culturally diverse schools the potential powerhouses for creativity and innovation across Aotearoa? 

Food for thought, eh!!

 

Te Rito Toi 4 .. why creativity, and what does it look like, anyway?

Understanding our 'Learn Create Share' pedagogy in the Manaiakalani framework can be difficult . Each word seems to have a common sense meaning that we try to draw from our everyday understandings. Yet understanding what each of these terms means is really important if we are all, whānau, learner, and teachers,  to engage successfully with this 'pedagogy,' this 'way of causing learning that appears to be so successful.

Regardless of whether we are learner, whānau, or teacher,  perhaps the hardest to understand is the 'create' component. Yet it is really important that we do,. It is no coincidence that it is the middle word, it is central to this whole pedagogy. 

Why is creativity so important? If you had a chance to read the paper by Professor Peter O'Connor and his team, you will have seen that the act or process of appealing to, feeding. and developing, our human ability to be creative feeds all of our other essential needs - our wellbeing, our learning (whether it be basic literacies, or our more advanced knowledge needs), our sense of self and our identity as human beings. Without these things no meaningful learning will occur.

So what does it look like? What IS creativity? That is a HUGE question, one not easily aaswered, A question that is perhaps more easily answered is 'what do we mean by 'create' in our Manaiakalani pedagogy?'. What would it look like if it were happening? How would I recognise it? These are all different ways of asking the same question, and I am not convinced that there is a widespread understanding of the answer, regardless of how you frame the question. Yet the answer is, I think, not too difficult to understand. It is important that the meaning is 'visible' to everyone, that we can all recognise what 'create' looks like in practice, whether we are learner, teacher, or whānau.

The generally accepted meaning of the term 'create' in the Manaiakalani kaupapa is:

“Combine existing knowledge with original ideas in new and imaginative ways to create a new outcome.” I'd like to take a little time to 'unpack', to explain, to make clear, what that looks like, what that means.

I'd begin by going back to the notion of knowledge proposed by Jane Gilbert in the early 2000s in her book 'Catching the knowledge wave'. 

She suggested that we need to redefine knowledge. Most adults today grew up with the idea that knowledge was 'facts' tor 'stuff' hat we needed to know. Jane suggested that knowledge needed to be redefined to be facts, AND what we did with them. Knowing stuff was no longer enough. Rather it was a matter of what we did with that 'stuff'. Note that this DOESN'T suggest that knowing stuff is not longer important. Quite the opposite. Knowing stuff continues to be vital. However that is NO LONGER ENOUGH!! So in the context of the current maths eduction debate, it is saying that you DO still need to know stuff like basic number facts, times tables etc. It's just that this is no longer enough. You need to be able to do stuff with this.

In the Manaiakalani pedagogy, 'create' means to create new meaning with what you know. This does NOT need to be new meaning for humanity. Rather it just needs to be new meaning for the learner. THAT is creativity. So a learner creates new meaning for themselves, and then the question is 'what do they do with it?'

Here is an example drawn from my own economics teaching background. I teach a student how to use a supply and demand graph/market model. That is the 'lean' part of the pedagogy. I then supply the learner with an article on the housing market in Aotearoa that talks about accelerating house prices. The learner takes the market model and uses it to explain WHY house prices are accelerating, and what could be done to solve the problem of accelerating  house prices. The learner has 'explained' and 'synthesised'. The learner has demonstrated insight into the problem. The learner has created new understanding for her/him self. 

That is 'creativity'. That is the 'create' portion of our pedagogy. To put this in context for the educationalists, this shifts the learner from the Multistructural to the Relational or Extended Abstract levels of thinking in the SOLO framework, or in NCEA terms to the Merit and Excellence levels of achievement.

To 'share' this the learner then writes a blog post that outlines/explains all of this. The blog post is written with a purpose. The purpose is to demonstrate the learner's insight and understanding, it is perhaps written to inform the reader. It is vital to understand that blogging must have a purpose, and that that purpose must go beyond (for example) recording a lesson. That in itself achieves little, The blog post as a piece of writing MUST reflect new understanding, new learning. THAT is its power. And ideally that blog post will receive comment from whānau, teachers, and the world more generally.

This does not exclude the more generally accepted ideas of creativity. Indeed these are crucial for the learner. And creativity is like a muscle: it can be exercised, and in doing so it will strengthen. But more on that soon.

In the meantime, my thanks to Kelsey Clifford, our Education Programme Leader in our Uru Mānuka kāhui ako, for supporting my own growing understanding of creativity. This post in itself is an example of the reflection of the growth in my own understanding of the Manaiakalani pedagogy, an example of 'create'. Kia ora Kelsey.

R Sutton

Tumuaki

Te Huruhuru Ao o Horomaka Hornby High School