So our inquiry is off and running!
The online meeting felt productive with lots of thoughtful comments from you. We really appreciated your participation over the 24 hour period.
Summary of your responses to Question One:
How could we collect our [teacher] experience and questions along the way?
You liked the look of the survey. Its length and structure seem useful and manageable to help capture some of the teacher voice.
We will now create a survey using these questions as they are so that we can compare our results to the national data collected by NZCER.
We think that the final question in the survey (where each teacher gets to make their own comments) will be very useful place to record your teacher reflections.
The comments from some of you about the need to include a question about dynamics of having a classroom full of students using devices is a good point and it is an important and rich question.
We think that it will form part of the story taking place in your classroom and will be better understood as a part of each teachers' presentation of their experiences.
We will now get this survey on the go and it will be ready for you to complete later this term.
Summary of Question Two:
How could we understand more about how students are engaging with the learning?
You analysed these questions in detail and you had queries around two areas:
1) the format of the questions
You wondered if these questions would actually work well in the practical setting of the classroom.
We have tweaked questions 1-3 so that they are more useful to our inquiry and removed question 4.
2) the mode for collecting student voice
You had a range of examples about how to collect student voice.
We strongly suggest that this is a chance to try something new and engage with new methods for collecting student voice that gives our students an active voice. Surveys and exit tickets are easy for us to administer and for students to complete - but they do not give students a chance to go 'off-script' and tell us what they are thinking and feeling whereas focus groups do.
The next step is for the four teachers who are piloting the methodology for our inquiry to get stuck in and have a go at trying something in their classroom.
We have refined three questions with prompts to use in a student focus group and created a suggested methodology to try. These have been shared with you in a google doc.
And then the next step which will actively involve us all will be :
MEETING #3 on November 24th from 9-11 am. Location TBC
Remember to put in for relief early.
It is during the next meeting Gerd, Esther, Duncan and Danielle will share with us what they have learnt and together we will use the reflections to inform the next teachers' cycle of Teaching as Inquiry.