A few years ago, I read a great blog by Jennifer Gonzalez about Companion planting. Around this time of year, when people are starting to get to the end of their tether, I normally send it to someone to remind them to check in with their marigolds. At the moment, as we round down to our last week of the first full term of school this year, you can see the marigolds bringing up their peers.  You can see them working in their teams, supporting each other, and at, blogging time, thanking them in their blogs.

In the article, Jennifer Gonzalez speaks about the power of companion planting and how each teacher needs to find their marigold, which is the plant that lifts up everything around them, and avoid the walnuts, which let off toxic substances and bring everybody down.

What we sometimes forget though is that we need to be that marigold for others. Anthony Mohammed writes about staffroom culture and says that there are four types of teachers in a staff room: fundamentalists, believers, survivors and tweeners.   We need to ensure that the voices and presence of the believers are around our tweeners.

I know that I have had my marigolds. It’s hard to survive in a school without them. If I’m honest each school that I’ve left it’s because the walnut (or the fundamentalist) side of me had gotten too big, and probably hadn’t noted it at the time. If you can’t be positive where you are in life any more, it’s time to make some decisions.

It’s also important to recognise the need to BE the marigold for others. The most annoying statement that I hear is “I know you’re busy but can I….”

Yes, you can. Because if we’re not making time for people, why are we in schools? Paperwork can wait. People are the important, non delegable, non postponable part of your job. And we all have so much effect on each other. In a regular school, teaching is a team sport.  In a new school, even more so.

I know my marigolds in the past have contributed so much to myself as a teacher, and as a person. They are not only the encouraging but also challenging.  Challenging me to be a better person and a better teacher, and I’m grateful for it. All in all it comes down to time though. They made time for me….and have been a mix of experienced and beginner, primary and secondary, teachers and non-teachers.  An old AP used to say to students all the time…show me your friends and I’ll show you who you are. I prefer to think….you become the people that you hang around.

Make sure you pick people you admire and that lift you up. And make time to lift up others.

Got to sleep in until 6.30. Love this working from home thing.

Get up.

Shower.

Quickly get dressed and plan out zoom meetings.

Feed year 9 son and set his work for the day because his school hasn’t. Trying to teach year 9 maths, japanese and english is pretty hard. Meaningful lessons? Maintain consistency is the key. Must keep learning.

8am Zoom meeting for personalised planning. Don’t have to drive to school. Love this working from home thing.

8.30 Year 12 Zoom meeting.

10.30 meeting with faculty to look at how we’re going to adjust a practical subject to online. Glare at husband when told that I couldn’t sit on lounge because he was Zooming with his job and I might hear “secret business”.

Keep headphones on and pretend my video isn’t quite working so I can secretly boil the kettle while on Zoom meeting.

Yell up to son to make sure he’s out of bed and started working on the useless school work I’ve set him because his school wasn’t setting anything.

Shove a couple of biscuits in my mouth while walking back with coffee to the next Zoom meeting. Get told I look like I just woke up. Remind myself to take the hoody off next time.

3 hour zoom meeting about personal plans. This working from home thing is tiring. Haven’t had lunch yet because back to back Zoom meetings. Starting to hate the sound of Zoom. This working from home thing kind of sucks.

Zoom meeting to talk about Zoom meetings for next week.

4pm Can fit in another Zoom meeting with a parent to talk about the fact their child is not working.

Working on scaffolding 80 page folio for a student. Haven’t had lunch yet but don’t have any Zoom meetings!

Marking portfolios and providing video feedback to students. Different than a Zoom meeting.  Why is my throat so sore? Is it COVID? No, Zoom. Havent’ talked this much in a day in a long time.

Write some more PP’s for students who are working from home.

Record videos for parents on how to access canvas calendar and answer emails about students who couldn’t get on Zoom, or did the wrong thing on Zoom.

Realise I have a 7pm zoom meeting with Church about mass via Zoom. It’s 7pm and I haven’t had lunch or dinner yet. Having trouble with my camera again so I can drink coffee while Zooming.

Final email for the day before I go off and make some dinner. “teachers are just on an extended holiday”

Final check of facebook while I drag myself off to bed, not having a break all day. Talk about Zoom fatigue.

Flick through son’s school facebook. Turns out I’d set a months worth of work thinking that his school hadn’t set any. They had. Why? “Yours is more interesting Mum”.  hmmmm…..

Yep, extended holiday. I love working from home.

This year I had a “milestone” birthday to celebrate. It was a weird mix this year. A lovely celebration from people at work, who spent time that they didn’t have to prepare morning tea and embarrassingly put me in front of the whole staff to sing happy birthday to. It was also a terribly sad day, because we sent all our students home.

We’ve learnt so much during this time.

About teachers: how fast and hard they can work, how dedicated,  caring, responsive and resilient they are when we change things every five minutes.  How much that they care for each individual as they Zoom for set periods, set and check work and call home when worried about students, and bring to the forefront quickly kids that need extra help.

Students: how resilient and hard working they are. How independently they can work when there is a need to and how much every student needs the connection to their school. Our attendance rates post-COVID are a lot higher than prior. Are the advantages of school now more appreciated?

Parents: How much they (mostly) value school and teachers seems to have risen in this time but also the awareness of their children. COVID bought the classroom into people’s homes. And on the most part parents were extremely grateful of the work that teachers did to facilitate student learning.

What a year this week has been.

Over the weekend, some great leadership from the state in terms of shutting schools.

Sunday, kids go to school tomorrow, we’ll make an announcement on Monday night. Let son stay home for obviously impending school closure. Cheers to the state for this.

Sunday night, our PM gets online and says with great disgust to the Australian people “You obviously can’t look after yourselves….we’ll look after you so cafes, restaurants, gyms, and pubs…closing. Cause you can’t implement social distancing….but schools will remain open….huh?

Monday  some good leadership from our State saying “Keep the kids at home unless you can’t” Well that’s confusing. Clarification from schools across the state “Please keep your kids at home”.  Clearly made the right decision about keeping son at home. Clearer information from principals with great leadership “I’m begging you to leave your kids at home”

NSW says that they’ve been working on online learning for the past 2 months, and they are ready now to hit the button with learning. Son still has no work. Fine, I’ll set some.  Noting those necessary things that are included in his “work”

Get up, shower and dress

Walk the dog

Unpack the dishwasher.

Ring your nan and ask how she is.

And yes, rigorous learning activities. Probably more so than he’s done before in some subjects. Lots of game playing too I’m sure.

Tuesday 24 kids turn up in our part of the school. Teachers work all day getting work together. So much work to do, such great work from teachers who are totally changing the way that they work.  Amazed at how much our teachers are just totally focused on kids, when each of them have different family situations at home.

Myself? Feeling sad, angry, frustrated, sad, happy. Needing more hugs in a time without hugs.

Potential for so much jump in teacher learning and so much loss at the same time. So much potential for student learning and so much potential loss. We talk about HSC and how it will be different this year when really we’ll see a 12 year impact.

I sometimes forget, in the rush of being in a K-9 school, (and loving the celebrity that comes from walking through stage 3) that most of my history in teaching is actually teaching big kids. Really big kids.  For the past ten years, aside from teaching in my current setting, where little kids (and yes, they do scare me) are rife, my experience teaching mostly lies with senior TAS subjects. A range of subjects, a range of kids.

I’ve taught a number of subjects across the KLA to a year 12 cohort, and have taught in this time a range of students. My favourite though is major project subjects. The pressures of major project teaching I’ve always found to be greater than that of a normal exam based subject. Your own blood, sweat and tears, and sometimes, also funds (thousands of funds) go into the projects, and often times the new ulcer that you develop every year as you coax, push and cajole students across the line feels like you care more about their projects than they do.

Nothing beats that day though, where they are standing in front of their project and it’s completed. Where a student can stand there and say they’ve done a substantial amount of work and that they can see the culmination of that work. That their work is complete, finished, and for a lot of those students, better than anything they’ve done in their schooling career. That they have something that they can see is the fruit of their labour.  My favourite projects are always those kids that you have to “hassle” the hardest.

The other day I heard my principal talking about good leadership being knowing what levers to pull and when. This is so relevant to general teaching as well as leading.  Knowing that sometimes you can stand there with a student that has done nothing and what to rant but what comes out is “That’s okay….you still have time….we can fix this…” to setting goals for students, to calling parents, to hassling but with love.

This is the job of a teacher of projects.  And this starts with empathy.

Maybe that pressure is because you can see kids wasting time over the course of the project. Maybe it’s because you can see that dip in their spirits as they realise that the date is coming up and they will never (even the best project) be completely happy with it.

The job of the project teacher is to be their support. As I said to a year 4 teacher once…I teach 17 year olds. I expect them to be organised, but I’m not stupid enough to trust them to be organised. We are the safety net for kids.

But that pressure is also flipped to pride when you see what the project is….fulfilment of potential.  What an honour to be a part of that.

15 years ago, I vowed never to go to camp again.

Last time I went it rained for three days straight. Everyone was miserable. The instructors claimed that there’d never been a camp that was so bad.  I didn’t find out until later but I was pregnant at the time, and the bouts on the giant swing wasn’t helping my general attitude of just feeling miserable.   Then, the year co-ordinator and her mates went off to the pub and left me and another teacher with 180 soaking wet and miserable year 7 kids. I came home, walked in the door, went straight to bed and told my husband “I’m never going to camp again”.

This year, I was put in the position of having to go to year 8 camp.  I tried as hard as I could to convince people that it wasn’t worthwhile sending me.  My problem is that I find it difficult to say no. But there was certainly a lot of (not subtle) hinting.  “There’s a meeting on that day that’s really important” was met with “you’re going to camp”.  “This person is coming out to visit today” was met with “you’re going to camp”. A workplace injury happened a week too early, and although it was difficult to walk up the hills while I was there, and I had to miss out on the archery (too much of a hill for me recently damaged knee) I was still healthy enough to go to camp. Damn.

What I had forgotten to factor in is how wonderful our staff and students are. Students who were carefully selected to be in groups with only one of their friends supporting those students who they would normally have nothing to do with. The moral support of encouraging someone to jump of the edge of a pole (while fully harnessed) astounded me. It broke my heart and I nearly cried when one of the girls in year 8 got stuck at the top, and regardless of the sound of all the encouragement below, she could not jump. The instructor had to go up and get her. She then jumped down with his encouragement and made it to the bottom in sobbing tears. Every student in the group hugged her. She then bravely announced that she would do it again, and proceeded to jump up to the pole again.

I was so encouraged by the way that students were treating each other and the staff. Even me getting students out of their room at 10 o’clock because I put the potentially noisy group next to my room was met with politeness. “I’m exhausted” I begged….”please let me sleep”. They must have sensed that I was on the edge of losing it, or they were really very considerate because they didn’t make another sound all night. Might have also been because I quoted some things that they said during the last half an hour (who brings Monopoly to camp?) as the walls were less than paper thin.

It was interesting how student perception of staff changed over time also. My first bout of laser tag saw me asking the team with the least people on it if I could join them. I can’t run, with this knee (from my injury) but I can shoot. A student looked me up and down, sighed loudly and said “I suppose”. My limping through the field yelling “someone shoot Mr Whitman” and my score of 144 (even though Mr Whitman’s team beat my team every time) must have earned someone’s respect, because on the next game, I asked a totally different group which team I could join, and they were elbowing other student’s out of the way to get me on their team. Feel like it’s taken me forty years to be selected first on a sports team.

Looking back to my previous camp experience, aside from the weather, the main difference would have to be the staff. I’m constantly astounded by how amazing St Luke’s staff are. We talk about “open to learning” and “willing to work hard”, and this comes through in all facets of working with St Luke’s staff. I do not know what it is, but it’s something special. Maybe it’s our size, while our SOL staff is still small, but I’ve never worked at a school before where every teacher is just brilliant. I hope it lasts.

All in all, I don’t think I’ll wait 15 years to go again. I’ve booked in the camp for next year. But a week later I’m still exhausted….so maybe if I start hinting now….

At St Luke’s Catholic College, Marsden Park, our vision is to nurture faith filled curious children to be creative contributors and innovative problem solvers. St Luke’s began in 2017 with an agenda to change the format of education to allow students to follow their passions, and to challenge traditional school processes. While working within a framework of inquiry, project based and problem based learning, assessment in many schools still looks like a “traditional” assessment where every student does the same thing, disregarding interest, ability or choice. At St Luke’s, we have redesigned the assessment process to align with strict state and federal requirements, but to focus on student choice, cross key learning area and bringing in things that students do outside of the classroom.

At St Luke’s, there’s no marks, no grades, no exams, and students can choose to disregard set tasks, so long as they can demonstrate achievement of the outcomes. Students can bring forth, with mentoring from teachers, any evidence that they wish to demonstrate this. This requires students to explain how they meet particular course outcomes and capabilities but may use evidence from anything inside or outside of school to do so. Can we do better at this? Absolutely, but the push is there at the moment. We’d like to see more students take this up with the extensive portfolio of things that they do outside of school.

Each unit of work comes with an assessment outline that includes the following statement

For each unit of work, students are expected to construct a blog post that explains how they’ve met the outcomes and pillars within that unit of work. This was meant to be a summative reflection of their work, but has become so much more than that with incidentally, students understanding and unpacking the syllabus outcomes explicitly, leading to a greater understanding and visibility of what students need to know and have learnt. This also serves as a great portfolio for us in terms of student writing, and student growth in writing has been substantial particularly in stage 4: with blogs, coaching of teachers by our IL: Literacy, and tools such as Scribo to support and assist teachers in understanding what good writing, and good writing teaching looks like.

Students develop over time, a portfolio of work, published publicly and to parents, of examples and evaluations of their best work. This leads to twice a year students presenting in student led conferences with their parents and a teacher, focussing on the achievement of students over the year, centred around their strength across capabilities. This along with student reports, serve to bring prominence to social and enterprise skills expressed in our 6 pillars

The St Luke’s Inquiry Process

Our inquiry process at St Lukes was designed in order to ensure that there was a consistency of understanding of what inquiry looked like from K-12. In this case, it needed to be simple, with easy to understand elements for students (and teachers), with the flexibility to work differently for more experienced teachers in inquiry. The model that we’ve used is adapted from research into many different inquiry learning models around the world.

The process starts at understanding the problem, immersing students in skills, knowledge and capabilities, in order to create something (whether this be an essay, a physical project, a poem). Reflection sits in the center of all of this, as reflection sometimes sees a student moving around and in and out of the cycle at different rates and pathways based on the student, the KLA and the specific piece of learning that they are doing.  Learning should be based around whatever is at the best interest of that student at that point of time based on the particular thing that they are meant to learn.

Understand
Understanding process includes the engagement and unpacking of what is required by the problem.

This includes an entry event where teachers open the idea of the unit of work to students. For example, in the unit of work on Forces and motion, students played games that involved different types of motion in groups, rating each game and noting any different types of motion that they utilised.

Students then watched the OK Go Rube Golberg video to look at possibilities for their Rube Golberg Machine.

Students then construct as a class a Need to Know list, which elicits pre-existing knowledge and questions that students may have about the project.

Students then, under the guidance of their teacher, immerse themselves in activities that guide their further understanding of knowledge and skills necessary to build further questions to explore. For example, prior to developing their Rube Golberg machine, students will need to do some research on different types of forces, and the different types of machines that can generate these forces. However, students that have no understanding of what a force is, cannot guide their own inquiry during the information gathering process. Therefore, this process is intended to immerse and engage the students in their needs to know.

SOL Staff’s thoughts about what might go in this section: 

• Brainstorm 
• Entry document/event
• Get data and information 
• Unpack the problem 
• Knows and need to know.

Immerse
Within the Information gathering process, students gather skills and knowledge through experiences and workshops designed and guided by their teachers.This knowledge and skills acquisition process is guided by the needs to know with students identifying the need to know something, students then further exploring and then gathering and refining the information that they need to know to construct their end product or answer the question.

For example, in the Rube Goldberg project, students conduct a number of different science experiments in order to gather knowledge and understanding about different forces. Students then undergo small practical activities in order to understand the concepts of forces. Students should have choice integrated into what they are doing…choice around what to research, how to apply that knowledge, so long as it meets the outcomes of the course.

SOL Staff’s thoughts about what might go in this section: 

• Facts, Knowledge, data
• Content
• Authentic connections: Immerse, connect, understand
• Note-taking
• Effective Research skills: Key/Main idea/Summary
• Technical skills
• Processes
• Workshops
• Group work 
• Modelling 
• Demonstration 
• GRR
• Benchmarking 
• Scaffolding
• Exemplars of work/Blogs
• Plus/Minus/Next steps (peer assessment
• Goal setting
• Self assessment and teacher feedback and peer feedback

Create
Students within the make/create process are constructing the object. This may be a written activity or a creative activity that requires students to demonstrate their achievement of outcomes. This requires a heavy focus on draft-construct-share as a process of developing prototypes and drafts in order to improve through reflection and feedback. Finally, presentation of their final product, to ensure that students can see that there is an authentic use where the culmination of their learning has a purpose.
A note about the process…
This process is not step by step. The process has reflection as the centre as during the process of learning, students are asked to regularly reflect on their process.

Assessment of outcomes for subjects and pillars are based around students selecting components of work across the project that exemplify their achievement in this outcome. Each outcome is linked to a pillar, with cross-kla outcomes being mapped in order to ensure that students can submit examples of work for multiple outcomes and pillars across different programs.

Eg, in the Rube Golberg, students are required to: WS8 selects and uses appropriate strategies, understanding and skills to produce creative and plausible solutions to identified problems (Science outcome) and 4.5.1 applies management processes to successfully complete design projects (TAS outcomes) both of which requires them to work collaboratively (pillar) and manage themselves (pillar)

SOL Staff’s thoughts about what might go in this section: 

• Problem solving 
• Experimentation 
• Testing 
• Refining
• Evaluate, retesting, 
• Use feedback effectively to improve product
• Prototyping: Draft, sketch, design 
• Teacher created samples
• Student choice

The option to start at different points on the diagram, and to delve back into previous areas based on need, is provided for through the arrows that link backwards and forwards in each element. Teachers may guide students through the understand segment, to information gathering, and then back to further understanding based on their information gathering. Teachers may also start with creation of prototypes in order to fully understand the problem, and then work through the process in a different direction. Central to all is reflection.

SOL Staff’s thoughts about what might go in this section: 

• Feedback loop (reflection happens throughout) 
• 2 stars and a wish 
• Evaluation (qualtrix) 
• Maths pathways/education perfect/scribo to get data
• Teacher feedback: Timely and consistent 
• Student response to teacher feedback 
• Blog
• Critical Friends.