Learning Through Listening

Do your students look at you blankly?
Do they speak to you during group sessions and not to each other?
Are they in tune with what you say and don't take each other's ideas seriously? 

These are some of the challenges that I believed needed addressing in the classroom and wanted to create something that would teach children how to engage with each others ideas.

What skills do we expect children to do naturally that could be explicitly taught?

I have created a site that breaks down the individual skills to listening and engagement. This includes the resources and assessments I am developing along with some modelling videos.

You can access the site through the link below:

Learning Through Listening

I would very much appreciate your feedback using the link found at the bottom of each page as I am still developing this resource and would like to make it as helpful and applicable to your classrooms as possible.

Nga mihi nui!

Next Steps

Kia ora readers and colleagues,

I am writing to you from the seat of AirNZ A320 happily masked up and brain buzzing with next steps for my MIT 2020 project. 

I was happy enough to hop on a plane for the first time since our Level 4 lockdown and head over to Auckland for an elongated weekend. 

  

Our small collection of teachers which had been restricted to meeting via google since the beginning of the year were delighted to reunite on the Auckland waterfront. We enjoyed a day of sharing and feedback along with wonderful hospitality from the team at KPMG.

This was just the incentive and reboost that I needed and am very grateful for the ideas and feedback shared by the team.

Learning Through Listening: A Website for Teachers

So I have some next steps which I am currently working through to achieve.:

Create Google Forms for Assessment and Feedback

Sonali shared an assessment which she had transferred into google form. This was a brilliant idea from a teacher perspective because it would be easy to replicate. I or any other teacher could fill it in quite simply once it was created. This could also be easily duplicated and adapted as a student self- assessment. So I am currently creating two google forms using the criteria from the orginal rubric which I designed earlier.

I have also created a feedback form for the site which is accessible at the bottom of each page of the site and can be filled in here.

Set up Google Analytics and Video Group Sessions

I have yet to set up google analytics on the site and video group sessions during reading and maths. These are the current top priorities.

Get the Site out there!

The second major priorty is to promote the site and get it out to teachers in order to gain feedback and to see if it is something that others find useful.

Data and Evidence

Data will be very important for backing this idea. Once the forms are created I need to get the students to self assess. I will also need to scale them on the rubric and compare the data to term 2s data from this year. Data from listening PATs is unlikely to be available until term 4.

 

Keep your eyes peeled for the next post promoting the new site! It may even pop up on your facebook feed! I look forward to your comments and feedback! 

Nga mihi nui,

Alethea