Michelle's Learning

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy? Learning about the Empowered part of the Manaiakalani kaupapa was really great today. It was interesting to hear how the word Agency was changed to Empowered due to the word association around agencies and how many families have had negative experiences with these services. It was certainly thought-provoking when Dorothy spoke about it being hard for children to feel empowered when not many opportunities are available to them due to financial restrictions. When adults are becoming 'working poor' due to their annual income and how they have to be creative with how they need to pay for their weekly bills etc. How can families be empowered when they want to buy their own homes and not have a home owned by 'the state'? We can see by the statistics of the effects of disempowerment for a five-year-old child that attends a decile one school as their MEAN performance level is of a three-year-...

  What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy? Ubiquitous Learning - Anytime, Anywhere, Anyplace for everyone.  This was interesting to listen to today. I never knew what this meant before and it was certainly helpful to have this explained.  We certainly got to use this in practice when we were in lockdown last year. We also have to remember that by having our lessons/learning on our class site our students can partake outside the 'normal' school hours. In Rongo-mā-tāne we have our weekly plans on our class site and pdf's of our home learning worksheets which whānau may want to use while at home (if the child's pukapuka isn't there). It was so interesting to hear that how children in a decile 1 school child compared to a decile 10 school child can hear 30,000,000 fewer words than their counterparts. I always knew that the statistics were very high but never to this degree. I have certainly seen this at our decile 3 school a...

  What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy? It was interesting to hear Dorothy talk about how we can make our teaching and learning visible. Is it visible to our learners, whānau, and colleagues? Back in the day teachers were able to show whānau hard copies of tamariki work but now in our digital world how can we be held accountable.  By using Google Sites it makes learning visible to the child and Hapara makes learning visible to the teacher. Google Sites are also a way for whānau to see what their tamariki are learning especially if they don't have the opportunity to speak to kaiako. Dorothy's statement about 'every password we make makes it a barrier for learners', was certainly thought-provoking. I have never thought of this before and I fully agree with this statement. I know how much trouble I have trying to remember passwords etc let alone for learners. This is a very valid point and we have to remember when setting up...

 DFI - Day 4 What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy? It was interesting to hear that the statistics for Learn, Create, Share is equally attached to the elements of Create as with Share. I know that our tamariki in our New Entrant-Year 2 studio love to share their learning via Seesaw with their whānau but I never thought of how other students would like to share also.  It was interesting to hear that Manaiakalani is about 'Sharing with PURPOSE for an AUDIENCE'. I loved hearing about how 'an assembly is not an authentic audience as they don't have the ability to pause then move on'. This certainly resonated with me as a kaiako who teaches 5-6-year-olds. The amount of time spent sitting for these children is counterproductive to them and their teachers, as we NEVER do this in our own learning time. Our blocks are broken down to small segments with movement and brain breaks in between whenever we see tamariki struggling. It...

 DFI - Day 3 What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy? I really enjoyed Dorothy's presentation today regarding the Manaiakalani pedagogy. I loved the idea of Hanga (It's all about the Hook) and how our children can be creative to show their learning. I enjoyed reading the different quotes especially 'Creative skills help students become better problem solvers, communicators and collaborators.' I know when I went to school (just before the dinosaurs roamed) and even when my own children went to school, templates were the thing and sometimes you couldn't tell who's work it was as they were all identical. When I started/finished my Early Childhood training my philosophy evolved that I would not be a template teacher and I was interested to see how tamariki would have the opportunity to be creative and expressive when I was employed by Rāwhiti School. I feel that our school give our students the opportunity to be creativ...

 DFI Day 2 What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy? I was interested to learn about RATE (Recognise, Amplify, Turbocharge, Effective Practice) and how we can recognise ako in our daily practice. This made me think - What does LEARN look like in our school/studio? I feel one of the ways that we can see the learning for our tamariki is when they Respond to Literacy during our writing programme. The kaiako read a book to our kaiāwhina group and then tamariki create their own picture and write about their creation. This can be their own ideas (for the more capable writers) or we have sentence starters for our new learners. Once completed they share their work on Seesaw. We have adapted this slightly this year to include our Rāwhiti School theme of Belonging so tamariki stay with their kaiāwhina teacher for the writing block. Last year we did the same concept but each teacher did a 'book sell' and tamariki were allowed to choose what boo...