Mercury Bay Area School (TLIF 3-037) - Changing teacher practice through using a middle years’ student profile Publications
Publication Details
Project Reference: Mercury Bay Area School TLIF 3-037: Staff in the middle school years at Mercury Bay Area School had a profile describing what the ‘ideal’ middle years graduate might look like. However, they needed to learn how to use it to change their practice, engage with whānau in discussions about education, and increase the engagement of middle school students in their learning.
Author(s): (Inquiry Team) Julie Bougen – original project lead and deputy principal
Date Published: May 2020
Overview
The school’s group of middle school teachers trialed a wide range of practices that put the profile at the foreground of their practice. These included new approaches to reporting to parents, introducing thinking journals for staff and students, ‘learning coach’ time, introducing thinking routines in classes, and focusing teacher appraisals on the profile.
I see the profile as something I can strive towards and it encourages higher levels of achievement. I can see what I have to work on and can be a better student. Teachers can see as well, and we can work together to achieve a common goal.
Year nine student
After a year, the new practices did not appear to have deepened student engagement in learning, although students were more aware of a range of thinking strategies. However, the teachers gained valuable insights into the system they were working in and uncovered potential keys to future progress. These insights will be a good foundation for further work on systemic interventions to improve outcomes for all learners and have given the teachers direction for further improvements in subsequent years.
The inquiry story
The inquiry involved the four lead teachers (two year 7/8 classroom teachers, one secondary science and mathematics teacher, and one secondary English and social studies teacher), a deputy principal in the middle school, and an external advisor as members of the project team. Each of the lead teachers either team-taught or worked with at least one other teacher and they all were part of the inquiry. The target student group included Māori middle school students and students from low socio-economic backgrounds, although all middle school students were included in the inquiry and all were surveyed as part of the inquiry’s data gathering.
What was the focus?
The school’s teachers had created a shared vision for their middle school and had developed a profile (the ‘MY profile’) of the ‘ideal’ middle years graduate. The vision is “To develop students who can think for themselves through thinking with others.”
The profile focuses on the key competencies and essential curriculum knowledge. The teachers believed that using this profile as a living document for middle school students would promote and encourage improvement in teaching practice and student engagement.
The project was informed by the existing literature and school data showing drops in engagement for middle school students in general, and Māori students and those from low socio-econoamic backgrounds, in particular.
The inquiry questions were “How might basing assessment around a narrative profile:
- increase student engagement in their learning?
- provide opportunities for discussions with whānau?
- support teachers to adapt their teaching practice?”
The teachers hoped that the project would move classroom practice from teacher-directed, subject-specific learning to greater personalisation. They wanted the students to see learning as a holistic, connected process, which will enable them to participate fully in our fast-changing world.
What did the teachers try?
The teachers took an evidence-based and dynamic approach to their inquiry, which meant they responded to evidence and hunches that arose during the project and modified their plan to take them into account. This allowed them to let go of things that did not appear to be working and try new approaches instead. However, this generated a level of uncertainty that was difficult for some staff to cope with.
Initiatives to support teachers adapt their practice
The vision was that the MY profile would drive planning, teaching, assessment and reporting. Staff would be able to justify their teaching decisions in relation to the MY profile. All teacher inquiries had a strong focus on how teachers could support students to “think for themselves through thinking with others.” Approaches to encourage teachers to think differently about their existing practice and to try new approaches included the following:
- Professional learning days were held for teachers to collaboratively explore how they could use the profile in their class.
- Weekly staff meetings were dedicated to thinking about how the profile was and could be used in classes.
- Learning design leaders led informal discussions with all staff on the profile and encouraged them to use simple thinking routines with their students.
- Limits were placed on the amount of other professional learning and development MY staff had.
- The teachers kept ‘thinking journals’ to model the value of reflection for students, provide data for appraisals, and support their own growth and development.
- All teachers were asked to ensure their planning showed explicit links between the MY profile and what they were going to teach and assess.
- The format of the middle school’s end-of-year report formats was changed to focus specifically on the profile.
- The end-of-year student awards were changed from acknowledging effort and achievement in subject areas to acknowledging progress with regard to the profile.
- The teachers visited each other’s classes to provide collegial feedback.
- Teachers were encouraged to try ‘Thinking routines’ from Project Zero.
Initiatives aimed at engaging with whānau
The draft profile and thinking behind it was shared with whānau as it was being developed, and the reporting system was changed to explicitly focus on the profile. Whānau–student–teacher interviews were based about the profile to provide formative feedback, gather multiple perspectives on each student’s progress in relation to the profile, and set goals. The profile was revised and made much simpler as a result of feedback from whānau.
Initiatives aimed at engaging students
- All students participated in learning group time each week where activities were explicitly structured around the profile.
- Students set goals based on the profile.
- All students were required to keep a thinking journal.
- At the end of the year, each middle year student developed a portfolio consisting of annotated artifacts from across the learning areas to give next year’s learning coach a sense of their current progress in relation to the profile, and to encourage students to take agency for their learning.
- At the end of the year, each student gave a short presentation to staff about their current strengths and weaknesses.
What happened?
The outcomes were very mixed.
Whānau engagement
The majority of parents, teachers and students warmly received the restructuring of the mid-year student–whānau–teacher interviews around the MY profile. Many them thought the profile was useful in supporting learning conversations.
Student engagement
It appears that the profile did not have an impact on student engagement, although students were more aware of what it means to think.
There was no clear indication of student shifts in intellectual engagement or their ability to ‘think for themselves through thinking with others’. Data from student-developed concept maps and student focus groups indicated students were more aware of thinking strategies. The concept maps they created at the end of the year included many specific strategic responses for developing thinking. However, students tended to rate themselves lower as thinkers at the end of the year than at the beginning. The teachers believe this may be because students developed a better understanding of what is involved in thinking and rated themselves more realistically at the end of the year.
Students didn’t engage with the goals they set at the start of the year, and generally made little effort to maintain their thinking journals, although this differed markedly from class to class. Their opinions on the usefulness of the MY profile varied from positive to very negative.
Change to teacher practice
Most teachers thought they provided more opportunities for students to talk about and to explain their thinking. Students had the same perceptions. However, when it came to how teachers helped students to think, the students’ responses were mixed, which suggests the focus on thinking and engagement was neither universal in class, nor particularly effective. The teachers admitted that their attempts to encourage thinking varied. Some of them found it hard to adapt to a different approach and would revert to the way of teaching they felt comfortable with.
There was little evidence teachers used the planning templates widely. Some teachers did incorporate elements of the profile and, more frequently, thinking routines into their planning, but the links between assessment and the profile were often difficult to see. Classroom observations showed there was a huge variation between classes as to the extent that the profile was in the foreground of practice. Many teachers acknowledged that they did not know how to implement the profile and needed more help.
What did they learn?
Although the results were mixed, the teachers in the inquiry were interested in changing the underlying system, not just incorporating yet another intervention or strategy. The team drew on a framework developed by Mark Cabaj (2018) to identify the three ‘mission critical’ aspects of underlying system change:
- Strategic learning: the extent to which efforts uncover insights key to future progress.
- Systems change: the extent to which efforts change the system’s underlying complex issues.
- Mission outcomes: the extent to which efforts help to make lives better.
The project team believes they have not found out a great deal about system change or achieved their mission outcomes of changing students’ engagement. However, they believe they have done a great deal of strategic learning. Changing a culture is a slow process and what the teachers learned from what they tried in this project is a strong foundation for progressing the work in the future. There are several important insights they believe will be key to future progress:
- The importance of good, clear communication to a wide range of people, not just those immediately involved in the project. This was one of the most powerful lessons.
- A key insight was the need to constantly circle from the ‘big picture’ to the details of implementation and back to the big picture. The project team needed multiple opportunities to re-visit what they hoped to achieve with the development and implementation of the MY profile, and why it was important.
- For many (mainly secondary) teachers, their subject specialty is important to their sense of professional identity. Some felt a focus on dispositions was detrimental to their subject area learning and would disadvantage students later in their schooling.
- It is necessary to find a balance between flexibility and structure when introducing a new approach. This allows teachers to find the balance point that best supports them to change their practice.
- All staff need to be able to positively use dissonance and to become more comfortable with both disagreement and uncertainty. They need to be ready, willing, and able to engage in robust collegial discussions aimed at understanding multiple perspectives.
Using these insights, the project team has identified two possible ways of driving more effective change at a systems level. The first is to create an innovation stream where teachers who are ready to further explore how to better engage students intellectually have the flexibility to try new approaches, while the rest of the teachers work to embed initiatives started in this project. The second is to introduce a new leadership position – teacher coach – to support the growth and development of teachers in the middle school. The teacher coach will support teachers to think critically about their practice, engage in collegial discussions, and develop the disposition to ‘think for themselves through thinking with others’ so they can model it for their students.
Inquiry Team
The inquiry team comprised the school’s deputy principal, middle school’s lead teachers, and an external advisor (who took over as deputy principal and project lead when the original one retired):
- Julie Bougen – original project lead and deputy principal
- Sue Barakat – middle school lead teacher
- Teresa Shepherd – middle school lead teacher
- Jamie Hutt – middle school lead teacher
- Pieta Begley – middle school lead teacher
- Ally Bull – external advisor and later project lead.
For further information
If you would like to learn more about this project, please contact the project leader Ally Bull at a.bull@evaluate.co.nz or Jenny Bloom, Deputy Principal of the Middle Years bloomjen@mbas.ac.nz
Reference List
Cabaj, M. (2018). Evaluating systems change results: An inquiry framework. Retrieved from http://www.tamarackcommunity.ca/library/paper-evaluating-systems-change-results-an-inquiry-framework
Ritchhart. R., Church, M. & Morrison, K. (2011). Making Thinking Visible. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
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