Ross Intermediate School, with College Street Normal School, Island Bay School, and Russell Street School (TLIF 5-033) - Powerful partnerships: Co-designing learning with ākonga and whānau Publications
Publication Details
Project Reference: Ross Intermediate School, with College Street Normal School, Island Bay School, and Russell Street School (TLIF 5-033) - Teams of teachers at four different schools were interested to know how they could discover and harness the strengths, passions, cultures, and rich experiences of their ākonga and empower them to lead their learning. They were excited by the notion of talanoa – open, unstructured conversation that involve storying and the sharing and co-creation of knowledge.
Author(s): (Inquiry Team) co-led by Liam Rutherford (Ross Intermediate School), Amanda Dennison (College Street Normal School), Nic Mason (Island Bay School), and Jacqui Innes (Russell Street School). Later, TeeJay Campbell took Liam’s place.
Date Published: February 2019
Overview
Working together, the participating teachers aimed to use what they learned from talanoa with students and whānau to develop new and ambitious approaches to effective practice that would expand the learning opportunities available to students who were not yet making the progress they were capable of. Each conversation was aimed at co-generating knowledge about the learning conditions that promote success and co-developing a plan to do something different in the classroom.
We get to choose what we do, and create the characters, and it was a good learning experience because we actually get to learn how to do it.
You got to be creative … we got to make the scene and choose what to put in it, because we were doing it.
Learner talanoa following co-design of the senior production
While each team took its own path, all of them developed the notion that talanoa needs to be part of how we do things day to day. By making space to listen to people and support them to be who they are, powerful partnerships can be formed that can lead to the co-construction of rich learning experiences, to students taking ownership of the learning space at school, and to students being able to make productive links between the learning that happens in different parts of their worlds.
The inquiry story
This inquiry involved teams of four to six teachers at each of the four participating schools. Each teacher invited participation from two to four of their students, along with those students’ whānau.
What was the focus?
This inquiry was driven by the teachers’ commitment to equity and the growing evidence about the importance of collaboration in driving change. Its goal was to use talanoa (or ‘cogenerative dialogue’) to explore ways that teachers could collaborate proactively with students and their whānau. Through this collaboration, the teachers aspired to discover and harness the students’ strengths, passions, cultures, and rich experiences and to empower them to lead their own learning. To achieve this, the teachers also wanted to transform their pedagogical practices by moving from a knowledge-based curriculum to a learner-centred curriculum that would better support students to develop competencies needed for living and learning. These goals would require explicit collaborative inquiry with ākonga and whānau but would also require personalised professional learning intended to foster teacher agency.
At one level, then, this project was about creating the conditions for collaborative inquiry between groups of teachers, within and across their schools. At another, it was about collaboration between teachers, students, and whānau. At both, participants sought to answer the question: “How can we discover and harness the strengths, passions, cultures and rich experiences of our ākonga and empower them to lead their learning?”
What did the teachers try?
The project commenced with a scanning and then focusing phase during which time the teachers gathered baseline data, including from student surveys and from a purpose-designed tool for assessing students’ sense of agency. Each participating teacher identified two or three students who did not appear to have a strong sense of agency. These students and their whānau were invited into talanoa conversations with the teacher, where they discussed what each student brings to school, the support they needed to realise their unique potential, and how this support might be incorporated into lesson design. The conversations were coached by the lead teacher in line with the principles of talanoa.
The talanoa conversations moved from information-sharing to co-design. One teacher would teach the co-designed lessons, with others observing. The lesson would continue to be critiqued and refined as different teachers tried teaching it with different groups of students. These experiences culminated in more talanoa between kaiako, ākonga, and whānau and another sequence of design, implementation, critique, and refinement.
The lead teachers from the four schools met at least once a term and all teachers met at least four times during the project. Thus, each teaching team followed their own journey while maintaining connection with the overall kaupapa of the project.
What happened as a result of this innovation?
The primary purpose of the inquiry was for the teachers to create the space for talanoa, to use what was learned through these open and unstructured conversations to co-design new experiences and structures, and to engage in further talanoa to reflect upon this. Teachers needed to shift their perceptions of what is involved in such conversations and that they are not teacher led.
Increasingly, talanoa has become part of the natural way these teachers interact with students and whānau. It is also being embedded into school routines. Two schools are engaging in talanoa with groups of students to inform wide-ranging aspects of the classroom programme and one is using it to co-design specific aspects with individuals.
All four schools were inspired by learning about Infinity Learning Maps to adopt and adapt this practice. It involves students in creating maps with themselves at the centre surrounded by the people and things that impact upon their learning. The students use arrows to show the interactions between these things. The maps create a powerful visual record of who students are as learners, how they learn, from whom, and where.
Schools used the learning maps in different ways. For example, in one school, students made videos where they talked a buddy through their map, then used the video and map as an artefact for learning conversations with their teachers about a ‘change goal’ they would like, and later with their teachers and whānau about what people at home and at school can do to help them achieve their goal. In another school, learner maps have been co-constructed by students, teachers, and whānau to identify challenges to wellbeing and engagement and the tools, people, and places that could help the student successfully address these challenges.
Visible changes in classrooms included one teaching team inviting their students to co-design the learning space for it to work for everyone. Students worked for weeks in self-chosen groups with specific tasks (for example, identifying jobs and responsibilities, creating a logo, and organising the floor plan). Each group had to gather voice from the whole class so that everyone’s needs were taken into account. In talanoa after this experience, students impressed their teachers with their ability to explain the co-design process and how it had helped them to make the classroom truly their space.
Teachers enabled ākonga to make their own choices, designing open tasks that were purposeful but could be achieved in multiple ways. For example, a previously disengaged student was excited by a task intended to support Te Reo Māori in which he had to create a book, game, movie, or comic that would help teach at least six action words. When he realised that he could use his coding skills to create a game on Scratch, he was highly motivated and ended up creating a game that left his peers awestruck!
Another teacher was responsible for the senior syndicate’s annual production. Traditionally, this had been a teacher-led exercise using a purchased script. This time, students used their own ideas to co-design a production that involved all ninety students in presenting three ‘twisted fairytales’, complete with music, dance, costumes, and visual effects. Students felt a sense of passion and ownership and their whānau felt immense pride.
Across the four schools, there were increased teacher understandings of ‘what counts’ as co-design and one school developed a model that uses the image of a kite to capture the process and the tools that make it happen. Their model describes a community process for “discovering the whole child, collaborating to design a shared learning pathway, and developing learners who soar.”
For some teachers, engagement in talanoa and learning to make space and listen prompted links to te ao Māori contexts and processes for engaging in partnership.
Across the four schools, teachers identified the following impacts on ākonga:
- Increased opportunities to make authentic choices about their learning and to take the lead.
- Increased engagement in learning experiences they had taken a part in designing.
- For some students, transformational change in terms of their engagement, sense of identity, agency, and feelings about learning.
What did they learn?
The team report that making space and truly listening and responding to students and whānau can change norms and create powerful partnerships. These shifts are interconnected for teachers, students, and whānau. Talanoa should not just be a one-off event but an ongoing mode of communication that demonstrates respects and how each person is valued for who they are.
Inquiry team
This inquiry was initially co-led by Liam Rutherford (Ross Intermediate School), Amanda Dennison (College Street Normal School), Nic Mason (Island Bay School), and Jacqui Innes (Russell Street School). Later, TeeJay Campbell took Liam’s place.
Raewyn Eden (Massey University) was the project’s critical friend.
For further information
If you would like to learn more about this project, please contact the project leader, Wayne Jenkins, at principal@rossintermediate.school.nz or TeeJay Campbell tcampbell@rossintermediate.school.nz
Reference list
Alexakos, K. (2015). Being a teacher / researcher: A primer on doing authentic inquiry research on teaching and learning. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Desimone, L. M. (2009). Improving impact studies of teachers’ professional development: Toward better conceptualizations and measures. Educational Researcher, 38(3).
Ministry of Education. (2007). New Zealand Curriculum for English-medium teaching and learning in years 1–13. Wellington: Learning Media.
Ministry of Education. (2019). Information sharing and building learning partnerships: Having conversations with young people and their whānau about their learning and progress. https://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/Strengthening-local-curriculum/Leading-local-curriculum-guideseries/Information-sharing-and-learning-partnerships#actions_underpin
Ministry of Education. (2020). Action plan for Pacific education 2020–2030. Wellington: Author.
Rinehart, K. E. (2020). Abductive analysis in qualitative inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 27(2).
Timperley, H., Kaser, L., & Halbert, J. (2014). A framework for transforming learning in schools: Innovation and the spiral of inquiry. Melbourne: Centre for Strategic Education.
Timperley, H., Wilson, A., Barar, H., & Fung, I. (2007). Teacher professional learning and development: Best Evidence Synthesis iteration (BES). Wellington, New Zealand: Ministry of Education.
Vaioleti, T. M. (2006). Talanoa research methodology: A developing position on Pacific research. Waikato Journal of Education 12.
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