Beyond 9 - 3, Spark-MIT 2017 Teachers

Today we met as the 2017 Spark-MIT 2017 teacher group. 8 teachers on a mission to inquire into a range of things that impact achievement for our learners. We shared ideas that connected to the Manaiakalani pedagogy that need to have visible and ubiquitous learning, strong learner agency and connectedness to grow knowledge. 


My focus for Spark-MIT inquiry:
 I propose to explore home learning for year 7 & 8 students.  How can we support ubiquitous learning to become a daily practice from school to home?   Manaiakalani encourages and supports expanding the hours of learning beyond the start and end bell of the school day.  Are our students taking advantage of this open all hours access to their learning? What can we do at school to motivate and maintain this opportunity to accelerate achievement?

 Data Gathered: Just a start... A survey completed by learners in team 5 - year 7 and 8 learners this month found the following stats. *Note these are only some of the questions I asked. It's helped me to see that first issue to resolve would be the access issue. While internet is available at home - over 80% - it didn't translate to students having actual access to it via a device. Over 50% do not take netbooks home - why is this? Another factor - students have voiced the desire for more parent help. How can we support this? How can we teach around the use of resources be it online or in the form of whanau. I'm looking forward to finding out and supporting this to happen and gaining more ideas from this Spark-MIT group who I can see are a rich resource to have. Thanks for today Dorothy@Manaiakalani and Lynne@Spark Foundation for what has been a great day of learning and professional development.