Manaiakalani Innovative Teachers - Part One

2-4rd March 2023 - Omaha Hui

First Night (02/03/23) : 

We arrived at a beautiful house in Omaha  around 6pm, and after some socialising and dinner we settled in to hear the introduction to the Manaiakalani Innovative teachers project from Dorothy Burt. In this presentation she outlined the reasons, the “why” of our project, and shared with us the stories of the innovators that contributed to the early days of Manaiakalani, the endeavourment  they showed in making changes and innovations that have lead to great success and engagement from, not only students, but teachers, academics, and philanthropists that have allowed Manaiakalani to flourish and achieve the success they have had over the years.

I felt inspired listening to the stories, in particular the ones from teachers who HAD to innovate in order to create equity for their students, and their communities. I feel a real privilege to be working under Russell and Dorothy Burt, who have demonstrated time, and time again, the willingness to think outside of the box, to work with entities outside of the traditional schooling system in order to make their schools a critical part of the community, whether that be their work in PNG, or the innovation that lead PES to become the first Google school in New Zealand, or to create a community internet system, not just for their school, but for the entire Tamaki community of schools.

 

The quote ““If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” by Isaac Newton is one that came up time, and time again during this presentation, and resonated with me in a really powerful way. I think it’s extremely important for us, as teachers, to understand how far we have come, and to understand our past in order to properly prepare for our student’s futures.

Full Day Meetings - 

Stage One (Empathy)

1. Role Playing - teachers were given roles to play as teachers of the imaginary Omaha Area School - each parent had a unique perspective, and situation that impacted what their beliefs were regarding the issues, and problems that the school had addressed (many of the problems raised were the ones we identified in our initial proposals). This exercise allowed us to connect with the problems from a variety of perspectives in order to focus on the Empathise stage of our design process.

2. Users Task - The next step in the design process is for us to be able to understand the perspectives of our students, as well as ourselves, and other teachers. By understanding the needs of teachers, and students we can more accurately direct the design process towards who needs it more; the students or the teachers. We answered the questions as both the teacher and the student;

• What does the user do?

• What does the user say?

• What does the user think? 

• What does the user feel?

For my project I  have determined that teachers are in need of a way for students to connect vocabulary that is unfamiliar to them, to strategies with which they are familiar. This will help them to solve worded maths problems with independence and therefore improve their self efficacy, and confidence when approaching these kinds of questions.

Stage Two (Define)

In this next stage of the process we were required to narrow down our idea for our project into a succinct sentence, answering the question “What is the problem that your user is experiencing?”. This was a tricky challenge that required us to distill the problem we had into a succinct and precise sentence, that outlined 

“______ (user) needs____________ because__________ (insight).”

My original statement read as follows; 

Mr X needs a way for students to connect unknown vocabulary with known mathematical strategies because it will help them to independently solve word problems in maths.

We presented our questions, and the feedback I got was that this statement made some big assumptions, that I believe relate back to the idea that correlation is not causation; that because this is a multifaceted problem it is presumptuous to say that this WILL in fact do anything to improve student progress in maths.

How might we? 

Once each teacher had presented their ideas we completed the next part of the task, which is to take on the feedback, and to change our statement and frame it more positively, instead of a X needs X statement it was phrased as “How might we…?”. 

My proposition read as follows; How might we support students to unpack maths problems which contain unfamiliar language?

By framing this in a more positive way, and phrasing it with an opportunistic sentence starter it also helped to further distil the question into a simple and concise proposition that I think will help to guide the next steps of this project in a clear direction.

Stage Three  (Ideate)

Crazy Eights

The next part of our idea exploration was the Crazy 8 task. This required us to come up with 8 different solutions or tools that might work for our problem. From simple to ridiculous we had to think carefully about how we wanted to solve this problem. 

Below you can see the original 8 ideas;

1. A Maths game by which students must show understanding of a concept or vocabulary to pass to the next level.

2. A help site by which students can identify what they are having difficulty with and can seek support through definitions, explanations, demonstrations and videos.

3. A storybook, choose-your-own-adventure style in which students must solve maths problems to find the next page in the story.

4. A tool where students can ask questions to other students using algorithm (number) questions to write their own word problems (showing both understanding of the numbers, and using words to add their own context.

5. Booklets, separated by topic with lots of information, and tasks for the students to complete.

6. A Youtube channel with engaging and interesting videos which can introduce and explain maths concepts to students.

7. A practical day cross-school where students can engage practically and apply their strategies to real life situations.

8. A variation of CHAT-GPT in which students can ask questions, for clarification and the AI will provide a definition, a demonstration or a video that shows what it looks like.

After we had come up with these 8 ideas we were asked to present, and explain what they were to the group.

Once we had presented we were given small stickers, and stamps and spent 15 minutes reflecting on the other members' projects, and placed the stickers/stamps on the ideas that resonated with us as being useful, and applicable. FInal step was for us to select one option from each of our group mates options that we thought was the best option.

This feedback was incredibly helpful as it allowed us to see more clearly the primary direction for our projects to head in. As you can see from my sheet above the Storybook option gathered the most stickers, followed by the Student-led questions. For future implementation student input will be incorporated, however for the time being I will pursue ways of creating a digital storybook that requires students to solve problems and answer questions to progress through