Wellbeing - a learning opportunity

When you cut it for me,

Write it for me,

Find it for me,

Open it for me,

Tie it for me…

All I learn is that you do it better than me.

(Unknown)

This quote appeared recently - its message is a reminder that all of these things are opportunities for learning.   This reminder is relevant as we must remember to guide our children rather than do everything for them, because if we do we could be robbing them of opportunities to learn for themselves… greater than that we could be robbing them of the confidence that develops from mastering these skills themselves.  It makes sense.

While pondering this question - another wondering occurred…

How does this relate to Wellbeing?  

More specifically how does this relate to Wellbeing in the workplace?

We all know the messages about the importance of Workplace Wellbeing and that is definitely not in dispute here.  The wondering was around how we apply this quote to the concept of Workplace Wellbeing.  If workplace wellbeing is about providing a safe environment, where there is a focus on the wellbeing of all - then the focus must not only be on what we can do but also on how we support our people to learn and develop strategies for themselves.  It is a big job - supporting students, staff, whānau… and ourselves, to develop wellbeing strategies.  

Empowering others is always big.  The thing to remember is… It is a big job, but you are not alone.  

In our line of work, we hear both sides of the coin - the leaders who feel they are doing their very best to create an environment focused on the wellbeing of their people.  Over time we have all heard of schools where staff believe that more could be done to create workplace wellbeing - many of us have read posts about this on social media for example.  

The truth is Wellbeing is the responsibility of us all.  Without a doubt, leaders play a key role in setting the environment and culture in all organisations, which is not disputed here.  It is also relevant to point out that it is a shared responsibility of all staff.  By doing all the work and taking on all the responsibility - are we as leaders providing opportunities for our people to learn and grow in their ability to grow their own wellbeing and that of the organisation.  How do we support the growth of ‘response abilities’?

This mahi is an area that we at Momentum Learning are passionate and committed to.  We work alongside leaders to support their wellbeing journey, and the systems and structures that support the wellbeing of their teams.  We coach from the side and personalise the support that we put in place to each unique environment.  Our support is all encompassing - we support leaders, teams and students.  The focus that schools are putting into the wellbeing for all of their people is heartening.  We share concerns about the realities that schools are dealing with on a daily basis.  You are not alone - reach out… make a connection.

We see dedicated, courageous and empathetic people in all work environments, and it is through partnering with you that we are ready, able and completely dedicated to empowering you and your team in this mahi.  Contact us today to get our journey started.

Lenses into history - unpacking the Aotearoa New Zealand Histories Curriculum

Using three lenses is like creating a kaleidoscope effect with possibilities for learning. Kaleidoscope image courtesy of instructables.

What lenses do you actively think about when designing your learning experiences for ākonga?

Katrina Ward

Sometimes it feels like we are looking through a kaleidoscope. Three mirrors work as a metaphor for the three lenses we put onto something, and suddenly there are fractals and moving parts everywhere… but I love that part. I love how the coming together of different lenses can suddenly create something really exciting.

We have been working with the Aotearoa New Zealand Histories curriculum with a number of schools and a lot of them have opted for some additional lenses to ‘triangulate’ their approach. The additional lenses I have been enjoying working with the most are the additions of digital fluency and learner agency. 

So what happens when these three lenses are combined?

The first lens is the Aotearoa New Zealand Histories curriculum. The lens of understanding the big ideas. Seeing the big ideas as big umbrellas that need to be over everything and then zooming in to the ‘knowing’ learning objectives aligned to specific contexts for each year level. Then we can adjust to a sharper focus to ensure that the ‘do’ of each activity hones into the subject knowledge and skills that are aligned with key subject-specific skills. An example of this is looking at cartography skills when looking at a map (geography skills), or focusing on source reliability and usefulness when looking at artifacts or photographs of the past (history skills). In the case of Burnside High, we have even designed a series of badge tasks to earn digital badges as ākonga complete skills-focused activities like ‘understanding bias’, ‘lateral research’ and ‘chronology’. 

The ANZHC lens is the main lens because it actively seeks to undo bias. This lens needs to be held in strong focus. When looking through this lens it is important to be conscious of the ‘rose tinted’ views that might come about if you neglect to meaningfully address the biases and power imbalances of history. This lens needs to be the ‘main lens’ into exploring local curriculum content for schools.  The ANZHC lens needs to be put on and put on again with regular editing processes to ensure that the big ideas can be ‘seen’ to be present in all of the activities/contexts that ākonga can explore. 

But those other two lenses also have an important role to play.

Let’s look at the lens of learner agency. 

For ākonga to be agents of their own learning they need to have choice about what they do, have choice about when they do it and also have choices for how they are assessed. They also need to be given opportunities to discuss and debate, explore and explain to show their understanding in different ways. The learner agency lens has been a fun lens to play with by adding ‘this or that’ choices throughout the unit design. It means ākonga can branch off and do different things and explore what interests them in addition to the ‘must cover’ content of the curriculum. It also means they can explore digital tools or play with paper-based ways to show their learning. Learner-agency as a lens means that no matter what is offered as content, you can give students multiple ‘ways in’ to the content which allows them to take more ownership of their learning. More ownership means more engagement and more engagement means more connection to the important ideas at hand. 

Learners as agents of their own learning also have more opportunity to be future agents of change. That’s why this lens is such a magic one. 

The third lens is digital fluency.

Have you ever heard of the term app-smashing? It is when you fluently combine apps to create something new. This is an end goal for students. Students can take a photo on their phone, edit it in one app, animate it another app and publish it on another app. Similarly students might create an infographic on canva and then load it as an image into thinglink and then upload audio to create a museum-worthy digital artefact of their own clever making. App-smashing processes give students an ability to be creators with technology - to see limitations and push things to their limits to create new things. It is highly engaging and ‘accidentally’ teaches them how to use a range of digital tools through focused and enabled discovery processes. We have really enjoyed designing some exciting tasks for ākonga to explore like creating a digital interactive map, experimenting with augmented reality and VR and creating a working school history app for real-life prototyping.

So there you have it. Three lenses. And just like a kaleidoscope creates new shapes and shifts in perspective, the new insights and the new learning can be magic. 

Exploring vocabulary with visuwords

Exploring primary sources with jamboard

Thinglink interactive map - pulse points lead to more thinglinks

Bringing understanding to life with interactive Thinglinks

This or that - creative writing or a timeline?

Planning your flight path - PLD planning tool

What great things does 2023 have in store for you?

Writing PLD applications can be a real drag, we know. But what if the process could be swift, uplifting and exciting? It is an opportunity to dream big, aim high and fly.

Check out our handy planning tool example here.

Step One: Choose from the drop-down boxes

These drop-down boxes are aligned with regionally allocated PLD priorities. You can decide on one PLD priority or weave a couple of priorities together into your application. We know that even though you might have ‘one big push’ there are likely some other supporting priorities in the mix. These might be embedding a previous priority, keeping the momentum with something you have started already or even adding an additional layer to support your application.

Step Two: Draw it. 

Visual sense-making is a really useful exercise. Are you wanting to work in sequence - one dot leading to the next in a line? Are you needing a woven approach? Does a triangle make more sense? Drawing the solution can help see connections in the PLD priorities and help you have a clearer picture of what success looks like. Thinking clearly will help you to lead better and we can help you to make sense of the priorities in your context with a quick drawing. 

Step Three: Check-in and destination thinking

Just like a real flight, you need to take stock of your current situation. What baggage are you checking in, what are you taking with you, and how might the weather affect your journey? We’re using a flight path metaphor to help you to make sense of the journey - who you are and where you are going, noticing and addressing barriers, predicting turbulence and painting the ‘blue sky outcome’ of your final PLD destination. 

Step Four: Mapping the path

This is a strategic planning tool to consider ‘layovers’ and checkpoints. Just like a long-haul flight, you will need to consider some re-fueling options and make the journey manageable. We also know that you will need a ‘visa and passport’ to prove who you are, where you have come from and where you are flying. We can help you to figure out the relevant documentation to support your application before you fly as well as what you will need to show when you land. 

We want your PLD journey to be fun. Look out the window and enjoy the view! We can celebrate little wins along the way.  What might you imagine for ‘in-flight entertainment’? We’ve added some examples of how we work with schools in this example. 

Your flight is yours to plan. The application process should not be a bore, it’s a time to soar! Get in touch with us to ‘book your flight’. We can’t wait to fly alongside you.

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Momentum Learning Pānui October 2022

Spring is a time of renewal and offers us all a chance to appreciate our environment and take advantage of the longer days. It is also time to reflect on how we might nurture ourselves in the last few months of 2022. This term’s pānui offers some suggestions on how you might incorporate well-being into your planning for 2023 and beyond.

As always, the pace is high and there has been a lot happening for the Momentum team, read more about what we’ve been up to in this month’s pānui.

Rewarding, Messy, Fun - the richness of rich tasks

We have been working with a number of schools looking at the NZ maths curriculum, a balanced diet of task types and effective planning processes. One of the biggest take-aways from this mahi is that rich tasks can be fun, rewarding and extremely informative for seeing what a teacher’s best next steps are. 

Rich tasks can be delivered to small groups, given out for individual ākonga or even run as a whole class. Through rich tasks ākonga can explore how different mathematical procedures can be applied to real-life situations, they can discuss what they are doing and can explain complex processes. Meanwhile, just as the learners are exploring, the teacher can be exploring and treat the task as a rich snapshot of learning - scaffolding those who need a helping hand and giving opportunities and prompts for extension. A rich task is a rich opportunity for active and timely differentiation - and the bonus is that they are fun to explore alongside ākonga.

What is a rich task?

A rich task is an unfamiliar task that requires a few different processes or procedures to be able to work out the answer. It is ‘rich’ because there is more than one step to figuring out the solution. It could also be ‘rich’ because there are multiple ways in to the problem. 

How can you use them?

You could use a rich task at the beginning of the week to help to plan content for the rest of the week - or you could use a rich task at the end of the week to help to plan the content for the next week - or you could use a rich task as a playful way to see if your ākonga can apply some of the processes they have learned. It is a rich way to plan for formative assessment. 

What is best practice for a warm-up? 

Ideally, a rich task should not be experienced ‘cold’ even though it should be unfamiliar. As a snapshot of learning, you need to see how ākonga are responding in the moment to the problem in front of them. A good warm-up might be solving a similar problem and justifying the solution to revise a key process - or looking at a similar context with a different (but more simplified) applied exercise. 

What are the best planning tips?

Planning with an empathy hat on is vital. What might ākonga need to understand the task? What manipulatives might they need? How might a ‘resource on stand by’ be used effectively just in case it is needed? Thinking about how ākonga can be enabled and extended before the task is launched is a really important step to ensure success for all. 

Ākonga love rich tasks because they are an opportunity to be agentic. They can choose how they solve the problem, they can choose to draw or to use manipulatives, they can use counters or dice, big paper or whiteboards and they can work alone or in pairs, in groups or in clusters.

Another benefit of a rich task is that it can be ‘low floor and high ceiling’. This means that you can provide some enabling prompts for ākonga who might struggle to start (some helpful diagrams or even a helpful formula) to give them their ‘way in’ to step onto the ‘low floor’. You can also engineer some extension ideas to create a higher ceiling for ākonga who are ready to stretch to a deeper level of understanding. 

Rich tasks might have a ‘right answer’ but they don’t have a right way to find it. The example images inset are from a group of year 4 students who all found a different way to solve a rich task about gardening (found on the nzmaths website). Each group, pair or individual was completely engaged with following their own process to figure it out. There were rich discussions, expressive explaining and multiple ‘aha’ moments for them as they explored the task with felts, paper, whiteboards, grids and counters. 

These images show an incredible amount of thinking, sequencing and clever problem-solving. The steps involved in coming up with their solutions were varied but all of them found success at the level that they were operating at - with room for being enabled and extended according to their needs. 

There is no necessary ‘finished’ presentation either. The wonderfully messy maths of a rich task is hands-on, memorable and fun. It is process over product and it shows ākonga that persistence pays off, procedures can be applied to multiple contexts and that maths can be relevant and rewarding.

What do ākonga say? 

“That was so fun”

“I am proud of how I went above and beyond what I thought I could do”

“I made a mistake in the sequencing part but I see that now”

“I was so excited to work out the pattern!”

“It’s like sneaky maths because it doesn’t feel like maths”

What do the teachers say?

“It is amazing at how much you can ‘see’ in an activity like this.”

“It really helps me to do meaningful and personalised planning”

“I’m surprised that some of my middle band learners were ready for extension”

“I didn’t think they would be able to do this.”

The results of rich tasks are surprising, messy, wonderful and conversation-worthy. Rich tasks are rich.

Check out the rich tasks on the nzmaths website to start your rich and fun messy maths journey.  Rich tasks can be fun, rewarding and extremely informative for seeing what a teacher’s best next steps are - and your first step? Giving it a go. 

If you would like to access some support with numeracy and mathematics learning design, get in touch with one of our team - we make numbers fun.