Practice 1: Activity 5 - Legal and ethical contexts in my digital practice

Activity 5: Legal and ethical contexts in my digital practice

The NZ Code of ethics for registered teachers makes clear in its opening statement that the 'primary professional obligation of certificated teachers is to those they teach'. Moreover, under that heading the first ethic is to: 'develop and maintain professional relationships with learners based upon the best interests of those learners.' Hall (2001) also points out that 'Teaching in schools has long been considered a moral activity (Wilson, 1967; Tom, 1984; Goodlad, Soder and Sirotnik, 1990) largely because it is recognized that how teachers fulfil their public duties influences the lives of vulnerable young people.'

As teachers we have a duty of care and responsibility to our students. Our relationships with them, must have their best interests at heart, must not endanger them physically, mentally or emotionally. We must also keep ourselves safe from any possibility that our actions in relation to our students might be seen in a less-than-professional light. Given that teaching is a relationship-centred profession we sometimes walk a tight rope between maintaining professional distance and building good teacher-student relationships. The ubiquitous use of digital communications and social media now make that tight rope even narrower.

The rise of social media, in particular, Facebook, has the potential to raise some ethical issues. Over the seven years that I have been teaching, I have often had senior students say 'Miss, we should be Facebook friends!', or 'You should follow me on Snapchat / Instagram.' My response is always 'Absolutely not!' Social media is a place to engage with friends; students are not friends. Students should not be a part of your personal life and should not be privy to your personal communications with adult friends. Depending on what you post, there is the possibility that students will see you behaving in an unprofessional manner. Even if you don't behave that way, being friends with your students on social media takes away that professional distance that must be maintained between teacher and student.

I remember an incident when I was in my first year of teaching, which was also the first year that I had a Facebook page. A teacher friend of mine, H, had a friend, K, at another school. K's daughter, M, though, attended our school and was in my class. I was Facebook friends with H, and H was Facebook friends. M managed to access my page by going through her mum's page, to H's page and then to mine. Now, I don't post anything that my own mum couldn't see, but I was still horrified that a student had managed to access my personal information that way. I immediately tightened my privacy settings and have kept them that way ever since.

Texting is another potential minefield. I give my cell phone number to students when we go on school trips or when we are arranging to meet at school for tutorial sessions or rehearsals and the like. There is a real danger here that students could try to text me as if I was one of their mates, and try to engage in social chitchat. If I were to respond to those types of messages I could put myself in a compromising situation, where my texts could be seen as unprofessional, crossing a line between teacher and student. Again, a student did try that in my first year of teaching. I made the mistake of responding a couple of times, but realised that was giving the wrong impression. I stopped responding and eventually the student stopped messaging me. In recent years, students with my number have used it only to contact me with regard to assessment work - when is it due, am I in my classroom now, they'll be late to the tutorial, that sort of thing.

I think one of the first things we should ask ourselves when communicating with our students is, what would we, as parents, think if a teacher communicated with our child in this way? Would our communications stand up to our own test for ethical behaviour? 

References:

Connecticut’s Teacher Education and Mentoring Program.(2012) Ethical and Professional Dilemmas for Educator: Facilitator’s Guide. Retrieved from http://www.ctteam.org/df/resources/Module5_Manual.pdf

Education Council. (n.d). The Education Council Code of Ethics for Certificated Teachers. Retrieved from https://educationcouncil.org.nz/content/code-of-et...

Hall, A. (2001). What ought I to do, all things considered? An approach to the exploration of ethical problems by teachers. Paper presented at the IIPE Conference, Brisbane. Retrieved from http://www.educationalleaders.govt.nz/Culture/Developing-leaders/What-Ought-I-to-Do-All-Things-Considered-An-Approach-to-the-Exploration-of-Ethical-Problems-by-Teachers

Practice 1: Activity 4 - Indigenous knowledge & cultural responsiveness in my practice

Gay (2010) defines culturally responsive pedagogy as 'teaching to and through students' personal and cultural strengths, their intellectual capabilities, and their prior accomplishments, and notes that is premised on 'close interactions among ethnic identity, cultural background, and student achievement.' (from Savage, et al). 

The educators in the Teaching Tolerance video (define culture as being the 'world views, beliefs, values, opinions, assumptions and filters that help us make sense of ordinary things.' They discuss the teacher's role as the 'cultural bridge', the person who must take the students' everyday lived experiences and help them make connections through their individual cultural lenses to the learning in the classroom.

Bishop (Edtalks, 2012) talks about culturally responsive pedagogy as creating a context where Maori can bring their own cultural understandings to the classrooms, where their values, beliefs and assumptions and the way they make sense of the world, is legitimate and valued. Overall, he states that culturally responsive pedagogy is relationship-centred education.

We all bring our selves to the classroom and that means our backgrounds, our values, our beliefs, our assumptions, our previous and current experiences, our understandings of how the world works. As teachers, we need to ensure that we accept, acknowledge, respect and value the varied backgrounds, beliefs, and understandings of our students. As Berryman states, if we aim to be agentic teachers, then we need to create a learning environment where our students can bring themselves - the whole of themselves and their cultural beliefs and values - to the learning conversation.

1. School Vision, Mission, Charter & Values
My school is predominantly Maori and is located in a town that acknowledges and owes much to the rich, cultural inheritance of its local iwi. Our school charter acknowledges the importance of culturally responsiveness pedagogy through the inclusion of the statement that 'where culture counts, learners bring who they are to the learning.' The school is very clear that one of our foci is 'Maori succeeding as Maori.' 

As teachers, we are encouraged to build relationships with our students, to get to know them and their whanau, to understand who they are, where they come from, and what values, beliefs, knowledge and experiences they bring with them. There is a huge emphasis on this in the time we spend with our whanau groups (aka form classes, tutor groups). Whanau time is not just about reading out notices and taking a break between classes, it is about getting to know each other, taking photos of whanau activities and displaying them on the wall, acknowledging birthdays and successes, tracking academic progress and attendance, and discussing any issues that students might have that affect their learning. Moreover, we keep the same whanau every year, so we see the girls grow from year to year and build stronger relationships with them.

 Cultural identity is also embedded in our school values. There are four values and they are built around the qualities of a Maori ancestress - Te Ao Kapurangi - a strong woman who exhibited personal qualities that we encourage our girls to aspire to. These Te Ao values are T - the willingness to learn; E - engaging to achieve; A - always shows respect; and O - offers to serve.  Under the acronym, Te Ao, they also encompass the Maori view of the world, acknowledging the importance of Maori culture in our school.

2. School-wide activities
Another way Maori culture is celebrated and promoted at our school is through a variety of school-wide activities. 
We begin each school year with a school pohiri for all our new students and staff. And all visitors throughout the year are welcomed with a pohiri.
Te Reo is strong at the school and its use by teachers and students is actively promoted. Often, the students know more than us, but they are always pleased when teachers use Te Reo. I'm not fluent, but I always use a little in the classroom everyday.
Our school waiata is in Maori and we sing it at all assemblies and award ceremonies and any other school occasion where singing is appropriate. It's a joyful sounding waiata and fun to sing.
Kapa haka is huge at our school, and we are currently the national secondary school champs. Kapa haka is always a part of our House chants, and our junior school have an annual competition  in it at the end of the year.
As a school we actively promote Maori culture through Te Wiki o Te Reo Maori and through Matariki celebrations. As a staff, we practise our pepeha and learn a kupu hou every week. Our Year 9s spend a week on noho marae in Term One of every year and this year, our staff have gone on noho too, learning more about our culture and our city's Maori history.

References

Bishop, Russell. Edtalks.(2012, September 23). A culturally responsive pedagogy of relations. [video file].Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/49992994

Savage, C., Hindle, R., Meyer, L., Hynds, A., Penetito, W., & Sleeter, C. Culturally responsive pedagogies in the classroom: indigeneous student experiences across the curriculum. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education. Vol 39, No. 3, August 2011, 183-198. 

Teaching Tolerance.( 2010, Jun 17).Introduction to Culturally Relevant Pedagogy.[video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGTVjJuRaZ8

Create a blog post where you first share your critical understanding of indigenous knowledge and cultural responsiveness. Then, critically evaluate how your practice or your school’s practice has been informed by indigenous knowledge and culturally responsive pedagogy in two of the following areas (ideally you would be able to evaluate one that is done well, and another that would benefit from improvement):

• vision, mission, and core values
• policies,
• goals,
• communication methods,
• decision-making,
• planning and assessment,
• learning activities,
• school-wide activities,

• resources

Practice 1: Activity 3 - wider professional context

Activity 3: Contemporary issue or trend in New Zealand or internationally

The 2016 K-12 NMC Horizon Report identifies 'students as creators' as a key trend driving technology adoption over the next two years. The report points to the "growing accessibility of mobile technologies" such as Snapchat and Instagram as one of the drivers of this trend. My recent adventures in MIndlabbing and my own changes in practice with regards to the use of digital technologies made this trend of immediate interest. I have added the use of those very apps to my learning units in the hopes of shifting my students to be creators and not just passive consumers of content knowledge. It has been a challenge, for, despite their frequent use of these apps for personal communication, my students have been reluctant to use them to show their understanding of classroom learning.

That reluctance is one of the reasons that I am so keen to continue to push the use of digital technologies to drive this trend in my classroom. Somehow, it seems to me, that we have bred a generation of students who only want to regurgitate learned content and do not want, or do not know how, to do anything with that learned content. I don't think they necessarily enter high school that way; generally Year 9s are still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, eager to learn, eager to make stuff, and eager to please. Somewhere between Year 9 and Year 12, though, they lose that enthusiasm for learning and creating. Perhaps it is our tendency to over-assess at high school; perhaps, as Ken Robinson discusses, entering high school is like entering a factory, where we expect the students to churn out the one right answer to each problem, so that they lose that creative spark they arrived with?

Reigniting, or maintaining that spark by shifting students to be creators rather than just consumers could be very empowering, particularly for those who don't do well on written, standardised tests. Giving students the opportunity to create something new out of what they have learned, in a form of their choosing, allows them to take control of their learning and to be more deeply engaged in it. Critical thinking and problem-solving skills would also be enhanced as students figure out ways to set and meet goals and ways to create something that shows their understanding. 

To achieve this increased creativity and critical thinking, teachers will have to think carefully about the design of learning units. The NMC Report discusses the examples of schools that encourage student-led curriculum design and lesson-planning and have found these tools to be useful in promoting creativity in the classroom, greater engagement, and deeper understanding of complex topics. Kay Oddone (Scootle Lounge) also suggests that an inquiry learning approach or a design thinking approach to curricula planning would achieve the same effect because they both put the learner at the centre, making them active participants in the learning process. Design thinking in particular "emphasises the role of the student as an active problem finder: investigating, trialling, and creating possible solutions." (Oddone).

The NMC Report also points out the changes that this trend would lead to in terms of assessment. Mastery of an area of learning would be shown more through a creative process than through a simple test that makes students restate recalled facts. The reports notes that with the increasing use of technology in schools, and with teachers becoming more comfortable and more adept at using that technology, we are moving towards more learning and assessment through creative means. 

Shifting students to become creators doesn't only involve digital technology though. And, certainly it is still the case at many schools that not all students have equal access to digital tools. But teachers could set up makerspaces to allow students to let their imaginations run free, using trial and error to investigate and redesign and think up new ways to approach all sorts of topics.

The ability to think creatively, to be adaptable, to come up with new ways of doing things is becoming increasingly important in our constantly-evolving world. Young people today will have to be flexible and fluid in their thinking and actions to keep up with changes in technology and society. It is our responsibility as teachers to ensure that we nurture our children's innate creativity and divergent thinking (Ken Robinson) rather than stifling it through standardised testing and a factory-like approach to schooling. Employers look for problem-solvers, critical thinkers and evaluators, not conveyor-belt jockeys.

Another important issue that the report points out too, is the need to understand copyright and fair use. With students creating their own products and probably sharing it with the world in general, they and schools will need to have greater awareness of the issues around ownership and use of their own and others' products.

References
Adams Becker, S., Freeman, A., Giesinger Hall, C., Cummins, M.,and Yuhnke, B. (2016). NMC/CoSN Horizon Report: 2016 K-12Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium. Retrieved from http://cdn.nmc.org/media/2016-nmc-cosn-horizon-report-k12-EN.pdf

Oddone, Kay. Making the Leap: Students as Creators, Not Consumers. Scootle Lounge. Resources for Australian Educators. Retrieved from  http://blog.scootle.edu.au/2016/11/02/making-the-leap-students-as-creators-not-consumers/.

Practice 2: Activity 8 - Changes in Practice

I still have a couple of posts for Practice 1 to complete, so this is my non-linear, big ball of timey-wimey-not-quite-the-last-blog-post-post.

So, finally, I have made it to the end of 32 weeks of the Mindlab. It's been challenging, and I won't lie, I wanted to give up several times. "I hate Mindlab!" I found myself saying, quite frequently, as managing my time to fit in teaching, parenting, living and mindlabbing got too much for me. However, I have been extremely grateful for the assistance and support of the Mindlab team, who allowed me to push some of my assessment submissions right to the very, very limit of the wire (and maybe slightly past it!). And even as I was bemoaning my bad decision-making in having signed up to this course, I was at the same time saying to anyone who was still listening, that I actually really enjoyed the reading and the ideas that we were being exposed to. The chance to engage in not only scholarly reading and discussion, but to see how the ideas in those readings could be applied in a practical context, have been invaluable. I realised that, when I caught myself saying "Oh, but if ...(person X).. had done Mindlab, they would know..." So, yes, it's been hard work, and I haven't had fun exactly, but I have learned so much.

So what changes have I made to my practice because of my Mindlab learning?

1. PTC 6 - Conceptualise, plan and implement an appropriate learning programme.
I have always been an early adopter of digital technologies and have been incorporating their use in class for some years. That was done piecemeal, though, with no real plan or link to 21st century skills. However, the readings for Digital 1 and 2, particularly the ITL 21st Century Learning Rubrics and Voogt, really opened my eyes to what the term '21st century skills' actually meant. And my research for the Lit Review gave me so many great, practical ideas as to how to achieve the learning of 21st century skills in my classroom. I have been slowly, but systematically, rewriting my unit plans to incorporate these 21st century skills, ensuring that the learning has a mix of both digital and collaborative activities that enhance my students' learning of the topic. The key trends reading for Practice 1 has also been a factor as I have been tweaking my plan for my combined Classics/History class for term 2, and as I rework my Year 9 Social Studies lessons on the fly. I keep thinking 'students as creators, not consumers', collaboration, real-world contexts; it's all very exciting.

2. PTC 9 - Respond effectively to the diverse and cultural experiences and the varied strengths, interests, and needs of individuals and groups of ākonga. 
The proliferation of digital tools now makes meeting the diverse needs of my learners more possible. It's been much easier this year to devise learning materials and activities that cater to different levels of understanding and to the different paces at which my students work, and to put it all online. No photocopying required. Digital tools have allowed more individual learning plans for my senior students, so the high flying students can continue at their own faster pace and those who need more time to process can take that time without feeling the pressure to keep up with others. And, as a teacher, I can conference and guide students as they need it.  This has been happening quite organically this year, but I am now writing it into my unit plans and am giving consideration to how this will impact on assessment requirements, particularly assessment done by a test paper.

Goals for the future
Really, I want to ensure that I continue to implement the learning from Mindlab, and to continue keeping up to date with the latest theories. I will really miss access to the Unitec library! I'm also interested in rethinking how we assess to take into account 21st century skills and tools, so I will be looking at that in more depth this year too. However, another key trend that I am really interested in is changing the way schools work. I think this is a really important trend, we need to move away from the factory model if we are to serve our learners interests. I'd like to somehow be a part of that conversation. Thanks Mindlab.