Morrinsville Intermediate
Planning for the digital future
Colin McDonald is leading Morrinsville Intermediate, a decile 6 school that has questioned what structural and pedagogical changes are necessary to enhance student learning in the digital age.
Strategic intents
When I first arrived at this school in 1998, I recognised that the school needed to meet the changes that were happening within the education environment, especially the changes in digital technology.
The first thing we needed to do was go to the community and find out exactly what they wanted for the school, and what they felt was important for the children. From there, we came back and worked with the board of trustees to look at what the school needed to develop to help them get on that journey.
The community was talking about students having skills to get them through to the 21st century, about people being able to use the technology that was around, and about students being able to be independent learners and succeed at college.
So from that, we sat down as a management team, and we looked at what was important to us as educators, and we tried to marry the two together. We set out what we called our strategic intents – that is, the things that we want to do that we believe are important for the school, but haven't quite got the capability to do yet.
First steps
Our buildings had no cabling, so we had to make sure that we could network the school, and put in the server to make sure that we could actually do what we wanted to.
We also had to build teachers' capability. So we had to put in a lot of professional development to allow them to upskill so they could use the technology effectively to meet the teaching we wanted to do.
We also decided to change the school structurally. We redesigned our library and turned it into a research centre. We redesigned the way the students use it. For example, we no longer visit the library in whole classes. We open the library for free use so that as students want to, they use the Internet, or use the hard book resources as they need to throughout the day. We employed a teacher to work in the library because we felt students needed expert help.
We found that the computers we had in our classrooms weren't practical. They were fixed, and although we had four or five computers in most rooms, we found that most of the time most of the computers weren't being used.
So we got rid of them. We took all the computers out of the classrooms and we rented two pods of laptops. Each pod has 10 laptops. They are wireless Internet-connected, and they are able to be used anywhere within the classroom, and even outside the classroom if they need to be.
We have done those things over the past six years. We've spent probably from 1999 to the beginning of 2005 building capabilities, and making sure that we have the capability to integrate computer-based inquiry learning in all classrooms. That means we have the infrastructure and the training, and we have the knowledge to make it work for us.
Inquiry learning
Inquiry learning allows students to make choices and to take responsibility for their learning. It helps students develop skills in terms of their independence and teaches them how to manage time.
For the last 18 months, the team leaders have been working with a consultant, upskilling themselves, and using inquiry learning approaches with their own class. By doing this, the teachers in their team could see the commitment from the students and the engagement they had with their learning before we actually introduced this approach school-wide.
Our consultant came in every 3 or 4 months to work with teachers, to talk about problems, go into classrooms, and help them out.
At the beginning of this year, having had that training for the senior teachers for 18 months, we invited the rest of the staff to join us on this journey. And every single teacher in the school has bought into it and bought into it well, and I think it is because we built up both the academic and the physical environment so it was going to be successful for them.
The practicality of setting up inquiry learning depended on the work that went before, the training, the redesigning of classrooms, and the development of the technology that allowed it to happen.
The learner
At the beginning of a project, a child will develop a big, or significant question. They are allowed to interpret that question any way they want to. For example, one of our teams has been researching various aspects of medieval England, so students are guided into a rich task that generates all kinds of questions. In this case, they had to design and construct a 3D model of the castle in Aberystwyth. The task is a springboard for questions. What do I need to find out about daily castle life? What's the geology of coastal Wales? What do I need to know about medieval warfare and castle defence systems?
Using this approach, they have a significant input into what they are going to learn, and what they are going to be doing, or performing, or producing at the end of it.
Their learning has been directed into authentic learning contexts that allow them some sort of performance. The performance might be telling somebody about what they have done and how they have built their model of a medieval castle, for example. The performance might be in presenting a little play about something. For the children in the school, it allows them choice, it gives them independence, and it allows them to build up problem-solving skills that I think will be important for them later on.
Tracking student achievement
Our strategic planning focuses on student achievement. It is based on a concept developed by Brent Davies and Linda Ellison. It consists of three concentric circles, the central being student achievement and learning progress. This is supported by the next circle, which is support for quality learning and teaching, and the outside circle represents the management arrangements that support the inner two.
School-wide data gathering and analysis is limited to literacy and numeracy (every year), and two or three other curriculum areas. These go through a cyclical process of needs analysis and implementation.
Close analysis of school-wide data is used to focus development of the school's targets in the following year(s) and it's essential we track how students achieve in reading, how they achieve in numeracy, and how they achieve in inquiry learning.
When teachers are planning, they need to use current technology to plan effective programmes. Assessment becomes easier because we can assess digitally what students are doing, and then transfer it within and around the school.
We track achievement through formative assessments and anecdotal evidence, rather than data-driven information.
We collect data so that it gives us big-picture ideas of where the gaps are. In terms of the class level, we minimise our data collecting, but teachers maximise the amount of assessment they do in terms of talking with students, giving feedback, giving feed forward, and making sure that students understand it's the process that is important, not so much the knowledge of what they are doing.
Teacher observation and teacher professional knowledge of how their students are improving is important, so that's how we measure their achievement.
At a whole-school level, we still have standardised testing. We still use exemplars, and we still use asTTle and the other assessment tools that give us the school-wide data. And this is important for us, because by using the school-wide data we get the picture of how the students are doing as a body.
We have a tracking sheet that says whether or not particular aims for a lesson have been achieved, and to what extent, and that is based on the formative feedback and teacher observation of the processes in action.
Transition to college
Our school is about transition. We have our kids here for two years. Our job is to prepare them to do well, to give them the tastes and the ideas of things that they can do well in, and set them up for college.
We are making sure what we are doing here is reflected in the goals and the needs of the college. So what's important to them is important to us. And we are also making sure that the students have skills and process abilities that allow them to do well in a different environment.
What we are trying to do is use the motivating effect of inquiry learning to build the skills, the independence, and the time management skills that allow them to do well at college. The college is well aware of what we are doing, and they know what our goals are.
Future plans
We are going to spend the next year observing what's happening, finding out what the barriers are to what we are doing already, and making sure that what we've got in place is actually what we intended.
Sometimes when you've got a programme working, it often looks as though this is what you want to do, but when you analyse it closely it's not quite what is wanted, so we have included some reflection time in our programme.
Our long-term future plan is to develop this school as an inquiry-based learning centre working together with the community. We are going to look at the length of the school day and say, "Well, does all the learning have to happen between 9 o'clock and 3 o'clock?"
Hopefully, with the development of digital technology or learning technology, we will be able to merge the home and classroom through the use of effective websites, and students will be able to access the school's database and library outside school hours.
We are working towards taking the learning into the community, using community people, and using community resources.
