See Me After Class

With the mammoth mid-term report-writing phase almost complete, we discuss their value with our students - and explore what we might learn from this in relation to our micro-credentialing project where information is available to students and their families in real-time. We love Liam, who thinks that the 17 pages should be reduced to one simple summary. One more week until the "holidays"!

This week contained a deadline for student progress reports, a school inspection by the Education Review Office, an unexpected sleep-in and Chris had an incident with a quarter of a deer. We invited our colleague Emily along to discuss our main topic, which was the territory between respect and deference, as it applies to the classroom - and we asked our students to name what they respect in a teacher. Whether it's six-sausage dinners, leopard skin or pedagogy, we've certainly got something for everyone this week.

After a recent podcast where we eviscerated a keynote presentation we'd experienced, we thought it would be a little more 'teacherly' to come up with something constructive - so in this podcast we're outlining what we think would make a keynote worth listening to. Moving quickly along from this, we also asked some students what they thought school was all about. Before we interviewed them, we tried to predict what they'd say - listen in for the result.

It's rare for teachers in a school en masse to have the chance to get together and listen to a keynote presentation aimed at developing our practice. Disappointingly, more of then than not when this does happen, the speaker imagines their main role is to entertain us and another important opportunity is missed. Nigel Latta was the latest in a long line of lay people who have made this mistake and Chris and Renee express their view - as well as their experience presenting a workshop together to our colleagues on the state of play in our micro-credential project. We wonder what Mr Latta might have made of us if he'd taken the time to stay around.

A highlight of our week is undoubtably the moment when some of our students approached us and volunteered to additional work for badges they weren't even being offered. The significance of this can not be over-stated, so we spend time discussing this - and we hear from them as well. Renee asked Chris about how the formal went, and there was good news there too. We look forward to some interesting events on the horizon and we both note with some alarm the strange twinning we're seeing in our home appliances.

It will surprise no-one to discover that Chris and Renee's experiences and perceptions of the school Formal (School Ball, or School Prom) differ widely. In this episode we explore our own past formal experiences, some idyllic, some involving car crashes of the literal kind and we also consider what the place of this secondary school institution should be in the modern educational world. As promised, you'll also hear some equally diverse views from the students themselves. Why not crack open some spray-tan and listen in?

As a departure from our usual format, Chris and Renee have one single conversation that narrates an ordinary school day. We chose yesterday - it was in many ways unremarkable and was easiest to remember. As a teacher strike over workload and conditions has been announced in New Zealand, we thought it was a good moment to give a small indication of what you get for your money. If you'd like to get a look into a typical teacher's day at our school, then this episode is for you.

Our achievement programme is live! Now students in our classes can demonstrate their attainment by unlocking micro-credentials. We explore some of the challenges we've encountered in the process of developing these credentials, and share some of the thinking that's currently keeping us occupied as we start to expand the selection of credentials available. Nina from the Education Hub gets a mention and our students speak this week about what might stop them from volunteering their ideas in class. Welcome back to school for Term 2. You can contact us via twitter or our website any time if you want to let us know what you think.

Each year our English programmes revolve around a unifying genre. Often there's a core text that establishes the stylistic components that underpin the genre for the courses and sometimes that text is written by William Shakespeare. Renee and Chris look at how we do this in our Year 11 and Year 13 courses. We also hear from students who show a remarkable openness to the challenge of studying Elizabethan drama and we reflect on the term that has been before we collapse into our Easter break. Renee finds a golden phoenix (clearly a literary reference of which Chris has no idea whatsoever). We reflect on the term's micro-credential making. Depth all the way.

It can be sobering in education to take note of what happens when teachers stop talking and start listening. We put this injunction into practice this week only to find that the students' ideas about assessment and ours were in remarkable accord. There was an additional aspect of assessment that is very important to students though - one that we'd completely missed. Also, Renee got a bit sick, so we decided to defer our exploration of the study of Shakespearian drama until next week. Listen on for Episode 9, Week 9.

It's mid-week and Renee is starting to hit the wall after her 24 hour+ support for our students in our local Relay for Life fund raising effort last weekend. We discuss why we choose to position Shakespearian Drama as central texts in many of our English programmes. We discover some of Chris' trigger-words; including "real world" and "relevant". Our episode this week is much longer than usual, because our guest Liz Breslin was simply too interesting to cut short. She explained some of the scope of how our Students in the Community volunteering programme works and then we went on to explore how we might create credentials for this kind of altruism. Grab a cup of tea and your favourite headphones and click play...

Teacher workload is not a topic we feel comfortable talking about. We know what a privileged position we hold in society, and of course there are all those holidays - but if we're on to such a good thing, why is it so hard to attract good young graduates into teaching - and why do more than 40% of us leave in our first 5 years? Sticking with the 'teachers are worth it' theme, we play an excerpt from Oliver's speech about how every one of us is special (a link to the video of the whole speech is in the show notes) and we ask a few students whether they think teachers should get a pay rise.

Christina's Money Laundering credential goes in for an overhaul, Renee's class claps for Lear, the idea of agency begins to take a concrete shape, and Chris' team cycles a speedway.

An exciting moment is captured in this episode where some of our micro-credential team are finalising their first badges. Christina Gott from our Maths Department is without doubt going to win the prize for the most creative naming of her badge on numbers between zero and one, while Emily the Head of Learning Area for the Arts shares how deceptively simple the assessment of Voice can be in Drama. Chris captures a moment of insight from students and parents while on tour to the South Island Triathlon Championships and parties and laughter prevail.

To justify upending the long-established assessment schemes developed in our school by hundreds of teachers for thousands of students, we must have a pretty clear idea of what kind of difference we will make. Renee phones in 5 of her top benefits of micro-credentialing in the Secondary School classroom. Chris and Renee chat about these a little and the rest of this week's episode is dedicated to 'chewing the fat' with Rosemary Hipkins, Lead Researcher from the New Zealand Council for Educational Research who is helping us investigate what impact our project will have on the teachers and learners in our school.

Happily Renee had time to give Chris a hand defining our 5 badge types. We've been working hard on this scheme for classifying our credential types so we're really happy to be able to share them with you. Bagley's back to finish putting a lid on extrinsic motivation and Chris gets pretty excited with what his Maths colleague Christina can do with a fraction credential.

Chris and Renee's boss, Gena Bagley is introduced. Her occasional section of the podcast "Keep a Lid On It" starts off with an honest analysis of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in the classroom. Renee 'phones it in', tells us a little more about the micro-credentials project, waxes lyrical about driving over a mountain pass with Rosemary Hipkins and lays down the gauntlet once again. This time in relation to the teaching of Romeo and Juliet to Year 10.

In this episode Renee gets pretty excited about crime thrillers, decorating her room and a big stationery gift - whereas Chris appears to pour cold water on it all. We also introduced the news that we've won an Education Hub Bright Spots award, and we share what we plan to do with all the money - plus there are a couple of phone messages that on better thoughts might actually have been better left un-hacked.