Observing Learn, Create, Share in Action

Today I observed Karen Ferguson (her blog here) and her Years 7&8 in Design and Visual Communications (DVC) class. I chose to observe Karen because she is a COL leader, is our Google go-to at school and is currently part of Google Class On Air. Therefore, Karen has experience with visible teaching and learning, and the Learn, Create, Share process. I feel I am still developing my confidence to incorporate the learn, create, share pedagogy into my practice, so this was the focus of my observation.

I asked three students the steps of accessing their learning from when they walk in the door, and what they thought about it. These were their responses;

• We go onto the rotation sheet because that has our tasks. I like because everything is in one place. I don’t have to go lots of places to find my files.
• We go here to see what we have to do, and what we have to do next. I like this because if I don’t know what I am doing, I can just go here to see what I am doing and then ask for help if I don’t understand
• Miss gives us instructions and examples of what we need to do. We can also see the rotation sheet and this shows us where we need to go and what we need to do. I like it because it’s easy for the teacher and us to see our work, and the teacher can see our blogs too.

The rotation sheet the students mention, is the tracking sheet of tasks (see picture below). Students access this Sheet to see what they are expected to complete, where they are up to and where they are heading, which is great accountability, and tracking of their learning. I have been attempting to use tracking sheets in my practice this year, particularly in Y11 (see Sheet here). These tracking sheets allow for differentiation within the class, which was evident in Karen's class today. The students were all working at different levels, on different tasks, in different parts of the room - it was incredible!

Reflecting after the lesson, I feel I am heading this way with my students slowly in Year 11, but definitely need to refer to the tracking sheet more often in class. Like the class I observed today, I probably need to include the expectation to access the tracking sheet at the start and/or end of every lesson, to continue with their tasks. I suppose with the nature of PE, this is a little different though. I also realised all of the students' links are open for anyone to view, but in my classes most of the students' creations are only visible by myself and the student. The students in today's observation were using their peers creations to support their learning journey, which I thought was incredibly powerful. Moving forward, I would like to encourage students to share more of their work with their peers, so they can learn from one another, rather than always learning from me! I hope that this may engage and motivate more learners in the classroom too, particularly the students who rely on me helping them individually.

Finally, I asked students to give me an example of when they have completed the Learn, Create, Share process in DVC;

• We learn about an idea or something, then we design and make it and then we share it - usually with our peers like a presentation, sometimes on our blog.
• Miss gives us a template to write our ideas on, and then we create our own. After we have finished creating it, we have to put onto our blogs for evidence to show that we have done it.
• We learnt about different types of clocks, and then based off of the different types of clocks we had to make our own. Once we drew and made our own clocks, we shared on our blogs with a description of what we did and our creations

Although I am trying hard to include the L,C,S pedagogy, I do not feel my students could articulate how this is evident in their class like the students did today. This is an end goal for me for next year. To do so, I need to make the process more obvious to the students, by referring to the process more often. Our balance and stability lessons (see Autymn's blog, and Isiah's blog to see further), were a great example of the process. The students learnt about a biomechanical principle, participated in a practical, created a resource to represent their learning and then shared on their blogs a synopsis of the learning process. However, I don't think students could yet explain this as Learn, Create, Share. Something to work on.

Overall, I enjoyed the observation, and think that having a specific focus meant I took away much more than if I didn't have a focus.