Reflection: Uru Mānuka Cluster Mini Conference Day 2018

Another day, another PLD session! With the beginning of the year starting, we have had a variety of opportunities to attend workshops on our teacher only days. Today the Uru Mānuka Cluster schools met for a Mini Conference Day, and it was a fantastic networking opportunity. Personally, I did my final placement at a Uru Mānuka school so it was great to see my mentors and teacher friends again after the holiday!

As these things go, most of us sat with our own colleagues upon the start of the session, but the facilitators quickly had us on our feet switching tables. The goal was that we had at least one representative from each school and/or grade level at our tables to maximize collaboration time. In the cluster there are a range of schools that cater collaboratively to NE-Year 6, NE-Year 8 and Year 7-13, so it's interesting to hear from teachers in different types of educational settings. I am part of the high school, but work in the Junior school teaching Year 8. We then got to work with introductions and our first activity. Our table had to discuss the concept of "Learn" from the Learn, Create, Share model.

These slides, A Taste of Manaiakalani, help explain a little bit more about what the Manaiakalani Outreach Programme does, and shows some of Uru Mānuka's Learn, Create, Share processes in action. 

Our group had a lengthy, if not heated, discussion about what it means to learn and where, when, how and why we learn. Something that was really interesting to me was the clear divide on whether you can isolate Learn from it's Share and Create partners, or if all three work together to provide the intended learning outcome for our tamariki. The majority were steadfast in that all three need to work together and that by feeding students information, it does not mean that a child is learning. Sometimes children need to work in the sharing role in order to truly learn a skill or concept and to develop new knowledge. By having them in the MKO or 'more knowledgeable other' role, a student may make strides in their own learning by sharing or creating with others.

Sharing and creating also do not need to be physical, attainable items. You can create new knowledge, learn from prior knowledge and share this with others. A tangible piece of work does not show that Create or Share have been met. There are a variety of tools which can show this such as student blogs, creating a Screencastify, producing a painting or sharing a dance routine, but these are just multimodal ways to show learning.

I feel like I could go on and on about learning and creating and sharing, however, I am interested to hear your opinions! What do you associate with the Learn, Create, Share model?

Edit: If you are interested in hearing more about the Mini Conference, our Hornby High School Principal Mr. Robin Sutton has created a post sharing his thoughts. https://whakataukihewakaekenoa.blogspot.co.nz/2018/01/crossing-rubicon.html