Getting Going with Growing No. 5

Another update is well overdue I think.

If you have read my other posts re. gardening (1, 2, 3, 4) you may have figured that our horticultural beginners journey is one of highs and lows, and it continues to be so. 

So far I have identified a couple of 'enemies': 

• Sheep- who loved my cabbage plants but ignored the spinach 
• Weather- hail stones that had no problem with attacking both cabbage and spinach, as well as leaving a considerable frost which killed the pumpkin seedlings that I had planted 

And I have two more to add: 

• Firstly, and I apologise for not mentioning this sooner, but cats can be a bit of a problem in the
  
  garden... one cat in particular for us I fear is our own rather heavy grey feline called Pippin. When I first started preparing the beds I think she misinterpreted my work as creating a sunbed/toilet for her. This did not stop when the first seedlings were planted! We remedied this with placing large netting over the beds as you may see in the background of the image here. 
• Secondly birds! Our first strawberries had ripened about a week ago and I was all ready to share them with my little man as a treat for our evening meal but... I left the glasshouse door open as the day was hot and I wanted to get fresh, cooler 
  
  air moving in the space. I assumed my strawberries were safe in the glasshouse and didn't even think to cover them... I was wrong! Lesson learned. 
• Weather again... this time heat. I was away for work for a couple of days and one of these was particularly warm. I had left instructions for watering in my absence but neither of us had anticipated the impact of heat in the glasshouse on the seedlings. When I came home found that most of my delicate capsicum seedlings had fried in the hot sun. Another lesson learned. 

As you can see our setbacks have been based around nature, and so it seems to me that learning to garden successfully is about learning to live in harmony with nature itself. We are finding our way. 

So let's now focus on the highs of the gardening journey at the moment: 

• Our basil is growing well and I will be thinning it out in the next week or so. 
  
• My last lot of corn planted is growing and the wind break cloth seems to be working with protecting it from some of the harsh winds we have had lately. 
• I have also nursed our last three pumpkin seedlings to ensure they are as healthy as possible and just planted them outside in the last day or so. So far they are looking good, I wonder if I had planted them too early last time? 
• We have little apples beginning to grow on our three old apple trees as well, yum, apples for Autumn. 
• The potatoes have survived the frost and are now showing
  good growth. 
• I have been experimenting with striking seed on dampened paper in plastic lidded containers, so far the beans and peas have responded well. Will keep playing with this method. 
• We have eaten some of our own spinach and it was delicious. It seems to have come away from the hail storm OK, not perfect but OK. 
  
• The zucchini are doing really well and we will be eating our first one soon. 
• We have little tomatoes on all of our tomato plants. I love the smell of our tomato plants, it brings back fond memories of my dad including one of the last moments I shared with him in his garden when he was ill. He loved his garden and grew the best tasting tomatoes, I hope that my use of the 'ucky' bucket juice (seaweed soup) will help to replicate the flavour a little at least.  

And to close the best and biggest gardening highlight for me...  

The other night we finally had another ripe strawberry, so when my little man came down to tend the garden with me I got him to check the strawberries for me, there was much excitement when he saw the juicy red strawberry sitting there. We picked it and I gave it to him to eat. He took a small bite and the response was one of absolute joy "oh mumma, it tastes soooooo goooood!" He ate it slowly and thoroughly relished every bite. It was wonderful to see and in some ways I wish I had taken a photo but on the other hand I am pleased that I was just able to enjoy the moment with him. 

Teaching is leading

From my perspective if you are a teacher (and let's think broadly about that term as well) then you are a leader and that is a tremendous privilege and responsibility.

Recently I attended a presentation about successful educational leadership with associate professor Ross Notman from the Otago university. He presented findings from his own research as well as international research including the International Successful School Principalship Project. As we went through there were opportunities to reflect on our own leadership practices and experiences of leadership, in this time I often came back to the thought that these qualities are not the exclusive domain of successful school principals.

Below are three of the areas discussed and how these might look for classroom practitioners:

Building a strong vision and setting expectations
Here we are talking about motivating others, setting high expectations, having a clear sense of purpose 
In the classroom how do you share your expectations? How do you motivate your learners? Are you clear about why you are doing what you are doing? And how do you communicate this with your class?
When we set clear expectations our students have confidence to complete set tasks. When they know why we are doing what we are doing there is a better buy in and if well thought out with them in mind then the learning will have greater relevance and therefore be more meaningful. Motivated students are more likely to be self managing and committed to the task at hand, whilst we don't want to create a dependence on us for motivation it is important that we support the students to get on board and stay on board. We can use WALTS (We Are Learning To Statements) to help clarify the our expectations, we can use rubrics and tools like SOLO taxonomy among others.
When talking about expectations we are not only talking about teaching and learning, there are behavioural expectations as well. One important thing to consider about expectations and is that unless these are held/owned by the whole group then they are unlikely to be motivating or sustainable.

Understanding and Developing People 
Thinking about building relationships and developing dispositions, valuing others, practicing what you preach
The three R's of teaching is sometimes described as relationships, relationships, relationships. I agree! The fabulous Allie Mooney shared the following quote at a conference I attended many years ago "you need to reach me before you can teach me", I have never forgotten it.
How do you build relationships with your students? It is not about being friends but getting to know each other. How do you develop dispositions in others? What about valuing all the students in your classroom? Do you practice what you preach?
If we know what switches people on and turns people off we are better able to help them stay motivated and share a vision that is palatable. When you are teaching is your focus on the subject/topic or the different learners you have in your class? Where your focus is will make a huge difference to the quality of the relationships you have with your students. It is not always easy to like all the children/young people who enter our classrooms, some come with some pretty tough baggage, it does help though if we approach all students with a desire to identify their strengths and unique gifts as everyone has something of value to offer. A question I have gained from a parenting expert Dr Monika Potter is to ask yourself 'what would love do?', it is a helpful reminder when dealing with difficult behaviour.
If we want our students to walk along a path with us, to respect and respond, then we need to be authentic... they can smell the disingenuous a mile off and if we don't practice what we preach then that will erode trust which is one of the foundations of relationships. It is OK to be human and make mistakes, admit it, apologise and move on if you do... in just the way you would expect your students to make amends if they made a mistake.

Redesigning/Refreshing the Organisation 
This is where we are establishing collaborative cultures, restructuring to meet changing needs and managing conflict. 
How do you create opportunities for collaboration in your classroom? What about distributed leadership... do you share ownership? How do you identify the needs of the learners in your care? What do you do about changing needs? How flexible is your classroom programme? How do you manage conflict? Do you create opportunities for honest, healthy discourse in the classroom?
We can be the masters of all destiny in our classrooms but when we do that we disempower our learners. Think about ways that we can share decision making with our students. I remember with one class giving them some guidelines for choosing desk groups then let them go for it, I was impressed with the quick way they selected their groups and how successful they were. Collaborative cultures take time to build and it is important to work on creating an environment where it is safe for students to disagree or have different opinions even with the teacher. When groups go too far with their desire to reach consensus we start to lose divergent, innovative thinking as the need to fit in with the group supersedes anything else. This is called 'group think' which I would imagine as teachers we would want to avoid developing in the minds of our young people if they are to be the leaders of the future.
Teachers have a lot of competing demands on our thinking when planning for our students so consider how much of what you do in the classroom is driven by student needs. When you are thinking about needs are you only concerned with the academic or do you look at the whole person? I suggest that if you are not considering the social, emotional, physical aspects of your students lives you might be missing out on some important information which will enable you to better tailor your programme to meet diverse needs and help your students do their best. If a child is struggling with their learning sometimes the root of the problem may not be the subject area or lack of ability but could be a health issue, problems with friends, or any number of things going on. Focusing only on the academic may lead to little improvement or, worse still, increase anxiety and create more problems. This brings us back to knowing our students and relationships, relationships, relationships.

There are many other qualities we could discuss including being leaders of learning, modelling an inquisitive mind, thinking dispositions and so on but I think this is a helpful start to establish the understanding that teachers are leaders. These qualities can equally be applied to parenting and other contexts I am sure.

Leadership for me is a learning journey. I see so many opportunities in everyday life to apply aspects from my learning in leadership so far. If you are interested in exploring leadership a little more I suggest that Simon Sinek's leadership material is a good place to start.

Simon Sinek shares valuable insights around leadership and is well worth following. 

Getting Going with Growing 4

Gardening is a pursuit that teaches important life lessons... this week resilience, patience and wonder.

After the attack of the killer sheep and the subsequent repairs to the fencing as well as putting up some wind proofing for my latest attempt at growing corn I thought we had catered for just about everything.... but not quite!

Public enemy no 2 has been identified and no it is still not the white butterfly.

This time it was unseasonal weather! Check out the little video clip below to see what hit, literally, our garden earlier this week.

The size of the hailstones were quite spectacular too.

The spinach that survived the attack of the killer sheep did not fare quite as well against the hail stone

bullets that pelted down from above.
Worse still was the unexpected frost from the hailstones overnight as they did not melt away... the potatoes (largely self seeded) did not fare well as the blackened curled leaves here show. I am hoping that they might come away again though... fingers crossed.

The pumpkin plants however do not look like they will come away again. It was so disappointing as this is my second attempt with my pumpkin seedlings and they were looking so good, now they are yellowed, curling up and very sad.

BUT this is gardening, and there's no point moping around about it. This is where resilience comes in, I could chuck it in claiming it is too hard with the pumpkins, the spinach and the brassicas but I have a glasshouse full of growing plants (and I am lucky I still have five pumpkin seedlings in the glasshouse to transplant).
There are seeds coming away that we planted a couple of weeks ago and I thought were not going to strike... they are now popping up all over the place!
The other day I was looking at the bed where I had planted sunflower and sweet pea seeds two weeks ago and there was nothing happening, I had decided I would put nasturtiums in there instead when I got the time... well today I walked past and had a look to water a couple of seedlings I had planted earlier and lo and behold there are a whole heap of little seedlings now coming through, what a difference three days make! A little bit of patience pays off, and if they had been right up when the hail hit, who knows, they might not have fared so well.

Sunflower seedling... exciting! 

On reflection there are lots of life lessons I am getting from gardening, here are a couple from this week:

• very few things in life are ALL bad, focus on what is going right if you can
• don't put all your plants in the one spot, diversification is key
• if at first you don't succeed, look at what you could do differently and have another go 
• it is OK to try something and fail... that is a great place for learning to happen 
• patience is a virtue and nature knows it well

In gardening, as in life, you win some and you lose some. If you are prepared to focus on the wins, work through the losses and approach as much as you can with a sense of wonder then all going well things will bear fruit. 

Getting Going with Growing 3

Well we are another few weeks on from my last gardening blog post and we have actually eaten something from the garden so that deserves a mention among other things.

So here is our first scrumptious offering from our garden, a Great Lakes lettuce, which we have enjoyed for several meals so far. Crunchy leaves for fabulous salads and juicy sandwiches... all the tastier because it has come from our own garden!

One of the great things I am discovering about gardening is that it is an opportunity for ongoing learning through trial and error. I am loving the opportunity to be a bit of a scientist with the garden and trying some new things out.

• We have grown seeds in individual pods using empty toilet rolls. We have filled them with dirt (seed raising mix) and have placed one or two capsicum seeds in them. To be honest I was beginning to despair that nothing was going to happen but in the last day or so some shoots are coming up. We have planted both seeds from a packet and some I harvested from a capsicum we had eaten so it will be interesting to see what grows, 
• We are now using our 'ucky bucket' seaweed water to feed new and transplanted plants. We water this down so it looks
  
  like weak tea and use this when we are planting... at the moment most plants have responded. 
• We have had a go at planting onions from onions that have sprouted in the cupboard. I found this blog post and thought I would give it a go. So far they seem to be growing, well they haven't withered and died so that's a good start! (http://www.anktangle.com/2011/03/growing-sprouted-onions.html) 
• We have planted our second lot of pumpkin seedlings, this time in a new plot with some slightly different soil so here's hoping this time they don't die! 
• I am still to master the mixed plantings with flowering plants, I have had some success with nasturtiums but my marigolds are pathetic. We will work it out eventually. 

• We have also had a little go at a slightly different planting arrangement inspired by the 1 metre squared garden concept. It gives a little bit of a patchwork effect and so it looks good at the moment. I have sown carrot seeds on the side plots, brassicas in the corners and corn in the middle. We are trying the corn again, but this time in different soil and with a little more protection from the wind we hope. (http://www.tuigarden.co.nz/howtoguide/square-metre-gardening-guide) 
• I continue with the broken eggshell slug protection system and whilst I think that is working I have discovered an even more vicious enemy of our humble brassicas... read on... 

This week public enemy number one of the garden became... SHEEP! 

Oh they look very innocent back in their paddock now but the results of their ruminating in my garden was quite obvious. Clearly they don't love spinach but have a thing for cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower! 

One of the cabbages that were savaged but still in the ground. 

The spinach that lived to tell the tale

We have put in some measures to deter the sheep from doing any more damage with some additional fencing at the bottom of the garden and hope that proves as effective as the cat proof netting over the garden plots has. 

So for now I have forgiven the sheep, as long as they stay on their side of the fence!

It is getting exciting as some of the plants are beginning to fruit so I will leave you with some images of new fruit coming... the anticipation of a fruitful summer is a wonderful thing. Happy growing folks. 

Zucchinis....

Strawberries....

 

Little grapes!

Same bat time, same bat channel- can TV help us improve student engagement?

Here's a little thought I have been having for a while... what if we looked at what TV stations do well to capture and maintain an audience and applied that learning in our classrooms?

I know it sounds a bit odd and in our day where we have varied forms of visual/digital entertainment perhaps the analogy is redundant but I'll let you decide that.

This is some of what I have been considering:

• On TV channels they have specific programmes airing at certain times but it shifts and changes depending on the day. There are some regular programmes and some variation, there are also thematic times such as Christmas or special days of remembrance where the schedule reflects that theme. 
• There are regular ad breaks, often every 10-15 minutes, which can be entertaining in themselves or provide us with an opportunity to shift focus or move around a little. 
• There are a range of programmes scheduled which are designed to meet the interests of varied parts of the target demographic. 
• The target demographic is carefully considered and monitored. 
• Programmers use cliffhangers and other strategies to hook their viewers in and make them want to tune in next time (as the old Batman series said 'same bat time, same bat channel') 
• Sometimes programmes that are less popular are sandwiched between two more popular programmes to keep their viewers tuning in. 
• What is coming up may be talked about in the credits from the previous programme to ensure that viewers do not switch channels. 

When we apply this to the classroom here is what it might look like:

• Lots of consultation with the students so you understand your 'demographic'. What are their favourite subjects, least favourite, how do they prefer to learn, what are their goals, strengths and needs... then consider how you can cater for that (hint: they won't be the same as the class you had last year, or the year before and they will probably change preferences throughout the year too)
• Short snappy lessons- don't drag on boring your audience or they will tune out! 
• Previews of what is coming up as we round off what we have just done e.g. (after a summation of what was learned) "so that was maths folks, coming up we will be exploring the fascinating world of adjectives in our writing...".  
• You can also preview a new topic coming up next week or next term at different times to build anticipation and buy in.  
• There will be predictability with daily scheduling but there will be variability between lessons and you may adjust your schedule seasonally. If we do things the same way all day engagement will drop off (hint: being talked at for long periods of time in the classroom is exhausting and encourages tuning out). 
• If something is a less popular subject then schedule it between two other more popular subjects or parts of the classroom programme e.g. if there is a general reluctance with math and written language don't schedule them immediately one after the other.  
• Stop regularly to allow people to move, shift focus, stretch, ask questions or talk. (Click here for some reasons to consider more action in your classroom) 
• If something isn't working then consider changing it, do something new or different, find another way. You could trial different things to see if they work, like pilot programmes.  

We want our students to tune in, buy in and engage just like a TV station wants their viewers to do, the big difference of course is that we don't want our students to be passive 'viewers' of the learning but active participants whose opinions, interests and needs do matter. And to finish here's a really bold thought, what would it look like if every student had their own schedule designed with them in mind? Just an idea...  

So, how do you get your students to tune in to the learning offered in your school or your classroom? 

By the way, please excuse the spelling for some folk out there, I come from New Zealand :)