MIT 2020 Collecting Data

I collected data using a survey that I sent out on the teacher's FB page. Up to today, 9 April, I had 62 responses from a variety of teachers, however, most were NZ trained. 

My goal was to collect Teachers' Voice of newly appointed teachers across the country. 

With collecting the data on when teachers started teaching in NZ, I was hoping to get data around if this feeling of being overwhelmed affects a specific age group of teachers, or whether it is something all new teachers experience. 

Of the 62 teachers participating in the survey, 56 started between the years 2019 to 2022. 6 teachers started between 1997 to 2018. 

On the question What is the hardest thing about being a new teacher in an NZ school, I had a variety of answers. Most of them indicated how hard it was to get used to the workload, understand the curriculum, planning and assessment. How to cope and plan for a digital class, learning new systems and lack of support. There were a couple that referred to how what they learned at university did not prepare them for the teaching profession. And finally, teachers struggle to get work-life balance due to all the new things that they have to learn. 

It was interesting to see what they felt they needed more help with. I thought that understanding the curriculum would be the hardest thing, but then I realised it might the case for overseas trained teachers, but not necessarily for teachers that are used to the curriculum from experiencing it as a child and working with it at uni.

The 4 highest areas where they felt they needed more support were: 

Planning, Assessment, Finding Resources and Grouping Students. 

The question where I felt the most empathy was: How would you describe how you felt about all the new learning when you started as a new teacher at your school?

Of the 62 participants, 32 felt overwhelmed. Some felt frustrated, disheartened, lost and that everything was tiring. 7 still felt excited and fantastic. 

When I How do you think student achievement was impacted in the time period when you were getting your head around the curriculum, assessment, planning, etc, most answers were a bit vague. I got the sense that teachers don't want to acknowledge that their lack of understanding might have had a negative impact on their students. Answers varied from heavily impacted to not impacted at all. 

And in my last question, do you have ideas for how a school could support the orientation and induction of new teachers more efficiently and effectively, there were a few great suggestions and the following caught my eye: 

Returning teachers could have a minor pct for a year... Eg like once per month you get a chance to go watch others or have an obs taken of them

Take them through the assessment process and ensure they have access to all the information they need.

Have a structured BT program (e.g., who provides what support, requirements, same expectations of each BT/consistency), and provide all school procedures and protocols. Be open, supportive and receptive to questions, feedback and concerns from staff to management.

Supporting more with assessments and understanding the curriculum

yes, structured induction would be really good

Have PDs on school-specific programs, sites, timelines and expectations BEFORE the start!

If one could get something to read before you actually start your first day at school whether it's online or hard copy, will make you feel more at ease and will also help you to ask the right questions when you do not understand how things work at the said new school.

Have a guidebook or a scavenger hunt type list of things to find and ask about.

Perhaps orientation/induction before term starts for teacher aides and teachers. Where to find resources etc.

Was my survey useful, yes definitely, did I get all the correct data? No, unfortunately, I forgot to let the teacher's email addresses be visible, so I couldn't determine whether they were in a Manaiakalaanie school or not. 

Moving forward, I will get in touch with the Manaiakalaani MIT teachers, and create a focus group with whom I will bounce my ideas. 

Survey Responses

KPMG Hui 1 MIT

On the 28th of March, we came together for our first hui at KPMG. As always, going to the city in itself was challenging for me. (I am not a city slicker). After getting lost and overcoming a few other hurdles, I managed to make it on time to catch the team at the end of breakfast. 

We first did a variation of WWW. 

What has emerged to add clarity and confirmation to my thinking?

I could "hear" how overwhelmed teachers were when starting at school. Some feel like solutions should be at uni or MOE, a common factor seems to be time vs volume of new learning. 

I shared with the team how successful my survey has been. I have had 58 responses from teachers across the country. 84% are NZ trained and 14% overseas trained. The areas that new teachers struggle with the most is as follow: 

Planning (70%), 

Assessment (57%), 

Finding resources(37.5%), 

Understanding curriculum (35%) and 

Grouping students (35%)

What I learned from our discussions were that I have no idea of where the teachers are from as I chose to do the survey anonymously. This presents a challenge as I can't measure whether it is happening in Manaikalaani schools or not. My next step is to narrow my data collection down by working with Matt and his facilitator's network. I am hoping to get a focus group organised to assist me with more data collection. It might be in the form of another survey, or rather an interview. I want to think of a creative way to do this, but also want to get it done as soon as possible so that it can inform my prototype design. 

What has challenged or confronted my thinking?

How can what I design not only be helpful in my own school, but across Manaiakalani Schools.

What HMW statement am I currently confirming?

How might I create a resource to support teachers starting out at a new school where they are presented with a complex array of new learning in order for them to be effective in the classroom.

We then had to create a storyboard using 3 of our Crazy 8 ideas. We could either decide to use just one of our best 3 or combine ideas 3 into 1. I chose the latter. I chose a site, spreadsheet with links and youtube videos. 

This is my current idea. A website that can serve as a dashboard for all new teachers in Manaiakalaani schools. I tackled the 3 highest concerns as collected from the survey. 

The blocks represent pages on a site. On the first page, I would summarise all the assessment expectations, have a video of how to administer the test, the templates, an example of a completed test, and links to where the data should be captured, or where the results could be found. 

The second page will have all the information needed to plan, examples of single-cell and collaborative space planning, and templates. Also on this page will be a Glossary of abbreviations used in schools. 

The third page will helpful links to resources starting wider with curriculum resources, then narrowing it down to resources that can support teachers in class, and finally resources that students can use digitally. 

The final idea is to have some kind of checklist for each unit that shows the teacher's progress through the induction phase. When they have completed the induction they earn a badge or certificate. (This part of my idea pose to be a bit of a challenge, although very helpful. However, it touches on creating logins etc which is a bit out of reach for me).

Feedback from my team: 

Everybody felt that this was something that they would use in their schools. The challenge was posed to some new teachers being able to work through something like this by themselves, and others would still need support. 

Through discussions, I realised that I would have to have separate sites for Primary and Secondary. We brainstormed what that could look like e.g. whether I should create 2 separate sites or just have a link to primary and secondary available. Also, I should create a template and a PES completed example. Schools can then make a copy of the template and adjust it to suit their own schools. The challenge on this one was that it is not as easy to create a template on sites so that it is available to all schools as the creator of the template will have to assign access to whoever wants to make a copy. But I am confident that we will work around this and come up with a solution. 

I could also add our Manaiakalaani Resource Experts as well as Toolkits recordings to my bank of resources. 

The team had to evaluate each person's idea as a Now, Wow or How. I managed to earn a WOW.

Now WOW HOW
Determine if projects are Now, Wow or How ideas.
Now ideas are ideas that are feasible and probably already exist.
Wow ideas are feasible, but also original
How ideas are not (yet) feasible, and also original.

It was really useful to meet as a team and discuss our progress and ideas. It keeps us accountable and inspired. I have lots to do and look forward to the following step in the design thinking process. 

MIT 2022 Kuaotunu - My who poster

 Our WHO poster. We created a flow chart of the people in our lives that will most probably support us. We were encouraged to go as wide as possible. My thinking process where the people I will most probably chat to about my inquiry. My critical friends and people that I could interview, and lastly people with digital experience who might be able to give me some advice on the practical side of things. 

Then we had to delete 2 people, no matter how hard it might be. I chose to keep my key people and let go of my Kahui Ako team as we have not developed into a strong team yet. We had to present our Who chart to the team and explain why we chose the people we did. 

During this activity, I identified the people that can support my journey to a solution. It was good to have the opportunity to think about this.  I also clarified that I should not use the terminology of overseas trained teachers. My solution will suit all teachers starting their teaching careers in NZ, including beginner teachers, retrained teachers and overseas trained teachers. 

MIT 2022 Kuaotunu - Empathy

Our first activity in the design thinking process was called Empathy. 

We started the session with another roleplay to show how my identified problem will affect the students in my class. I was buddied up with Matt. (He is a great actor). When watching everybody's skits, I realised how each challenge is very real and applicable. In my skit, I was the teacher and Matt the student. My student presented me with a beautiful piece of writing, however, when he showed it to me with pride, all that I noticed was his errors in using capital letters and full stops, not noticing the high level of writing he has actually produced. My "lack" of knowledge of the learning progressions in writing caused me to keep my student back and most probably made him unenthusiastic about writing. 

During the Empathise stage of our design thinking process, I had to identify who the people were that were affected by my proposal, then describe how they might feel, what they say, think and do. The goal of this activity was to gain an empathetic understanding of the problem I am trying to solve. I went into the headspace where I am the new teacher. I thought of how a new teacher could experience their first few days/weeks at a new school, whether from overseas or as a beginner teacher. This gave me insight into their needs.

I managed to get through this activity pretty easily, as I could 100% relate to this, being an overseas trained teacher myself. It brought back emotions that I experienced when I started teaching in NZ and made me even more determined to come up with a solution that will make the life of all new teachers easier.

MIT 2022 Kuaotunu - Ideation

 I really enjoyed the 3rd stage of the design thinking process. We had to come up with 8 crazy possible solutions. Then we looked at each other's ideas and stuck small dot stickers next to the ones that we thought would be good ideas. Then everybody had to choose the one idea that stood out for them the most and mark it with a bigger sticker. What was really interesting was the idea that I have been playing within my head was the first one I wrote down. The other 7 were just little ideas that I wrote down, and ideas 2 and 3 got the most likes. We then presented our posters to the team and we discussed them. Through the discussions, I could explain that the smaller ideas could actually fit within the bigger idea (Idea 1). The team was quite excited about the possibilities idea 1 could present and we expanded on my original idea. Therefore this was a great exercise to determine if the idea I had would land well and if people can see it as being useful in their schools. 

MIT 2022 Kuaotunu - Interpretation (HMW) - How Might We

The defining phase in the design thinking process is to refine my challenge statement in such a way that I will be able to act on it. I struggled with this part. I wanted it to be a general action plan that would help all new teachers, not specifying beginner or overseas trained teachers. By creating a very specific problem statement, I'm hoping to get a higher quality solution. With the help of the team, I managed to get to my final statement as highlighted in yellow. 

We then wrote our new statement on an HWM (How Might We) chart. Each person then looked at everybody's statements and made suggestions as to how we could action on our statements, starting with the following sentence starters: 

Here are the suggestions I got: 

1. Have you thought about a survey - ask new teachers what was complex, challenging, time-consuming?

2. How about providing a resource that new teachers can access support?

3. How about asking what they think they might need to support them?

4. Have you thought about collaborative planning opportunities?

5. How about prioritizing what is essential immediately and what can be overcome in time?

6. Have you thought about finding out what this might look like overseas?

7. Is this an opportunity to survey teachers to gain a better understanding of the situation? 

8. Is this an opportunity for a feedback loop for in time learning? 

9. How about creating almost a buddy system where regular contact is made to discuss?

10. Create mentor roles with move xp staff to share & offer back, forward and reflections regular. 

11. You could see what ideas they have and give value to the way they do some things - their way may be right.

This started the thinking process of what possibilities there are.