St Andrew’s College

1. St Andrew’s College Tamara Yuill Proctor

2. Overview • St Andrew’s College is: • Located in Christchurch, • Decile 10 • Co-educational • Independent school • This project was conducted with 20 Year 11 students of mixed ability in English • I had planned to use Knowledge Building and Knowledge Forum for the whole year for all external assessments. I was also keen to combine the Unfamiliar Text with the Creative Writing internal assessment as well as write a collaborative internal assessment for 1.8 (Making Connections)

3. Implementation • 20 students • First assessment was the Visual Text – Social Network (same as last year). I introduced KB and KF as a discussion and explained some of the key ideas: • All ideas are improvable and idea diversity – what does that look like • All knowledge belongs to the community – why? Benefits of this? • Every needs to share the load – epistemic agency – be responsible for own thinking and learning. Basically, I said in a nutshell: “when you hit the end of the year I want you think, think for yourself, think about what you are learning, think about knowledge”

4. Implementation Cont. • We then had a play on KF. I set up different views and let students select the area they wanted to work on, whether it was character or them, etc. • We used 2 periods a week and homework was set. • A lot of discussion in other lessons about information and questions that arose from using KF. • Using the scaffolds was introduced and encouraged. • Organization of the views for clarity.

5. Outcomes & Assessment • For NCEA L1 English Visual Text students need to be able to :Show perceptive • understanding of specified aspect(s) of studied visual or oral text(s), using supporting • evidence.” • KB & KF enable students to reach this point faster – Abstract level of thinking. It is about making judgments and ‘perceptive understanding’ rather than retelling the film. • Deeper level of understanding gained a lot fast • Ability to use own words – then tie it into Visual/Verbal techniques and finally directors intention • Last years students

7. Student Judgments in own words

8. Personal Reflection • I was very pleased with the engagement with students from the start. Unlike last year the students were able to access the Enhanced version from the beginning. I also used the library as the zone where we worked on Knowledge Building. I was encouraged by the organization of Knowledge Forum by students and their ability to use the different scaffolds. I think this was because of my confidence in passing this on. When we updated our servers and internet it became impossible to log on to Knowledge Forum in any capacity at school and students were reluctant to use it at home. • Whilst the idea development within this class was still minimal the depth of understanding students had of the text as a result of using KB and KF was very high. Students performed well in the visual text essay during school exams. They retained the information more deeply.