[MUSIC] Hello, welcome back. We're about to engage in a really important part of this course. And we're hoping that you're working with a partner, and we're hoping that you remember some of the things that we talked about when we were exploring learning principles, because that's the territory that we're going to be in this week. And for Judy and I, this particular content area is critically important and we've seen teachers transform their planning practices by working together with these four questions - which can seem deceptively simple, but as we explore them, I think you'll find them really fascinating. So, we hope that you're remembering the learning principles, and, and we hope that you're really remembering all of your planning - that it's learners and learning at the center. That that's where we really need to focus our attention as contemporary teachers. And that wasn't always the way we were developed and trained as teachers, but that's what we need to think about now. We want learners to know that they're cared about, and we want learners to be owners of their own learning. That's the metacognitive and self-regulating part of what we're doing. So, our big intention is there for you to consider - how can we consider the ways in which four questions contribute to developing greater connections with learners, and to building stronger ownership of their learning, so that they really-- not just have a voice, but they really feel like they're in the learning driving seat, because it's very important to us. And here are the four questions. They seem deceptively simple. And as I say each one aloud, and as you consider them, you might think, well, those are very straightforward. But, putting them into practice and using the information that we gain from the questions in our planning that has a bit more complexity to it. The first one is, to ask each young person that you work with, can you name two adults who believe that you will be a success in life? The second is, where are you going with your learning? What are you learning? Where is taking you? How are you going with your learning? Can you figure out how to navigate? And where to next - what's the next step for you in your learning? These questions are powerfully important for lifelong learning. Later on this week, Judy's going to take up these - the last three questions, and talk a little bit about a school in Australia and we're going to be attaching this work to an inquiry framework. But this habit, if we could wave a magic wand and have you think for the rest of your career about these four questions everyday, every week, every year - we think that you will be well served. That's what we found. So, let's look at the first one. Can you name two adults in this setting, in this school, in this building, in this learning environment, who believe you will be a success in life? Why is this question important and how did we come across the question in the first place? On the screen, you'll see a professor at the University of British Columbia. Her name was Kimberly Schonert-Reichl. And she and a group of colleagues internationally are working on the area of social and emotional learning, and discovering how powerful developing social and emotional learning is now to a learner's cognitive success as well as to their emotional and social success. Where did she gather her knowledge about what mattered to young people? Well, she and her colleagues developed - again, what you're looking at on the screen - an early learning group developed something called the middle years developmental indicators measure. And you can see the big categories. Social and Emotional Development, Connectedness, how young people are experiencing school. What their views are about their physical health and well-being and what constructive use, if they have constructive use of after school time because we know that school's only one dimension of the learning of young people today. And how the survey worked is an individual half hour interview with each learner. And in our setting, those learners were grade 4 and grade 7, about 10 and 13 years old, in that range. And the classroom teacher sat down, and went through the survey and asked these questions, and got a very rich picture of each individual learner. Now, we're realistic educators, we've been classroom teachers ourselves as well as principals, and we know that every teacher that's taken the course will probably not have the luxury of talking to every learner for a half hour. But we want to tell you one or two things that we think we all can do, so let's go back. Just should say that what's unique about the survey is that the learner voice is what created the evidence and we think that's important and we want to capture some of that. So, here was one of the key questions. When learners could answer - yes, I know two people, you know, my teacher, you, are one of the people who I know you really believe in me, and here's how I can tell you really believe me. We like the response from one young lad in Australia, when his grade 5 teacher got him to write about this, he said, "I don't know who cares about me, you haven't taught me that yet", and I think in a way, you know, often that is the case - that we need to figure out how each learner looks at the world because these social and emotional connections are so important. So, let me tell you just a quick story about an action research that several teachers in British Columbia did that's really influenced our thinking here. And I put the spirit of this question in mind. Biergate was a very successful English teacher. Learners who didn't go to any other class in her inner city school came to her English classes, tough, secondary English classes, literature mainly. They really participated when they were there and on internal and external measures, they all seem to do extremely well. Biergate didn't have a picture of why that happened, and a new counselor arrived at the school, her name was Louise, and she said, "What if together we study what it is that you do? Because what I'm finding in my office is that all kinds of learners are coming and asking to be in your classes." So ,they engaged with their union or with their district in an action research study, which we think is a really terrific professional planning practice. What Louise discovered when she looked at Biergate's practices was something perhaps, quite simple but it's something that the rest of us have tried to apply ever since we did this learning. Everyday, Biergate made it her professional handle to talk to every learner in her English classes, every single one, and that would be a lot in four or five classes a day, about something in the learner's life that had nothing to do with English. You know, she talked with them about their dog, their sport, their home, what they watched on television, just some small personal moment. And the pull of that human connection seemed to engage them in a way that then allowed them to enter the world of English in a very different way. So, we thought that was a powerful insight. Then when we read Michael Fullan's work from Ontario, we had a big investment in secondary student success. And in one of Michael's books he wrote about a strategy - and again, I think it's something reasonably simple - he called it "Two by Ten". And it was this notion that if you have a discouraged or disengaged young person in your class that if, as a teacher, you'd focus on that person for two weeks, ten days in a row, just for two minutes, and engage them in a personal conversation, that for many young people that can turn their lives around. They found it over and over and over again in their Ontario classrooms. So, those two approaches which sound doable to all the teachers that we worked with, that we can take two minutes a day for two weeks, and engage in getting to understand our learners did a little better than we do when we feel we have so many different things to do, knowing now the social and emotional learning is so important to young people's growth in a very complex world. And if we can also do what Biergate did, which is just to take those moments before class begins or before the learning program is, you know, we're engaging with our tasks and our busyness to get to talk to people individually, that those two things can actually transform a learning session. And so we want you to think about how you can build that into your repertoire. Just a very quick second story about a intermediate teacher in northern B.C. Her name was Janelle, and what she did was, she just did this in writing. She did, she asked the kids to respond to, can you name two adults who believe in you? And can you tell me a little bit about how you know that they believe in you? And she found that out of 140 students in her school, three of them couldn't name two adults. One was a middle child in a family constellation. One was kind of a discouraged learner, and one was a learner who had moods that kind of went up and down. What we wrote about in Spirals of Inquiry is she then took that information and she did two things with it. One, she went back to all the teachers who said-- when learners said, you know, Mr. Townsend, he really believes in me and here's how I know it. She went back and she told them who the child was and what they'd said which gave a bit of an emotional boost to teaching because it can be demanding work. The other thing she did is she taught two of the three young people who didn't feel that people believed in them and she created individualized strategies for those learners to develop that understanding that in fact they were cared for. She also noted that some kids or some young people said well, you know, you believe in me, but you're paid to do it. And that made her realise that some young people kind of viewed the relationships in more of an instrumental way, and so she worked to get around that challenge. So, this question is incredibly important. We hope you build it into your own planning repertoire, and Judy is going to take you in the next two sessions into the more cognitive part. But remember, the social and emotional part is critically important and we know that now from an extensive and growing body of research. [MUSIC]
