What does an inquiry focussed teaching team look like?

Nurturing robust, resilient learner identities.

To date, in these blog postings, I have made various comments and positioned a Learning Story at the end to illustrate ideas in the context of an individual child's learning experiences. Today however, it is the reverse because I think the way Catalina Thompson has written this narrative assessment evokes such powerful images that conversations linked to this Learning Story will have more resonance. I hope so. I invite you to read and see what you think...

I have tried to climb this hill myself so I have a very clear understanding of how difficult it is, the failures along the way and the grit and determination required to master it and the feelings of achievement when all that hard work and emotional stamina has paid off. I too am in awe of the stand out abilities of everyone who reaches the summit. This goal doesn't come cheaply or easily, and the way Catalina explored the learning depths Poet experienced to get there, made me think about teachers' visions for nurturing children's learning identities, inside a culture of learning and teaching that becomes a shared understanding of 'what it is we do here'. 

Rarely does learning happen alone. So often the beating heart of learning, the kind that makes a difference to learner identities, happens inside communities as we see possibilities, watch carefully, listen to other's experiences and then muster the courage to have a go ourselves. What adults do really matters. First of all we have to rate the experience and make it possible.  Those of you, who make nature experiences part of your setting's curriculum, understand the background planning, permissions, risk and challenge benefit analyses, and cost required. So making it possible to go into nature, not just once but over and over again, doesn't just idly happen. Repeating these experiences regularly are important if children are to feel comfortable enough to stretch their learning to the edge and beyond. Poet didn't try this feat the first time we went to Ohauiti. Neither did she try it because teachers decided that this would be the next activity for everyone to do. It was after watching her teachers and friends, and listening to the determined language they all used, as they tried different strategies. Finally, in her own time, she used her emotionally and physically courageous dispositions, not only to attempt it but to make reaching the summit her determined goal.  

Poet is part of a cohesive learning community where risk and challenge, courage and camaraderie are powerful frameworks for the way we engage with each other. Teachers model these dispositions and children learn with and alongside each other and grow them over time. They become the leaders who help other children. Eteinne Wenger has a lot to say about these kinds of learning communities and below is just one quote that rates the importance of being in a social learning community.   

There were no stickers, stamps or certificates given out. The joy of reaching these kinds of goals for Poet, and for the many other children who draw on their own motivations to achieve their self set goals,  are deeply intrinsic. These are the incremental feelings that little by little, time after time, shift children's thinking about themselves and build the kind of brain this world, in this century, asks of us all. No one escapes the rigours of a world spinning relentlessly in a vortex of change. The last few months is testament to this, for none of us heading into this new 2020 year could have envisioned what a Covid 19 world would mean. Resilience, resourcefulness, being reflective, and empathic, innovative and determined, and most essentially learning through your mistakes, is armouring children up against anxiety, depression and harmful risk taking, that impacts so negatively on so many young people's lives. Sir Peter Gluckman's study on morbidity of teenagers provides a detailed report if you are interested to explore this further, particularly how managed risks in early childhood support children to avoid these life changing/threatening outcomes.  . https://www.nzfvc.org.nz/news/improving-transition-reducing-social-and-psychological-morbidity-during-adolescence

If we want to be nudging, fostering, encouraging, and nurturing children to stretch their learning (all those supportive words that don't imply rescuing, or hijacking children's ideas), then we have to plan for challenging environments, both outside of our setting's fences and into the community. We have to build a shared understanding of what Te Whāriki calls our Local Curriculum so we are all on the same page as a teaching and learning team, and we have to use the language of learning that promotes, resilience and resourcefulness. Writing about these experiences in ways that emotionally engage children's  families will give them an insight into possibilities to stretch their children's learning too, creating a wider notion of where our communities of practice have influence. 

Below is another story written by Catalina and is reminiscent of my earlier comments on children becoming the teachers, (the teina) and epitomises, I think, the kinds of learner identities we all strive to nurture in our children.