Goal setting and 'The Power of Yet'.

This week, our Autahi students had their first taste of our Goal Setting process. This is something we do throughout the school: it looks a little different in each space to suit the age and stage of our students. 

Our Autahi students conference with their teachers and decide on something they are proud of that they can do NOW. They then think about the things that they can't do YET - and choose two. These are our students' goals. We ask them to draw their ideas. The drawings give us plenty to talk about and help us to discover what our students' choices mean for them.

We usually find that our students students think big. We encourage their aspirational thinking: goals should be substantial.  'I want to write a story' and 'I want to count to 120' are chunky goals that will take time and effort to achieve. This can make it hard to know where to begin. This is where Kaisen steps come in. When conferencing with students and their whānau, we have the opportunity to break down these big goals into a pathway of smaller steps. For example, 'I want to write a story' might begin with telling or drawing a story or learning some letters and sounds. Kaisen steps give our students meaningful actions that they can take straight away. They also give students the chance to experience Positive Accomplishment on the way to achieving their big goal.

Of course, there are going to be bumps in the road: learning new things is should be fun. But, where learning is happening, there are always challenges as well. At Worser Bay School, we draw on the work of Carol Dweck, who has researched and written extensively about Growth Mindset - or The Power of Yet. Struggle is intrinsic to learning. Developing the skills to respond positively when the going gets tough is what makes great learners. Your child will be working on this throughout their time at WBS.

An example you will have come across in our Goal Setting meetings is our Character Strengths. We help our students to recognise the strengths that they have - such as Bravery, Curiosity, Perseverance and Humour - how to 'dial them up' to help with different challenges and situations. We also work on strategies to cope with feelings of frustration, how to get unstuck or find help. And we are always keen to notice and praise our students' effort, grit and determination. 

For more on this, take a look at Carol Dweck's Ted Talk about The Power of Yet.

And for fun, The Power of Yet by Janelle Monae and Sesame Street.

Goal setters

This term we have had a school wide focus on goal setting and what it means to be a goal setter.
In Autahi we look at things we can do and things we can't do yet. 
That word yet is very important to us. It tells us that even though something might seem tricky to us now, with some practise and new learning we can make small steps towards being able to do it.
Those steps are called Kaizen steps.

They are smaller steps that we can practise in order to help us reach our goals.
In writing we have been thinking about what makes a good writer and how being able to write is goal we all share.

Each child has chosen one aspect to keep in mind and work on during writing. This is them using the small steps to help reach their goal.

We talk about goals a lot and ways we can practise our goals. Many children have used discovery time as a chance to work on some of their goals and practise things they can't do yet.

Growing our Minds!

We have been thinking a lot about our brains and how we learn.  One thing we learned is that trying new things helps us learn.  

We read these books:

                                       
The first one is about being OK at things and that it is OK to just be OK at something.  It also made us think about how trying new things is the only way we will know if we like those things. The second book is all about our brain.  It tells us about the different parts of our brain and how our brain works.  It tells us about how we can grow our brain by trying lots of new things.  

After we read these books we started to think about what we wanted to learn about and we made Growing our Brain Crowns.

This is my grow your brain crown and the 4 things I really want to learn are drawing real animals, reading books, learning Kapa Haka and running up hills fast! I think my brain will grow lots!

We are making grow your brain crowns. We are thinking about what we want to learn about. We want to learn how to do headstands, backwards rolls, read chapter books, learn more about space, about how to be a great scientist, how to build strong buildings, how to run really fast and about how things change! Wow our brains are growing already!

We want to learn how to draw cats, count to 100 from 0 and backwards, draw Maori patterns, read tricky books and learn some songs on the ukulele!

Choosing what we want to learn about is the first part of setting goals.  From here we will think about what we might need to do in order to learn to do the things we've identified.  When we have a hand in choosing what we learn about it helps us to be engaged in our learning and have agency.  So look out because we are driving this learning train! Choo Choo!

Choose your challenge

We all want to reach the top of the maunga and in Autahi we have a special mountain we are working our way up. As you can see at the top of this mountain it says that 'I can choose to do things that are challenging for me'. Everyone in the class has a little avatar that represents them on their own journey up the mountain of challenge. As we choose to do things that are challenging and helpful towards reaching our goals we start to move up the mountain.

This journey will look different for each learner and not all challenge is the same. Learners in Autahi are encouraged to look for things that will challenge them and help them grow their brains.

Here are some examples of learners choosing different brain challenges:

Building rocket words with play dough

Creating and matching words

Feeling the letters and guessing what they are

Writing a creative story using my letter and sound knowledge

Using all my writing skills to create an amazing story about dragons

Adding beads to a pipe cleaner and writing down how many I have put on

Stretching out sounds and stamping what I can hear

Practising my rocket words with play dough

Working Towards our Goals

Being a Goal Setter has been our Learner Attribute focus this term and you can see in previous posts that we set goals around our Art Celebration--these goals included things like being brave on stage, practising and learning our moves and concentrating at practise time.  

Goal Setting and being aware of our goals fall under the Positive Engagement and Positive Accomplishment domains of the Positive Education Model.  If we are aware of what we want to improve on and we track our learning, we are more engaged and therefor are able to see achievement and if we work from areas of strength and interest we are able to get into the flow of learning, which also leads to accomplishment and engagement. 

We have a goal setting meeting close to the time we start school where we look at goals from a strengths perspective.  We identify things we can already do and a few things we can't quite do YET.  

Then we get to work on learning by continually practising our goals.  

One area that we are all working on is our writing.  Writing is very complex and has many parts, so we start small and work our way through it.  

One of the first steps in learning our letters and sounds.  Each week we practise this in different ways and then on a Friday we check in on our letters in our rocket.  We celebrate all our hard work and effort. Eventually once we know all of our letters and sounds we start to learn words. 

In order to be able to write words we have to be able to hear the sounds in them, identify which letter makes that sound and remember how to write that letter.  So throughout our day we practise these skills in different ways. 

We are playing a game where we pick a card, stretch out the sounds, find the letters and then draw and write the word.  This practise helps us when we are trying to write our own words. 

We also use a goal card to remind us what we need to do in writing.  We practise writing letters that are formed similarly and we practise using objects to help us stretch out sounds and write the words.  

Part of being a goal setter is knowing what our goal is and being able to share this with other people and talk about what our challenges are.  Last week we had whanau group time where we shared a piece of writing with our whanau group buddies.

We use these prompts to have our learning conversations:

I Am a Goal Setter Buddy Reflection

What were you learning to do? What was your goal

What was a challenge for you?

What will you do next with your learning?

Next week you will be coming in to walk through a learning scavenger hunt with your children and some will be having Student Led Conferences where we reflect on our goals we set at our start of school Goal Setting Meetings.  Help us by asking us the goal setting questions so we can explain what it is we are learning to do!