Finding your position on AI in education

OpenAI has recently produced a course called ‘Chat GPT Foundations for Educators’ which is designed to be a silver bullet to teach educators how to use AI. The course is the product of a partnership with Common Sense Media which is (usually) a reliable source of ‘common sense’ reviews. What they seem to be missing is how teachers can use AI effectively and purposefully. They are not really encouraging teachers to be co-designers, critical evaluators and engineers of content.

It basically falls short of practical (and not contradictory) use case scenarios and has omitted a lot of big picture questioning about the ‘why’ behind the use of AI. The current debate appears to be an assumption that teachers should choose between AI or the highway. But maybe this yes/no binary thinking is the real problem.

AI shouldn’t be an ‘all in’ or ‘all out’ or Yes/No debate. It is much more complicated than that.

If there were a fork in the road that was ‘AI or the highway’, choosing the highway (non AI) is (still) just fine. If you haven’t read about the OpenAI foundation course you can find a useful critique of it here: How does OpenAI Imagine K-12 Education by Erik Salvaggio.

Here are some of the key points of critique:

• it assumes that teachers are passive producers of content

• it posits that productivity is more important than effective pedagogy

• it does not teach critical AI literacy

• it does not target pedagogy

• it is not a best practice example of UDL in action (no closed captioning)

• it assumes that administrative tasks can all be automated

• it does not seem to value the agency of teacher-owned creative processes in course design

• it overstates the predictive capabilities of AI

  and my addition:

• it assumes that teachers need to be ‘all or nothing’ consumers

OpenAI seems to champion itself as a heroic solution to all of the problems that teachers have. It does not really dig into any additional problems that using AI blindly also produce.

If you stand with AI - then you obviously must use it for everything and save so much time and create so many more resources and power up your productivity to the point that even writing your own meeting agenda can be outsourced. But - quantity does not beat quality. And producing does not equate to creating.

When I was at Elam School of Fine Arts, my professor said to me (when I was churning out bad art at a rate of knots): ‘There’s enough sh*t in the world. Why contribute to it?” And I think this is golden advice that can be applied to finding your own position on AI in education.

An easy ‘out’ is to stand on the opposite road with those who say No. You might stand in solidarity with teachers who see AI as a flash in the pan that is best avoided. These teachers might be summed up as the ‘pen and paper warriors’ who want to make sure that text books are used instead of laptops. If you avoid technology, then you also do avoid a lot of the ‘bad’ things - but you also run the risk of stealing learning opportunities away from students who also need to learn critical AI literacy. Teachers have a duty to empower students to understand, question, and navigate AI responsibly. This isn't just about using the tools to enhance their own productivity but helping students to critique and control their own uses to be critical creators of the future.

If you want to start using AI in the classroom it is ok to do so cautiously. In fact, it is best to use any tool with your pedagogue hat on and ask all of the questions like ‘where is the science’, ‘how does this enhance learner experience’, ‘how does this increase critical thinking’, ‘how might this offer more agency’, ‘how might this remove barriers to learning’ etc. And if it doesn’t align to your lens of what education should be and needs to be in the future, then don’t use it. Or more simply put, if you are adding to the sh*t in the world, don’t.

AI, when used purposefully, has the power to enhance, augment and improve learning - but you have to become an active architect of learning and do so.

So what next? Thinking and Linking:

1. Prioritise Critical Literacy: Read up on AI’s limitations, biases, and ethical implications. Foster a culture of inquiry rather than blind adoption. Read widely or at least dip your toes in: 12 Best Blogs on AI

2. Focus on Inclusivity: Accessibility should be a baseline, not an afterthought. All training materials must meet diverse needs to ensure equitable learning and expand rather than restrict learning accessibility. Use AI to expand not restrict.

3. Balance Efficiency with Depth: Productivity should not come at the expense of the thoughtful, creative processes integral to teaching. AI should enhance, not overshadow, pedagogical engagement.

4. Collaborate and Innovate: Join a community of practice to join in the critical conversation (this AI Forum is really worthwhile. It has fortnightly recorded webinars and emailed transcripts for an easy win for those of us who might be time poor). Even if you don’t join a community of practice, you might share innovations, successes, and challenges with AI in education with your colleagues in-house.

5. Critique your Use: Think about process over product, learner agency and the experience for the learners above all. How is augmenting and enhancing learner experience? How is it supporting more critical thinking? Ask ethical questions: How does this tool support diverse learners in my classroom? What biases might the AI outputs carry, and how can I address them? Are the benefits worth the potential trade-offs in creativity or critical thinking? My work-in-progress rubric is below.

6. Become an engineer not a consumer: There are SO MANY new AI tools on the market right now with Chat GPT being just one drop in a vast ocean. Popular educational solutions like MagicSchool.AI can create educational consumables in seconds, but the outputs might not be of true benefit to students’ experience. Consider how you might engineer your own more purposeful solutions rather than accepting ready-made products that might push passivity or feed another tech company’s coffers.

7. Explore Innovation: For some interesting use cases for how to innovate with AI in the classroom check out Harvards’s AI Pedagogy Project (this was also mentioned in the first blog link).

8. Put Pedagogy over Product: AI tools are only as effective as the intentionality behind their use. Targeting strategies like flipped classrooms, differentiation, UDL or gamified learning means that you can apply AI to pedagogical frameworks purposefully.
   

I created this rubric (work in progress) based on the ITL Microsoft Partners in learning rubrics. There are more categories in the rubric - but this is the first page as an example.

AI might not be a silver bullet or a magic solution, but neither is it a storm to be feared.

It’s not really an “AI or the highway” scenario, forcing a binary choice of ‘this or that.’ AI is simply a tool, and like any tool, its value lies entirely in how we use it. By asking critical questions, exploring practical use cases, and fostering collaboration, we can move beyond the ‘yes or no’ debate. Instead, we can become thoughtful, critical users who forge our own purposeful path forward—together.

I added this as a provocation - does the SAMR rubric work when considering AI? SAMR rubric by Puentedura adapted for AI use.

Thoughts? Questions? Leave a comment to share your thoughts.

Visual Learning and Metaphor in the Classroom

This term I’ve been playing with visual learning and metaphor as a way to anchor students’ understanding about a new Achievement Standard in English (1.2 - Demonstrate understanding of specific aspects of studied texts). After exploring and explaining a ‘boat and anchor’ metaphor in class with quick sketches on the whiteboard, I took the time to draw it up as a published whiteboard on Canva so that students could ‘connect the dots’ and revise the key requirements of the task more easily.

Breaking things down into pictures is a way to reduce cognitive load and is also a way for students to connect with their learning beyond written instructions. Using images to support learning is a way to offer both scaffolding as well as differentiated learning opportunities. Using pictures to support words (or visuals to work alongside verbals) aligns with Dual Coding Theory which you can read more about here. The main principle is that retention and memory is enhanced by offering pictures as well as words. Applying a UDL lens, pictographic representations are also useful supports for students with dyslexia, dyscalculia and autism and can make learning more ‘universally’ engaging.

Application of metaphor

The boat metaphor I used in this instance was a way to discuss the importance of tying an observation about aspects of a text to the author’s purpose, to the theme and to draw attention to the fact that the ‘treasure’ of this learning is exploring a personal response. This was a useful mataphor because it helped students to understand that naming a technique and giving an example of it is like pushing a boat out onto the water - it will float away if it is not anchored to anything. The examples need to be linked together (like a chain), the boat needs to be anchored to the author’s purpose (why is it there in the first place) - but also that the ‘real treasure’ is our own responses and thinking about the ideas or themes in the text.

I used the metaphor of a boat and anchor ‘chain’ as a way to explain that examples need to be linked together for their writing to be convincing. If students zoom into the chain, they can see that it is also likened to a venn diagram in order to show diagrammatically that the connection between aspects and how they work together is where the magic happens. By recreating the anchor metaphor in Canva, I was also able to add explainer post its at each section of the image for students to zoom in and out to - depending on how much support they needed. In this way the visual whiteboard works as a differentiated learning tool too.

VIsual learning is away to present complex information in a more memorable way. My interest has been in whether or not this way of presenting learning is ‘actually helpful’ or if it is a waste of time. As it turns out, verbal feedback from the students indicates that it ‘is really helpful’ and I have noticed that they are able to talk about ‘anchoring’ their ideas to the author’s purpose. It also has served as a way for students to know that the ‘treasure’ is the most important part and that they need to explore different ways of connecting to a text in order to have a justified personal response. From a numbers standpoint, when I look at ‘click through’ analytics or observe how many students are ‘in the board’ each lesson (and out of class time), this has been a quick indication that presenting learning visually is something that the students are keen to engage with.

Targeting asynchronous delivery

I ended up extending the whiteboard canvas in Canva to summarise the other key documents that are already loaded to the Learning Management System. Where information was new, I added a ‘NEW’ sticker and drew their attention to it in class and on the class stream (live feed) to ensure that students who had been away would not miss the notification. I also screenshot the board and reposted it to the stream to indicate ‘where’ on the map there might be updates to check out. The benefit of the visual map as a way to present learning is that the students can ‘explore’ all of the resources in one place and have a better understanding of how they fit together through the process of exploration (active learning) and they also don’t need a tab open for every document.

Addressing Challenges with Google Classroom

Google Classroom can be a frustrating conduit for learning..There is limited functionality as far as how resources can be presented to students. The list view has limited iconographic or colour-coding functionality and I am constantly guiding students how to find things even when there are clear titles because the headings alone are what distinguishes one resources from another. Students seem to waste so much time clicking in and out and around to find documents. By presenting hyperlinks to the key resources within the Canva whiteboard, I am able to streamline the ‘purpose’ of each doc with explainer notes. Similarly, students can ‘see’ what they are about to click on before they click into it.

A major benefit of visual learning is how complex information can be presented in a more memorable way. Finding a metaphor and using visual aid is a useful way to present multiple steps or share pieces of a bigger project. Using a whiteboard is also an engaging way for students to zoom in and review/pick a path and explore class materials as well as supporting information or explanatory notes without needing multiple tabs open to organise their exploration.

Visual learning and using visual aids can also make it easier for students to process and remember information. Additionally, the use of metaphor can also improve memory retention so that students can visually re-trace connections by remembering parts of an image. Further, presenting material visually and/or with metaphor is a more inclusive way to present information because it can so easily include iconographic supports.

Trials and Tweaks

If I were to use this particular canvas again, I might make it more linear rather than ‘scattered’ or I might potentially number sections or use more arrows to indicate flow and progressions. In this instance and as an initial experiment, this map was built alongside students and added to incrementally to build on synchronous and collaborative learning in class. As a tool, the students were already familiar with the boat/anchor metaphor so the board served them like a revision tool. If it were a stand-alone tool that I needed students to explore on their own, I might need to scaffold the pathways a bit more clearly.

Canva whiteboards are a fun way to present a lot of information in a visual way. An important note is that this visual learning/mapping tool is presented ‘as well as’ the list view within Google Classroom rather than ‘instead of’. It is also an optional way to explore materials and is not a ‘must’ for students who prefer more traditional delivery methodology.

Miro is another great whiteboard tool with a few more embed functions that Canva hasn’t got yet (although it needs a paid account). As a note, my Canva account is an education account and the hyperlinking of docs is a workaround to try to get some of the functionality of the Miro ‘embed PDF’ option that I like. (Just as an FYI). I have found that you can embed video and powerpoints/slideshows relatively easily within Canva too.

And that’s my picture.

What do you think? How might you use more visual learning tools or metaphors in the classroom?

Further reading:

Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning

Visual Thinking - podcast by Temple Grandin

Differetiation, does, in fact, work

Quick read on Mnemonics and why they work

Best Practice and Burnout

I have recently returned to the classroom after working as a consultant and advisor for the last three years. Working in the private sector and working for the Ministry of Education more recently has offered me some fantastic opportunities to refine my understanding of what ‘best practice’ looks like. The ‘ideal state’ of optimal curriculum linking, deliberate use of data, systematic planning, agentic learning experiences, literacy/numeracy rich task design, critical thinking and 21st Century ‘make the pie’ pedagogy is my goal and this has been my active lens for advising teachers with ways to be better practitioners. Of course the ideal state is the goal - but there is a big but… let me explain.

Smilingly teaching on the outside, but on the inside, teachers are overloaded and suffering from incentivitis.

Being in the classroom is a humbling reality check. No change is a quick change and there are no ‘quick fixes’ for embedded teacher, learner (and leader) habits.

On the ground and knowing the ideal state lends itself to a bit of a panicked scramble. Where are the systems? What is the pedagogy? Where is the agency? Why is this not aligned to the curriculum? Where is the literacy? Where is the digital fluency? Where is the culture of collaboration? (So many questions!) When you know what best practice looks like (in the classroom and beyond the classroom, in management systems, in school-wide systems, in leadership styles etc), it can feel like a veritable swamp. We come home exhausted trying to fix so many things. So this is where a reality check needs to come into play.

Because best practice can be a perfectionist pedagogist’s undoing.

For me (on a personal level), I can see so many things that need to change - yet I need to remember that all change needs time and consistency to be effective. Also, I am one human. Further, I am one human who also has a family life and a ‘parent hat’ to put on as well as ‘partner hat’ and a ‘friend hat’ etc. To dedicate ALL of my time to the pursuit of excellence in all areas is commendable - but realistically not possible. I have to admit my human fallibility.

The first step is to take stock of the things we can change. We can add some systems to our classrooms. We can schedule student interviews. We can target specific data with our planning. We can reflect on our lesson sequences and look for ways to tweak them to be better for next time. We can give our students more opportunities to be critical thinkers and agentic learners. We can give them more opportunities to create with technology. Most importantly, We CAN strive for best practice - but we need to do it incrementally.

One thing that I have found particularly useful is using padlet as a kanban for next steps. Breaking down my big picture ideas into smaller chunks is a sanity saver. I still have my ideal state in mind and I can add small tasks to my kanban that will allow me to make incremental steps towards the end goal. (Check out my previous blog post about ‘The Kaizen Classroom’).

An example: For scaffolding the skills the students need for making good learning decisions daily is: Create a visual map of the lesson, print as a poster, get button magnets for showing where we are up to, design reflection activities for decision-making, create opportunities for decision-making, design survey for student voice, track engagement using Schoolytics (a handy plugin you can use with Google Classroom), trial, reflect, tweak.

An example of my ‘making good decision’ classroom road map. It is a useful way to chunk a lesson into clear sections and students have a ‘pick a path’ opportunity to explore different activities to anchor or apply their learning.

The burnout phenomenon among teachers is very real indeed. Teachers have ‘incentivitis’ and are constantly shifting and adapting to meet the requirements of new incentives. PLD funding is limited, effective PLD is hard to find (I can help with this) and time to implement actionable steps post-PLD is rarer still. It is no wonder that New Zealand’s education system is in a state of crisis.

So what is the solution?

Best practice needn’t be a pie in the sky that is unachievable. The truth is that if you are making small steps towards ‘better’ practice then this is something that should be noticed and rewarded. The solution is that we need to maintain a best practice vision and keep stepping towards it.

• Keep a diary of ‘small steps’ that you can take in order to inch closer to the best practice model that you have in mind.

• Determine what best practice actually looks like for you - what is most important?

• Notice what key actions you have tried and keep a record of the steps

• Use a Kanban to track your progress (‘Doing’ cards can be shifted to the ‘Done’ pile)

• Share the load with others - collaboration is a great way to reduce your workload

• Share failures as well as successes - what not to do is sometimes just as useful to know as what to do OR you might be able to troubleshoot better strategies together

• Don’t give up on what best practice can be

• Connect with others with a similarly optimistic vision for education (There are so many naysayers and fixed mindset people who cloud the vision for change. Avoid them.)

If you know what best practice looks like and then look around and feel like it ‘too far a star’ then look for a ‘near star’ marker to head to first. If you feel overwhelmed, swamped and depressed about the status quo, you need to remember that striving for better is possible - but also that it will take time.

Assess where you are at. Make a mark. Point to your far star and start marching there one step at a time. Don’t give up.

• If you have a ‘far star’ in mind as a teacher or as a leader, let’s connect to formulate an achievable action plan together.

Hold please, caller. What real learning looks like.

Noisy classroom. Kids out of seats. Animated conversations. Kids drawing on whiteboards. Kids exploding out into the hall. So loud! Enough!

But wait.

Take a closer look: students are discussing measurement, others are tinkering with motors to prototype a powered hat design, someone is researching portable solar panels, someone else is designing in Tinkercad and there are drawings and diagrams and things being tweaked and thought about everywhere you look.

I always look forward to this bit. This is the bit when you see that learners have 'earned their stripes as learners’ and that they know how to learn. They are finding things out, they are tinkering, they are thinking, they are wondering out loud and they are problem-solving.

The launching pad for this was a ‘think tank’ unit exploring the history of Aotearoa’s taonga, early trade and enterprise, the history of New Zealand inventors and entrepreneurs, critical analysis of Shark Tank pitches and exploration of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Now it is the students’ turn to come up with something useful, something that services a need, something that targets a sustainable development goal, and something that they can pitch to (albeit pretend) ‘sharks’. They have two weeks to work through the empathising, defining, ideating, designing, prototyping and testing phases.

Design Thinking is a process that opens up so much potential for students. When explored thoroughly, the empathy stage opens up problems to solve that were there all along. The ‘goldilocks’ card sheds real light on problems (see my emptahy deck). We can walk in someone else’s shoes and really think and feel what they are thinking and feeling - and as a consequence, we can design new and improved solutions to actually make the world better.

Maybe it is this part that is the most rewarding - the idea that we can make the world better. The actual asking of ‘how can we make the world better?’ and the actual belief that ‘we can make the world better.’ But actually, this part IS so rewarding. I can stand back and watch, observe the noise and the ‘real and beautiful chaos of learning’ and see that they are all immersed in their learning. The noise is the good kind.

“It is such a loud class today,” said one student. “I know,” I replied. “Because look, everyone is into it.”

So, when at first glance it looks like ‘all noise and boisterousness’ and something that needs to be controlled, stopped or silenced - look closer. Hold please, caller. Don’t step in and stop it. Embrace it. It is what learning looks like.

The Kaizen Classroom - Teach, Tweak, Repeat.

One small tweak here, one small tweak there - imagine the difference that you might make over the course of a day, a week, a term… a year?

While designing some ‘stacking starter’ activities this year, I have been thinking about how the first five minutes of a class are the ‘golden moment’ to set the tone of the class, invite them into the learning and engage with the content. If you think about our students as users and apply some UX (user experience design), we need to be mindful that they have been tuned in to different teachers and different environments in a fairly relentless cycle before they get to us. So what can we do to make it welcoming, engaging, and exciting? I have been thinking about this a lot - and beyond the first five minutes and the great power of an effective starter - the answer can be found in Kaizen.

Kaizen is the Japanese art of continuous improvement. James Clear talks about a version of it through a different lens when he writes about habit stacking (stacking a new habit onto another once the previous one is ingrained) in Atomic Habits and I think that habit stacking AND constant tweaking to seek continuous improvement has enormous potential in the classroom.

This term my focus has been on the ‘first five’ of classroom culture. Embracing the ‘DO NOW’, I have been playing with this space as a place to explore literacy (word games), ignite problem-solving and critical thinking (puzzles or problems to figure out as they come in), retention strategies (list five key words from last lesson), Agency (choose from the choice board) and journaling opportunities. I have used it as a space for agency with ‘This or That’ frames and as a place to specifically target 21st Century Skills and learning dispositions that sit ‘beside’ current learning objectives. So what does Kaizen have to do with it?

In the ever-evolving landscape of education, finding effective ways to enhance teaching methods and empower students is a perpetual goal. And as a perpetual goal, we need to be agile and constantly shifting in order to meet it effectively. Kaizen - the Japanese term that translates to "continuous improvement," is a way to think about what we are doing as a process and not a product. It is a useful way to think about how we can constantly tweak the dynamics of our learning environments. Teach. Tweak. Repeat. It even has a fun ring to it.

At the heart, Kaizen is the belief that small, incremental changes can lead to significant improvements over time. Similar to habit stacking (This is adding a new habit to an existing habit - like listening to a podcast while driving to work since driving to work is an existing habit and listening to a podcast is the new desired habit we ‘stack’ onto it), tiny wins can result in large victories over time. In the context of education, this means continually seeking ways to refine the way we deliver, present, and reflect on the ‘glorious messiness’ of teaching and learning.

The Kaizen Classroom - Key Steps:

1. Embrace a Growth Mindset:

   • If you try something once and fail that does not mean that it will never work. A growth mindset helps us to think about what the students were carrying with them into the lesson, what we (we are not devoid of our own baggage) were carrying into the lesson, and realising that a single attempt is not a finite attempt nor is it the end product. As teachers, we need to have a growth mindset and model as well as encourage the belief that intelligence and abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work and, in this case, reflective iteration.

2. Continuous Self-Reflection:

   • I have a ‘plus-minus interesting’ reflection log that I have been keeping in my planning book. I jokingly refer to it as ‘Tragedy/Comedy’ sometimes (Have you seen that Will Ferrel film Stranger than Fiction? It is one of my favourite films). I regularly reflect on what worked and didn’t work and look for ways to shift and change my delivery. Was it too hard? Was it too easy? Were the instructions unclear? Was my technology choice fit for purpose? I am never afraid to ask the students what they need more of or less of and to really tune in to what they tell me. Regular reflection on teaching methods and outcomes allows us to figure out small things we might change when we try again. (Notice - we - not me). We can identify areas to refine and improve, and be open to growing - even if it still doesn’t work in round two.

3. Small, Gradual Changes:

   • It takes a long time to turn a large ship. If we think about how students have experienced school, how they have experienced the world and what their expectations are for what learning should ‘look like’ - we would be unwise to give them too much to chew on for fear they might choke. Having said that, they can eat larger and larger pieces gradually. In a year 10 class (over a term) we have gone from the students ‘doing nothing’ when coming in to jumping straight in, knowing what they are learning and where they are up to, following a weekly quest (a map I make for them each week) and working collaboratively to find out about questions as they come up. This is a big win - but it wouldn’t be there without nine weeks of incremental baby steps. Over these nine weeks I have gradually released their expectation of me as ‘sage on stage’ and taught them the skills they need to navigate ‘trickier’ and ‘unchartered’ learning experiences. If we avoid drastic overhauls and instead focus on small, manageable adjustments, we can make meaningful change happen. Incremental changes applied carefully can lead to lasting improvements.

4. Student-Centric Approach:

   • An exit ticket that requires a bit of bravery to administer is, ‘What do you want less of?’ Asking students how learning has been/is going for them is vital for successful iteration. Is this map working for you? Do you think these instructions could be clearer? Would you prefer to be quizzed at the beginning or end of the week? Students are the end users of our learning design and we can tailor our teaching strategies to meet the diverse needs and learning styles of all students - even if it is just one baby step at a time. Kaizen helps us to deliver tiny improvements for every student.

5. Data-Driven Decision-Making:

   • Iterations can also target success criteria. Recently, a student told me that he couldn’t prepare for the Current Affairs Quiz each week because he didn’t have time to read the news. A tiny tweak to my planning now includes ‘news time’ to read the headlines as a starter activity (that golden first five). To top it off, this tiny tweak has prompted me to think about how I can offer a ‘media smorgasbord’ to gently push students to consider different sources of news. I am looking forward to sharing Future Crunch with them (an optimist’s news feed) and slipping in some lateral research skills. My next ‘This or That’ for them may now be ‘read the headlines’ but with the choices of two different global news websites or obviously biased sources. We can utilise data (like a student underperforming in a current affairs quiz) to inform the next incremental tweak to our teaching practice. Tiny weeny eeny meeny adjustments every day can lead to improved outcomes over time. Just because we plan something one way doesn’t mean it can’t be tweaked in the process of delivery in order to be more responsive.

6. Culture of Collaboration:

   • For Kaizen to have the most Bang for Buck, we should all be talking about what we are trying, what we are tweaking and what we are failing at. I love sharing ideas in the classroom and love the stories of things that haven’t worked as much just as much as I love hearing about techniques that have worked. Teach, tweak, repeat - imagine if we all shared our wins and losses with each other and how much faster our strength as a collective might grow. Effective communication and a culture of collaboration amongst staff can amplify the impact of Kaizen in the classroom to become a genuine culture of learning and innovation beyond single cell iterations.

Most measuring sticks are divided by little steps. We can learn from them too. Inch by inch…

Here are some ways that Kaizen can be used in teaching:

1. Lesson Planning: We can add tiny updates to incorporate new ideas, technologies, and teaching methods. What if we tried ‘one new thing’ each week?

2. Feedback Loops: How are we getting student voice regularly? We might tweak how we get feedback so that we can be more responsive to students’ experiences.

3. Professional Development: Kaizen also applies to professional development. Though perhaps not daily, - monthly, termly or annual reviews of practice can promote a culture of continuous improvement. Need someone? (Hello! Pick me!)

4. Classroom Environment: Make a tweak to the classroom environment or staff room each week. It could be a new quote for the wall, a new display or a new way of sharing learning outcomes. Small wins add up.

5. Target the first five: Like my examples above, maybe the first five minutes is a worthy space to focus your energy.

I have touched on the benefits of a Kaizen Classroom - and in a nutshell - the Kaizen Classroom is the belief that small wins can lead to big victories over time. Whether it is improved engagement, streamlined ‘openers’, less time wasted in transitions, more engagement and buy-in with assessments or better relationships - Kaizen is being responsive, adaptive and reflective in the pursuit of doing things better.

The journey of education is just as important as the destination. If it doesn’t work the first time, tweak it. Try again. Tweak it. Try again. Twerk it. Work it. Repeat. (Deliberate typo for fun). If we apply Kaizen principles to teaching, we are never settling for ‘this is how it is because it has always been like this’. No. We can do better. We can not only transform our classrooms one baby step at a time but we can also shape a brighter, bolder, braver future. What little thing might you do differently?

Top Tip - Secret teacher affirmation stash ideas

Sometimes you have days where the kids are scratchy, everyone is tired, no one wants to go to school/work, the spoon drawer is low, the plan didn’t work, your coffee got cold before you got around to drinking it and you forgot your lunch. It’s never one thing…

On those days, it’s handy to have a pick-me-up in your back pocket.

For me it is a bookmark.

Secretly and stealthily hiding in my book is a ‘Stay Weird’ affirmation postcard. I think I got it in a package when I ordered a custom vintage plate with a crow on it for my wall once. It is a picture of a girl with a face hugger on her face. It makes me laugh and reminds me to be myself. I don’t do what I do to fit in. I’m not afraid to stand out. I’m not afraid to stand up.

There are loads of people out there who will have the same humour as you do. And whatever it is, embrace it.

Keep doing what you do. Every drop in the bucket is still a drop in the bucket.

Some other fun places to hide your ‘keep your chin up’ affirmations are:

1. Your login password

2. Your screensaver

3. Your email signature (depending on where you work and what it is)

4. The dashboard of your car

5. Your desk

6. Your pen

7. Your pencil

8. The bathroom

9. The mirror

10. Your phone wallpaper

Stay weird.

Image courtesy of Red Bubble. @Luvseven

‘Only sunshine and love today’ - Collaboration with One Million Happy Thoughts - Katrina Ward - NZ Artist series.