Blogpost #10 - Restate your inquiry question...

 Restate your inquiry question and your theory of action/chain of events

Inquiry Question: 

Can we make accelerated shifts in literacy through teaching Identity & Cultural Competencies?

Chain of events:

1. Planned our project (The PASHISKA WAY - A cultural experience to remember)
2. Unpack what learning will take place (Boys tasks: Write a proposal to Mr Herlihy explaining the project and asking for financial support, create invitations for whanau and Senior Syndicate teachers, create a menu featuring cultural dishes from each members ethnic background and write out the recipe/identify ingredients, create mash-up performance to perform on the day
3. Meet 3-4 times a week with the boys to follow-up on progress of the project
4. Launch/Host project in Week 9 of Term 3

Unfortunately, due to covid-19 and the nationwide lockdown, The PASHISHKA way project was put on hold.

Describe how you will collect information about the implementation of your changed practices/intervention

• When meeting with the boys, plan what the following week would look like. Often I would make reflections and anecdotal notes in my planning that specified what we worked on and what our next steps were
• Student Voice - a powerful tool that kept the 'fire' or 'mana' of this project going. The boys were so engaged, they would remind me of meeting times. There was one day the boys really wanted to go to the library to find a Pacific recipes book to help them with decide on which dish was the easiest to make. This came up during maths learning and I didn't want to 'downplay' or 'ruin the moment'. So I took the class to the library (luckily, it was free) and continued with our learning in there while the boys tracked down their recipe book.
• Blogging & Teacher reflections

Identify informal and formal ways you are monitoring the effects of your changed practices/intervention on learner outcomes. 

Explain the reflections and tweaks you are making along the way

The biggest struggle for me right now is lockdown and getting hold of my PASHISKA boys. For the last couple of weeks of online learning, none of my target students have attended the calls. I have sent parents text messages and composed emails to my students, but still no response.

I am trying to stay positive, in hopes that I will get hold of the boys soon so we can plan a google meet call to check in on everyone and talanoa about a plan B for our project. Everything was slowly falling into place pre-lockdown. 

I have been in talanoa with Poto Faalili and Dorothy Apelu about their inquiries and the progress of it all. It seems we are all in a similar waka with our intervention coming to a stand still. We have  discussing ways on how we could try keep the 'engagement' and 'momemtum' going from our students.

One things for sure, we are not giving up! We are trying to reach out to our tamariki!