There are far too many interesting things that we saw in our visit to detail them all here, so I'll just pick out a few things that especially jumped out at me as noteworthy.
First off, a big thanks to Cindy Walsh, the Principal of TPS, for taking an hour out of her busy schedule to be our tour guide. We really appreciate it. She has been marvelous with her friendliness to us and openness to include us.
This "field trip" to the school came about as a result of my looking into how home educated children might trial school. As it turned out, it is not possible to trial school in the sense I initially thought, but Cindy has been open to the possibility of Mulan and Miya joining in with classes at the school in some (as yet undecided) part-time sense. So, this visit was an initial get-to-know-each-other meeting, to see if, and in what way, it might work.
I already knew the school area quite well, as I attended TPS between 1981 and 1986 (Nainai also attended there back in her day), but things have obviously changed a bit since then.
In recent years, our family has also had a few experiences inside younger children's schools, including:
- In 2009, we had a similar visit to a Montessori kindergarten in China.
- In 2010, as part of Mama's professional academic research she visited and observed several schools around Auckland, with a focus on documenting and assessing their Chinese language teaching materials to determine their needs for future textbook design.
- Last year, Mulan joined Bayswater Primary School's netball team. Weekly practices were at the school with two of the teachers.
- For the past two years, the girls have had weekly music lessons in the classrooms at Belmont Intermediate School (through Belmont Music Centre).
- For the past two years, we have lived next door to Takapuna Normal Intermediate School.
So, while we mostly knew what to expect, it was very useful to see classes in action at our local state primary school.
On to my thoughts about the visit.
1. The classrooms
The biggest thing about TPS that stood out for me was how the physical architecture of the place paralleled and complimented the learning structures TPS appeared to be emphasising. That is, both the physical architecture and the learning environment emphasised a plurality of smaller parts rather than a singular, regular, clearly-defined hierarchical structure. I'll try to explain.
As we all know, for the most part, schools have rectangular classrooms. They are usually longer than they are wide, and have a board at one end where the teaching is mostly based at. The schools listed above that I have seen lately all still follow this rule.
Again, as we all know, back a few generations ago, and sometimes still in my day as a pupil, in these rectangular rooms the desks, one for each student, would all face the front blackboard in rows. The teacher would then mini-lecture from the front. This created a regular, structural authority to the room, as the teacher was based at the front and there were no hidden corners.
When I was at TPS in the 1980s, teachers were often experimenting with different desk arrangements in these rectangular rooms, with the desks not always directly facing the front blackboard. Desks might be in small groups facing together, or in a U-shape, or other various creative combinations. At the time TPS was also trying out having large doors between classrooms, which could be opened to provided larger spaces for more than one class to work together.
When I did my ESOL teaching training (CertTESOL) in the early 2000s, it was suggested to us that we could "break the rules" even more, turning the class around when teaching so as not to be facing the board at all. Teach from the back or the side of the room if we want, and get away from the authority-based structure of board teaching. (Although interestingly, my TESOL trainers instructed us to always stand while teaching, in direct contrast to my university tutoring trainers who instructed us to always sit while teaching.)
But all of this was still within the confines of a basically rectangular classroom.
We saw on Tuesday that TPS is intentionally breaking this rectangular-classroom rule. In recent years, they have redesigned classrooms to be extremely irregular in shape, with various-sized alcoves and partitions zigging and zagging in and out to create separate, more private learning zones, while the classrooms themselves are often overall big enough for a few classes/teachers. Their latest room was redone last year (we saw the renovations at the time when we frequently drove/rode past the school). In this sort of irregular-shaped classroom, there is no "front" that I could identify for a single authority to occupy (nor did I notice any panopticon-style central viewing area that could authoritatively overlook every part of the classroom.)
With this sort of classroom structure, learning can potentially happen (a little) more privately. There can be zones of relative privacy where individuals or small groups can work (a little more) away from others.
Furthermore, within these irregular-shaped classrooms, TPS has done away with the one-desk-per-student approach. Instead, the various learning zones have a wide variety of desk/chair styles and combinations, where the students are free to choose whatever suits their needs at the time. There are high desks to stand at or to sit at with bar-stool style seats, as well as standard height desks/chairs, low desks/chairs, comfy seats, and floor spaces to work on the ground at.
All these zones are strewn around the classroom in a fairly natural, slightly irregular looking way. In fact, if I had to describe it, I would say that TPS's latest modern classroom looks quite similar to a homeschooler's indoor learning environment (that is, if homeschoolers were able to get $10,000 a year per child from the government instead of $600 per year).
Learning in these sorts of classrooms is thus much more small-group based, and apparently rarely entire-class based. A few to several different activities may be happening simultaneously, in different areas of the classroom. What we observed is that the teacher then calls various individuals or small groups to the "workshop" (at the teacher's chair), where the students show and discuss what they have been doing and suggestions/corrections are made by the teacher. We were informed that the senior students are even able to choose their individual classroom learning timetable, so that those who are morning-people can get their brainwork done early and those who are night owls can wait until later.
It is very interesting to see that to make this pluralistic learning environment work TPS has implemented some of what Sal Khan was talking about here, at least in the sense of on-demand learning (I have no idea if TPS is mastery-based). Cindy mentioned that they work with Reading Eggs and Mathletics.
I only ever saw teachers addressing their entire class twice in our visit there. Once was at the end of a lesson before morning tea, when the entire class was called to the "workshop" for a couple of minutes to get a couple of children to present their ideas to the rest of the class. The other time was to quiet the class down when they were getting too noisy.
2. The lessons
After our hour-long tour with Cindy through the classrooms and around the facilities, there was about 20 minutes of class time left before the 30-minute morning tea break. Cindy suggested that we spend the time in any of the classrooms that we choose, then join the other kids out in the playground for the break.
Since no one else was making a decision, I suggested that maybe the Mulan-aged classrooms would be less suitable, as they all appeared to be midway through longer projects (and often using tablets/notebooks for their written work). Miya quietly said that she would like to join a maths lesson we had seen at her age level that looked easy and nonthreatening, so we headed to that.
Unfortunately, when we got there they had finished maths and were instead completing a writing lesson that the teacher said they had started the day before. But the teacher was very nice, and welcomed us in to join them.
As we were heading in, the teacher asked if Miya had done compound sentences. I wasn't quite sure how to respond, as I didn't think that 5- or 6-year-olds would need to know that sort of jargon just yet, so I stammered out a surprised, "not explicitly."
But it turned out that it was more that they were writing a few to several sentences about something that they had done recently, while trying to include words like "so" or "because" in them as much as possible. A couple of children (I think the best ones in the class) read aloud their stories to us. Both children had amazingly beautiful handwriting (maybe even better than mine!), and their stories were extremely well composed. We were very impressed. (Since I am not sure how long it took them to do it, or how much adult help they had, it is hard to make any real comparisons.)
We set Miya up with paper and pencil, and she made a small start with her story, agreeing with me that it would be good to write about our visit to the Botanic Gardens on Sunday. (I was a little bit more leading than I normally would be, given our time constraints.)
When she got stuck on the spelling of "Sunday", I asked one of our deskmates if they had classroom dictionaries (I've just recently given Miya her own junior dictionary, and taught her the basics of finding words; she now uses it sometimes with her own independent writings at home). Our deskmate didn't know what a dictionary was, but the teacher gave us a word list on a card, which she said the children are expected to know by the end of the year, and showed us a class dictionary. I asked Miya if she knew all the words on the card (there might have been about 30-50 of them, with words like "went" and "then") and she said she did.
From what I could see, the teacher's approach to teaching spelling was to get the children to try to write the words out on their own, by sounding them out. They clearly didn't use dictionaries. After they had finished, the teacher would then write the correct spelling in pen above any incorrect words.
I am not sure which method is better, but I will probably continue to spell out words to Miya when she asks me, rather than let her to write out wrong words. I wonder if seeing wrong words on paper might reinforce wrong spelling habits. Also, as I wrote here, Miya's word learning style tends to be not as phonics-based as Mulan's was, and I am happy to follow Miya's own learning style.
During the remaining few minutes before morning tea, Miya had time to write her first sentence, "On Sunday we went to the Botanic Gardens.", asking me also how to spell "Botanic" and "Gardens", which I told her, and correctly spelling the rest. We have brought Miya's story home with us, and we will probably finish it soon. Clearly, written compositions is something that we could work on a little more with both children. This visit has inspired us to do a bit more.
At the end of our time at TPS, we exited via the school office, where on the wall they had several sets of maths exercises, at varying levels of difficulties, presumably for children to take away to do. Mama grabbed about half a dozen of the most challenging ones, which looked appropriate for Miya (they were all much too easy for Mulan). Miya did two of them yesterday (with a little bit of advice from me):
3. Our interactions with Cindy
As I say, Cindy was extremely friendly and personable. She was very likable, and I felt we got on well with her. She seemed to have good relations with everyone at the school, and clearly knew quite a few of the students by name, talking with them in a very interested and encouraging way about what they were doing. It all came across as very genuine and natural, and I liked her teaching/interaction style with the children. Interestingly, these students all called Cindy by her given name.
Clearly, though, Cindy gave us the appearance of her seeing our visit as mostly for advertising the school, rather than as a genuine discussion between educators about educational approaches. Two incidents especially spring to mind:
Firstly, while walking around the grounds, Cindy told us about how they have a Mandarin teacher who has been sent from China (through the Confucius Institute). I mentioned that one of Mama's professional academic duties in China was to train these teachers on how to teach Mandarin in schools, and that some of her ex-students had similarly come to New Zealand to teach in schools like TPS. Mama then added that it was a worldwide thing, and they went all over the world.
I had hoped that mentioning this might turn the conversation to comparisons between New Zealand and China with regards to teaching and teacher training. I had hoped to be a quiet listener to an interesting conversation between two senior, experienced, professional educators.
Unfortunately, Cindy ignored this, closing off that topic with a decisive remark that their Mandarin teacher was excellent, and then moving on to the next point on the tour. (There was not even any small-talk acknowledgement or interest in Mama's years of experience as a trainer of these teachers who Cindy finds excellent.)
Secondly, after observing that in the classrooms there were always several small groups working independently on different activities, Mama mentioned how it must be challenging for the teachers to have many different small-group activities going simultaneously. Cindy's response was that that is what they are trained to do and it is part of their expertise, before once again moving on to the next point on the tour.
Well, of course Mama has 20 years of classroom experience, teaching a subject that typically has students at unequal levels and with unequal needs. I'm sure Mama knows very well about this sort of thing, and I guess she was aiming to turn the conversation to the specifics of the various ways this might be accomplished.
All this left me thinking that, as nice and as decent a person as Cindy undoubtedly is, there nonetheless seemed to be (consciously or unconsciously) something of a professional arrogance in her manner.
To be clear, of course I am not questioning Cindy's or the TPS teachers' expertise in teaching. I was extremely impressed by what I saw of the teachers and in the classrooms, and I like the way I saw them doing things at TPS.
But what was slightly disconcerting was that there seemed to be an assumption by Cindy that the content of this teaching expertise need not be communicated or explained to us. That it was sufficient merely to assert excellence or expertise as explanation enough in conversation.
From our perspective, clearly it wasn't sufficient, and so it left us a little dissatisfied with the overall feel of the visit.
Obviously, though, this slightly odd feel of professional arrogance would not stop us from being interested in Mulan and Miya working in with TPS to some extent and in a part-time way. We feel that there is definitely a lot of potential, if managed well. We ended the visit with Cindy suggesting that we recontact in the new year to see about starting at that time.
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