Skip to main content

2016



This year I am venturing into unchartered territory on my journey as an educator. I am team teaching in an open environment with 55 students ranging from year 6 - 8.
I am participating in an eFellowship where I am looking at innovative ways to engage and teach students.
All of this is very new and as such I thought it would be interesting to share my reflections with an authentic audience in the hope that by doing so it will provide me the forum to be honest with myself so that I can improve my practice.
If anybody should come across my blog, please feel free to provide some constructive feedback/feedforward, what ever you prefer to refer to it as.


Week 1:
  • What has gone well -
    • team teaching going very well
    • Share similar philosophies - growing people, understand and value the importance of community, empowering students
    • communicate well, no ego’s and willing to learn off each other and recognise each other's strengths
  • What can go better -
    • team planning and progress recording sheets could be focussed on a little more - we have provided them but I’m not sure how well we are monitoring them. I think if they are to be successful we need to make sure the students understand what they are, what they are for and why we are using them

  • The focus has been on:
    • Community: What is it? What does it look like? How does it function? What does our community look like?
    • All students shared their ideas of what they think community in in a video journal. We will use that and others in the future to track students understanding of community and how it develops over the course of the year.
    • It has been interesting to see what students understanding  of community has been and to realise their understanding of their own community is limited.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Learning is messy

I find myself somewhat frustrated with the environment that we are expected to work in. Being a data driven industry I feel torn between being an innovative, future focused educator that focuses on individualised learning experiences for my students and on the other hand having the pressure of National Standards reporting hovering over my shoulder. Last year I achieved some wonderful results with my students. I managed to provide opportunities for students to taste success; students who had spent most of their school years feeling inadequate and incapable of achieving well in standardised tests. Many of my students still failed to score well in standardised tests. However, they managed to succeed in areas that are hard to measure. I saw many students self-esteem improve because they managed to complete a project for the first time on a topic of their choice and one which they were engaged with. They began to see themselves as experts in a niche area. They began to recognise themselv...
2 comments
Read more

How is your school addressing the needs and aspirations of its community?

How is your school addressing the needs and aspirations of its community? In the last few years I have been fortunate enough to have been the recipient of several research grants. As part of this I have read many education and social research articles both international and national. This has allowed me to be aware of, and follow many international and national trends in education. It has also meant that I have been exposed to many different perspectives of what education could look like as we attempt to navigate the uncertainty that surrounds the future needs of our ākonga.  There are many organisations that have discussed and provided evidence to help us recognise the need for change and the tools to implement them. Organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) provide The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study, which governments use to help them measure the effectiveness of their education systems for preparing stu...
Post a Comment
Read more

Creating a shared understanding of the issues impacting our societies, our community and our ākonga and how we address them as a school

  Creating a shared understanding of the issues impacting our societies, our community and our ākonga and how we address them as a school Society, culture and professional environments are all facing issues that are often pervasive and impact us in ways we sometimes find difficult to fully understand. As an educator, I am aware that we all influence and affect one another, either positively or negatively. When we can create a shared understanding of an issue, more often than not, we can achieve outcomes that have a positive impact. However, if we fail to achieve a shared understanding of an issue, then our outcomes have the potential to have a negative impact. It is well documented that societies around the world are changing at a rapid rate and for many of us, it is a struggle to keep up with what is current. This is particularly true when it comes to education. One of the biggest issues we currently face, and one I have experienced in more than one school is the difficulty of cr...
Post a Comment
Read more