This year as part of the Appraisal process at our school, we have been using Interlead Appraisal System. As teachers we are required to self review our Teaching Practice and then our Team Leader appraises us within the same time deadline. We have completed this appraisal once in March and once in September - below are aspects of my reports that I think highlight key aspects of the reports. March: This is where I self assessed myself against the Registered teacher criteria and Tataiako in March
The following areas were areas that I felt I needed to put specific work into.
- Using curriculum knowledge in ways that honour students with different languages and from different backgrounds
- Using student achievement data as a basis for reflecting on and making modifications to how curriculum is covered and students are engaged.
- Students knowing the criteria for both summative and formative assessments.
- Blending Maori culture into planning and teaching programmes.
Based on feedback from my students and leaders I believe that I have had success with the last three of these areas that I chose to work on. The first areas is one that I am continually working on and adapting my programme to help honour these students.
September:
The September appraisal was slightly different as it made comparisons between both appraisals. I have uploaded my data from the second appraisal here also. These first two are judging positive behaviour management (this was cut off) and the rest have titles that explain the picture.
I am please with how these appraisals have come out and believe that they do a good job of representing my growth in my journey towards gaining full registration.
I am sure that we all know the song 'My Favourite Things' from The Sound of Music. If you are unfamiliar with it it goes like this...
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things
Cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudels
Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite things.
Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes
Silver white winters that melt into springs
These are a few of my favorite things
When the dog bites, when the bee stings
When I'm feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don't feel so bad.
I was walking along the beach in the holidays looking out over the sea and marvelling at how lucky I am to be working in a job where I am able to take holidays in order to rejuvenate and regain my spark back for the following term when I realised that as much as I love the beach and the holidays I only have one more term left with my class before they move onto intermediate and that they truly are my favourite things. These children are the reason that I became a teacher and they bring joy, laughter and brightness into my life everyday. I decided to write my own lyrics to favourite things...
Bright eager eyes and a passion for learning
Telling their stories and playing with yearning
Watching young children frolic and swing
These are a few of my favorite things
Duty with kiddies holding my hand
Listening to my students play in the band
Helping my students to grow their own wings
These are a few of my favorite things.
Students in leotards doing forward rolls
Young students singing with all of their souls
Those 'aha' moments that make kids go 'ping'
These are a few of my favorite things
When reports are due, when markings not done,
When I'm feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don't feel quite so bad.
Recently I was talking to a teacher who is trained in high school physical education. She noted that the amount of work that we have to do as primary teachers is phenomenal compared to what she had to do at her old school and queried how we manage to get through it all. At the time I just shrugged my shoulders and was not sure how to answer, but when reflecting back on this conversation I realised that I do it because I love the children I work with and I know in the bottom of my heart that if I did anything less than the best I could for them then I would not be worthy of being their teacher. At the moment that workload is growing even more - we have normal school life, summative assessments needing to be done, reports that are due in and camp that we are needing to prepare for - however students still deserve to see the best of us every single day and not have teachers who are worn out, stressed or tired. I know that I can be talking to other teachers in the morning and be feeling stressed out about what I have not yet done as the to do list in teaching is never ending, however the second I see my students those feelings of stress dissolve and smiles and laughter fill their place. Part of what makes working with children so special and so rewarding is finding out what makes them tick and what helps them learn. This year I have a number of Maori/Pasifika students and so this has influenced the way that my classroom has been run, from our greetings, to commands, to the way that the students are able to work in groups and support each other. I feel blessed to be working in a job where each day the relationships that I have with my students and their families makes a difference - whether this is due to a child achieving something special and their parent knowing, helping a young child who is hurt on the playground or looks as though they need a smile, encouraging a student who has lost all motivation or cheering a student on as they achieve a goal that they have been persevering with.
With term four comes reports, and with reports comes up to date summative assessments.
As a result, summative assessments have already begun being carried out in my classroom - so far students have all sat an IKAN test and some students have completed running records. The great thing about summative assessment is it shows visible growth that students have made as they have sat the same standardised test earlier on this year. It also shows me as a teacher where I need to place more focus and which students continue to/or are starting to need specific help or extension and as a result I am able to make changes to my programme. I was especially pleased with the IKAN results of my students as it demonstrates that our math warm ups and number knowledge revision games have been effective in helping children to grow and maintain their number recall. The running record results of the students who have sat it so far have all been positive as all students have moved up a reading level and the students have all made progress in their comprehension also. The moment that inspired me the most with my running record data however was when a student took the ability to transfer her summative assessment and make it into a formative assessment for herself - she said to me - I know that I need to work on inferencing now - I am going to make that part of my self directed learning programme for the rest of the term.
However, the one thing that frustrates me is about summative assessment is that all students are required to sit the same/similar tests - and this is where assessment for learning becomes a real positive - this is no longer the case with assessment for learning.
Each child is provided with feedback and feed forward based on where they are at and the assessment becomes real for them - it becomes a tool that they can utulise - whether in the form of feedback and feedforward from me as a teacher or whether via self/peer assessment and feedback/feedforward.
When I came back on Monday of term 4 I was unsure how much of the work around success criteria influencing assessment for learning that my students would retain as Term 3 had left them all very tired and they had just had two weeks break. However, within the first block of learning time I overheard a number of students referring back to their success criteria both individually and to help others achieve their WALTs. This was a real positive for me as it showed that the work that my students had been doing on having clarity about their learning was transferring through all curriculum areas for all students - making assessment something that they then began to see as something that helped them learn rather than something that was there to judge what they had learnt.
Recently as part of my professional readings I have been reading the book "I've got something to say" by Gail Loane. Below are things that I have read and that have captivated my interest and which I will both continue to do and also try to include into my practice.
We demonstrate how readers and writers think and behave - even when we are not consciously modelling it.
Every student has something to say -they might not always realise it though so it is our job to believe it and have our students believe it also. We need to include a variety of ways of doing this - it is important to provide time for reading, talking, listening, non verbal communication and writing daily - all of these aspects form literacy and communication not just one of them.
Lev Vygotsky (1978) describes language as a socially mediated process - where interactions with others play an important role in language development. When we transfer this to our classrooms it is clear that collaboration between students can help provide a way forward - indeed research demonstrates that when students respond to the work of others and seek feedback on their own work they show more definitive progress. Effective ways of applying this within senior classrooms include things such as partner conferencing, peer response, whole class sharing. These ways of working together are effective as they allow immediate feedback, the opportunity to make amends whilst writing, a wider range of opinions not just the teachers, a greater awareness of what works, a less threatening small group audience, chance to take risks and not just try and please the teacher - an opportunity for everyone's voice to be heard.
In order to teach writing effectively we need to ensure that we start with the whole and its meaning, draw out the teaching point for exploration and then return it to the whole. When we are deconstructing texts over a number of days it is important to acknowledge the context of the whole text - yes we may need to put a magnifying glass on a particular aspect of it but we then need to zoom back out for children to truly appreciate the effect of that aspect.
The last month has been a time of exploration, trying new things and going back to my roots all at once. It is an interesting and intriguing place to be - one that I am glad that I have been in also. The title of this post - that to the world you may be just one person, but to one person you may be the world has hit home in all aspects of my professional life over the past month.
Over the weekend, two of my mentors sent links to me that seem to have mixed together more than I thought that they would - one of these people works with me and is on a course and so directed me towards a strengths quiz that she is doing as part of this, the other used to be my tutor teacher and sent me an reading that he thought would be relevant based on previous discussions that we have had in the past and continue to have via email. The reading is by Kate Mason and is titled 'How does personality affect teaching and learning: Judging or perceiving?'. The strengths quiz is run through the University of Pennsylvania and is titled the VIA Survey of Character Strengths. Both of these things have helped me to step back and see who I am and how this reflects in my classroom, rather than allowing me to remain caught up in the day to day running of a classroom filled with energetic, hormone filled 11 year olds.
My strengths as per the character quiz came out as follows:
I am lucky enough to have a range of wonderful mentors that I look up to within my workplace. The first is my tutor teacher - she is always there to ask questions to and has a lot of faith in our ability to help our students achieve success even when things seem hard.
The second person who continually helps to shape and inspire me both personally and professionally is a colleague from another team within the school. She is someone who uplifts me and inspires me with her practice and her relationships with her students and other colleagues. I was looking up mentoring this morning and came across the following two quotes that I think summarise her mentoring style quite succinctly.
These are:
"A lot of people have gone further than they thought they could, because someone else thought that they could."
"The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches but to reveal to them their own."
The third person who I look up to as a mentor and guide was my tutor teacher but no longer works at this school. He asks questions that inspire me to grow, questions that he does not always know the answers to, but questions that he knows will hook me and help me drive my own inquiry. The following quotes sprung out at me about this person when I was searching mentoring this morning were:
"Always surround yourself with people who are better than you."
"We all need someone who inspires us to do better than we know how."
During the past week I found myself reaching into things that these three people have taught me when facing a difficult situation with a student. The character survey that I completed above was evident throughout this interaction. This student is one of the most loving children that I know but she has faced difficulties that are emotionally beyond her years in her childhood. On Thursday she left my class without warning and in a huge mood, she proceeded to tell other students many negative things about me and my practice. However, thanks to the leadership that I have experienced and my background knowledge of this student I understood where she was coming from and how I could help her. She calmed down over the next couple of hours and came back to class just before the bell. I asked her to stay behind after the bell and had a chat with her, in which she emphasised that she just needed someone who could listen and care and did not feel that the other students were doing that for her. I reminded her that I am always there for her, and we discussed the weekend excursions that we had been on previously to support this. She went home a much happier child. I did not see her until the following afternoon as I was away at a school gymnastics competition all day, however when I returned to school the following afternoon she came running up to me and told me how much she had missed me that day before proceeding to tell me all about her day. At that moment I realised that without knowing it, I had applied mentoring techniques that I had learnt from those who inspire me to help this girl see the love this world had for her and to make her worth felt.
The only way to sum up the past month is in fact - to the world you may just be one person, but to one person you may be the world. As teachers we never know who we are influencing and where our influence starts and stops and so it is crucial that we do indeed spend time with those who lift us up so that we can continue to be those people to others also.
We have just completed our second video observation feedback session based on Michael Absolum's Clarity in the Classroom text. Our first one was a term ago and we received feedback based on a rubric then and have just had to redo this now. This second rubric highlights the growth that I have made in regards to student and teacher understanding of what they are learning, how and why they are going to learn it and how they will know if they are successful.
As a school we have been lucky enough to have a local artist - Nicola Bennet - come to work with us during staff meetings and provide us with professional development around Art in the classroom. As a PRT I have found her wealth of knowledge and experience extremely helpful and in my own way am playing around with some of the ideas that she suggested.
Attached below are the two powerpoint slides that she has shared with us in order to inspire us. During each of these session we were able to experiment with and explore different aspects of her presentations.
At the moment in class we are doing an art portfolio unit where the children are being encouraged to explore a range of different types of art styles. The pieces that we are working on include sketching with charcoal, watercolour sketching, collage, paint, dye and pastel. The children are loving exploring their creativity through this unit and it is a wonderful opportunity to hidden talents emerging from a range of students.
One of the things that Nicola talked about was the way that Art is one of the things that people decide at a very young age that they either can, or cannot, do. I find it quite special that in my classroom a culture has developed where students are so encouraging of each other and of themselves - one wee young boy came up to me today telling me "Miss M - isn't my art great. I am so proud of it and I did my best - it doesn't look exactly like J's one - but I don't mind because it looks how I want it to look."
Another student came up to me whilst he was on independent writing today to discuss his work - he was thrilled with the creativity that he was involved in and shared with me how he was transferring his learning about gesture drawing in sketching into his writing. It was an exciting moment for both of us. My hope is that my students continue to feel this way about their creativity in art and across the curriculum for many years to come.
As a school we have been focussed on ensuring that our learning intentions and success criteria are developed alongside our students in a way that enables the students to both develop ownership and achieve success. We have been working through the book 'Clarity in the Classroom' by Michael Absolum. I have really enjoyed seeing the link between university studies and working within the classroom as this is the first book that we have used at university that has linked directly into what we have been doing in the school setting.
Last term we were videoed and after that we worked alongside a mentor from the senior management team to develop ways in which we could be more successful in helping learning intentions and success criteria become more commonplace and effective within our everyday teaching. For me, this is where all of my work with POGIL originated.
Last week in staff meeting we were shown this clip by John Hattie about learning intentions and success criteria and we discussed the importance of having these in very small breakable chunks for them to be most effective for students. Below are the notes that I took during this staff meeting and presentation. Some of this was just simply a reminder however aspects of it gave me something new to think about and consider.
Learning Intentions are about what we are going to learn not
what we are going to do. Best way to
show success criteria is to model what a successful one would look like.
If you have a clear understanding of what success looks like
you are able to get rid of what matters and teach just that. If you don’t know what you want the kids to
achieve in bite sized chunks, then it is impossible for the kids to know what
they need to achieve.
If we want to develop life long learning then we should not
be the ones who are telling them they are successful – they need to be able to
self regulate it against success criteria.
Success criteria should not just be performance related –
needs to be mastery focused also – and teachers need to show the students what
mastery looks like.
Need to have a deep understanding of where each child is to
understand what success would look like for each kid – is it exactly the same
for each child – and when it is not, how can we make it so that it is something
that every child can achieve.
I have attached the link below so that you are able to watch it - I personally found the first half of it most effective.
I have recently visited a school who have taken a lot of inspiration from the TED Talk by Ken Robinson titled: How to escape education's death valley. Watching it gave me a lot to think about - both in terms of my practice, the practices occurring within my current school and the practices that are occurring nationwide. Below are notes that I took from this speech and that will influence the way that I continue to teach.
Human beings are naturally
different and diverse:
The problem with education arises when education is being
based on conformity and focuses on acknowledging children’s achievements
against a narrow curriculum -STEM. For
the curriculum to provide opportunities for children to flourish it needs equal
weighting also applied to the arts, humanities and physical education.Research has proven that children prosper
when they are provided with a wide curriculum that recognises all their
talents.
Curiosity
If a parent or educator can light the spark of curiosity children
will learn naturally.Curiosity is the
engine of achievement.Teaching aligns
with this as teaching is a creative profession – within each day an effective
teacher may ake on the roles of mentor, stimulator, thought provoker, and someone
who engages others.When this is true it
is important that educators continue their own learning and developing their
own curiosity.
Put at its most simple the role of a teacher is to
facilitate learning – not to facilitate tests.There is a need to move away from standardized testing – it is still
important and needs a place however it should not be dominant but rather
diagnostic.
Human life is inherently
creative
Each day every one of us is creating our lives and with each
decision we make we continue to create them.Our role as teachers is to awaken and develop powers of creativity
within our students.At its most
effective, learning is developed though curiosity, and the individuality
creativity that stands alongside curiosity.
Education is about people and seeds of possibility lie
beneath the surface of each child waiting for the conditions to be right – and
if the conditions are right individual success is inevitable.Within education these conditions are
possibility, positive relationships, high expectations, a range of opportunities,
and the discretion to be creative and innovative.Leadership and teaching in education should
not be command and control but rather climate control – and creating a climate
of possibility – when this occurs people will rise to and exceed expectations.
Benjamin Franklin once famously said that “All
mankind is divided into three classes: those who are immovable, those who are
movable and those who move.”
My mission for myself:Be someone who makes things happen.
Halfway through the year the students take a moment to reflect on their time in Room 16 - why they like being part of the class and what their favourite part of the year has been.
I love the holidays for two reasons. One - they are a time of rest and relaxation after a crazy term and two - you end them feeling like you are on top of everything and ready to take on the world. And what a feeling it is!!
Every teacher - and every student - could tell you about the importance of teachers being energetic and lively and how this impacts student teaching, however I can certainly say that in the last few days of an 11 week term those words are not adjectives that I would have chosen to describe myself.
Having spent the past two days in school I feel refreshed, renewed and filled with enthusiasm about the coming term. I have changed around my planning and have been inspired to create a mini inquiry into some of my lowest students for writing - these are students who are below and not quite well below but will still need a lot of directed and individual focus to get them to where they need to be by the end of the year. My mini inquiry is based around the question: "If I work daily with my struggling writers, instead of seeing them twice a week, will this provide them with the structured guidance that they need to have moved up a sublevel by the end of term - and to also have transferred their learning across to their independent books?" Usually I mark writing books with the students when conferencing and then make notes about what to discuss with them from their follow up sessions. With this group I will be conferencing with the three of them daily in a group session but then also marking their follow up with them in the afternoon and having them hand in their independent writing books each night for me to be able to see also.
I have attached as google docs some of the planning that we have done for this term - and also my weekly timetable for the first week. I have not yet planned my Maths as the students will be doing a pretest before the lesson - also where it says POGIL this means that the students have their own sheets of activities that they work their way through - based on the focus within the teaching session and their choice of what they need to learn at that time - decided through conferences and goals.
Below are attachments that highlight what our focus will be for the first three weeks of school.
I have been very lucky as a beginning teacher to have wonderful tutor teachers that have provided me with support and guidance over the past one and a half years. Unfortunately for me (but fortunately for him) my tutor teacher has just become a principal at a new school. The past six months have been a whirlwind for me and I have learnt more than I would have thought possible - and now that my final six months are beginning I have a new tutor teacher - who also happens to be my team leader. In order to bring closure to the past six months I have compiled a written record of meetings and observations that have occurred in the first half of this year - in addition to this I also have pages of hand written notes, but will not put these up here as what I have recorded neatly summarises these anyway. Over the past six months I also have records from observations from my team leader which I will post up here also as having all records of observations etc in one place will provide for an easy starting point for the rest of the year.
This evening I was going through my google drive having a look at the work that my students have been doing on google slides creating pick-a-path stories when I came across this video that the students at Pt England made me when I finished working with them as a student teacher. It was just too adorable, and so I have posted it here so that I can remember that even on days where we might not feel subject matter has been as effective as we would have liked, we are still teaching little humans life lessons all the time - and they appreciate all of it.
As the term progresses and the children have developed a high quality understanding of POGIL and it is working effectively, I have found a need to change my inquiry slightly - to cater more effectively for the needs of all my students - specifically the two children in my class who have dyslexia. As POGIL is quite a student directed style of learning there is a lot of reading and writing - which does not suit these children all of the time.
We are conducting student led conferences at the moment and one of the mums of the dyslexic children in my class sent me through the following article Dyslexia Daily - 17 ways a teacher can support a student with dyslexia before coming in for her student led conference. I thought it was quite relevant and pertinent at the moment and so have explored some of the ideas in it.
I have taken the following things from this reading that I can change and implement in my programme immediately:
Talk regularly: As these students often work with the teacher aide, when they have problems or are confused I often trust the teacher aide to help them out. I will change this so that they have opportunities to talk to both myself and my teacher aide when they are stuck so that they feel valued and that they can come to me at any time when they are stuck.
Watching carefully: Within this student led style of learning, the children are often in charge of talking to other students before they see me if they are stuck - and so I allow them time to find a solution to their problem before jumping in to help. I do the same with my dyslexic students and believe that this is the right approach however I feel that I may need to provide more explicit modelling for these students around how to find help from other students - as often they are probably focussed on paying attention to what they are being asked to do and so may miss out on the more subtle hints and modelling that is occurring.
Visual Clues: Providing visual clues is one thing for dyslexic student that automatically makes their day so much easier. The dyslexic students in my class have visual clues in their books to help them alongside the written text but I will try and incorporate more visual clues around the classroom rather than just having it all written.
As a result of reading this, and of my ongoing thoughts around my inquiry, my next focus for my inquiry is: What strategies and processes can I put in place that directly support my dyslexic learners within the POGIL style of teaching that is occurring in my classroom.
I have recently had a colleague through my classroom specifically to view POGIL. This is the feedback that she gave me.
Hi Sarah,
Thanks again for the opportunity to see your maths programme in action on Thursday 4th June.
All the students in your class were on task and engaged in their learning. The students I spoke to could verbalise their learning and the reason for this. They explained to me that following a pre-test, they then identified their own learning needs; learning that needed to be reviewed and new learning, in the area of Patterns and Relationships. They explained that POGIL was fun way to learn. A group of students I spoke with agreed that they could support one another with their learning in a group situation. They enjoyed the autonomy provided by the POGIL way of learning, as it gave them greater ownership. They could reflect on their learning using the 4E’s and explained what each of these meant.
Next for me is to trial this method of learning in my classroom!
Kerryn
I have found it really helpful to have feedback from a person who does not usually see this programme in action as it has reaffirmed for me that I am on the right path. My next step for my inquiry is to look into how I can effectively help my learners with dyslexia within the POGIL programme.
Every day, I encourage my students to express their learning in a variety of ways and discuss with them why and how it is beneficial to do so - however I have found myself not always doing this since developing this blog. In a recent staff meeting we discussed the difference between wondering, pondering, journalling and reflecting - how these are all based around different things - and that reflecting should be based around certain criteria and around our children and their learning. In class today I was working with a student on Wordle and realised just how well that tool can sum up the main ideas of something simply by how often they are repeated. I decided to place each of my recent reflective blog posts in Wordle so that I could get a true representation of what it is I am focussing on - with Wordle the words that are repeated the often (and therefore the largest focus in the reflection) are the words that are largest. I was happily surprised with what I saw and it was a timely reminder that I am on track with my reflections.
As part of questioning my planning of POGIL I have been doing some research into future orientated learning and the different learning styles that this teaching style caters for effectively. This is a reading that I found interesting as it simply restated what the different learning styles are and how they fit within a future orientated pedagogy. A timely reminder.
I find it is always just as you feel like you are finally starting to get on top of things - that something knocks you side ways and makes you question what you have been doing. Today that something is a whole mix of little things - colleagues planning, professional reading and feedback from my students.
My children love POGIL, and they love to tell other people how much they love POGIL - they are extremely confident and familiar with their learning - and I am beginning to wonder if because of that they are starting to let their guard slip - that or we are in Week 8 of an 11 week term - or realistically maybe a mix of both.
As I am the only teacher in my school currently trialling POGIL styled learning across all subjects my planning, and how I have presented it - both to the kids and as a professional record - has changed each week as I try to find the best way. I was sure I was finally starting to see the light with what I had done when the kids mentioned that it is difficult for a reliever to come in and pick up my planning and for the programme to run as smoothly as it does when I am in the classroom - which is natural with the style of planning that I do as it leaves a lot of room for student direction. The problem here however is that I have a release teacher in my classroom once a fortnight for PRT release.
Over the weekend I have changed how I do my planning and whilst it is still spread out over a variety of sources for the children these have all been hyperlinked into my main planning document for weekly planning and there is a more detailed weekly overview with opt in workshops clearly marked also.
Coming out of university I had in my CV what I believed to be comments that spoke very highly of me as a student teacher. What I of course did not realise was the huge difference between being a student teacher and being a full time classroom teacher in charge of your own classroom. I had heard it all before from the teachers in my family - give yourself space to breathe, you can't do everything at once, everybody makes mistakes... and every time that I heard it from someone new I got frustrated. I didn't want to be a beginning teacher that felt like I was drowning and knew nothing - that may or may not however have been the exact impression that I gave off to the principal of my school in the first term. I would take everything on, and crumble inside - but remind management many, many times that I am brand new at this - it was in a way my excuse for not having everything perfect. What I didn't realise was that it was perfect at that stage to be a brilliantly imperfect teacher - and through not knowing things, making my own mistakes and learning from the mistakes of others was exactly what I was supposed to be doing - that was the perfect role for me at the time. I had left university as a teacher, and by mid year of my first year of teaching I had finally reaccepted my position as a learner. In line with this, I find the following saying very true - both for myself as a new teacher and for teachers who have been in their position for many years and may not necessarily want to learn new things.
Over the following two terms, I relished my role as a learner - and soaked up as much as I could - whilst still learning the ins and outs of the school that I was working at. This year is where I believe that the change has been for me however. I have an outstanding tutor teacher who has complete faith in my abilities - both to teach successfully and to fail at teaching (and learn from it). Having a tutor teacher who has seen me succeed well, and seen me fail (not so well) has led to conversations that are very growth minded. He knows that I want to learn and grow and that I see myself as a learner - and so he has led from alongside me and provided direction by jumping on the learning journey with me. Working underneath this person has moved my love of teaching students to a passion for developing myself as a teacher continually. He has helped me set goals, visit other schools, observed me, helped me find professional readings that challenge me - and most importantly allowed me to play around with my own style of teaching. In my class I have been experimenting with POGIL (as referred to in previous posts). This has been one of the things that I have done as my Teaching as Inquiry this year - and I have fallen in love with it. Hence the next picture.
However, I am extremely grateful that I learnt the importance of viewing myself as a learner early on in my first year of teaching. The POGIL style of teaching was slightly chaotic at first and left my team leader making comments about the noise level in the room - and wondering if the students could concentrate at that noise level. However, as the weeks have gone by and I have adapted the philosophy behind POGIL to my classroom everything has settled down. The children love their new style of learning and so do I. They are inquisitive, they have urgency for their work - and they truly are learning because they want to - and for no reason except for that. They help to analyse their own data and determine what they will be learning and they love it. The same team leader came into my room last week and commented on how well the kids were working and the programme that they were doing. As a result of sticking with this, my whole team is now experimenting with POGIL styled mathematics tasks - adapted to the teachers individual journeys with POGIL.
This next picture stuck out to me because with POGIL this is true - my children work so well together that I know that the same depth and breadth of discussion could be happening regardless of whether or not I am in the classroom and working with their group. I have become far more of a facilitator and guide than someone who issues them with instructions etc.
I feel extremely honoured to work with such a great team at my school - and to have the support of other teachers. As well as my TT and my team leader I have had a small number of other teachers come and ask if they can observe how POGIL works also. My students are very keen to share their hard work and I am excited to have these other teachers in my classroom also. These teachers have no experience of POGIL and so it will be a learning curve for them just as much as it is from me and I am extremely interested to see the feedback that they have given me (My tutor teacher and team leader both have researched POGIL before coming to view it in my classroom).
My final thought for the night is the same thing that hit me half way through last year - the best teachers truly are the best learners - teaching is a journey where we help and support each other, through observations, through sharing readings and resources, through being able to talk things through, and sometimes by having a night off together that has absolutely nothing to do with teaching. I aim to be a brilliant teacher who can cater successfully to the individual needs of every student in my class - and to do that I need to be a pretty switched on learner. I am looking forward to continuing on with my teaching journey as a learner - and learning from everyone and everything around me.
Today we had a teacher only day where we looked at the PaCT tool and made professional judgements for our students based on the mathematics and writing aspects of this tool. Whilst this tool may still be considered controversial amongst educators I personally found it to be quite a beneficial tool to use. The judgements do not take too long at all to make and I managed to get through my whole class for writing in about three hours - not too bad considering that this is the first time that we have used the tool for writing.
Tomorrow we are making our maths judgements - as I have more experience with making Math judgements against PaCT I have found that the aspects in the tool can be quite useful in helping me to plan a differentiated programme within my classroom as they expose maths in a different light to the numeracy project.
Attached is a booklet that I found extremely useful for helping to clarify what the different aspects were in reading, writing and maths when I was making my judgements.
It is week six of term two, halfway through the term, and therefore probably an appropriate time to do a formal reflection of my teacher inquiry for this term.
My teacher inquiry question was:
How can I, as the teacher of a year six class, use strategies associated with POGIL to help my students develop independence and autonomy over their learning?
When this inquiry came about I discussed with my tutor teacher the importance of having a variety of sources of evidence to show whether or not this is working and highlight areas that need to change/develop and so I endeavour to do so below. I think that it is so important to have student voice as part of a measure of how successful I am in my teacher inquiry as realistically they are the ones whose learning it is affecting - and therefore they are the best people to be able to provide evidence. At times this is formal feedback in terms of videos and PMI charts and at times this is in the format of questions that my tutor teacher asks my students when he comes to observe me. As I will be referring to student answers to these questions throughout this reflection I have listed the questions below.
What were you learning today in …
Why were you learning that?
What tools have you used to ensure you are successful?
- How blogging has provided a voice for my students
View the hyperlink above to see how blogging has given my students a voice - it has changed the class from our classroom where it is mostly teacher led to being there classroom where it is hugely student led. Be sure to read the comments - it is heart warming to see the way that they support each other, both in terms of providing positive feedback and in the way that they help each other through providing appropriate and timely feedforward. What is most amazing is the way that this feed forward and feedback has crossed from simply being an online tool and become part of how they communicate in the classroom - even my shy students are no longer hesitant to tell other students when they think they are doing well, or how they think they can improve.
- The purpose of success criteria, and how these have influenced what and how my students are learning
- Excerpts from professional discussions that I have had, both with my tutor teacher and with other teachers within what I consider to be my professional learning community
- Reflections on my planning for this style of teaching and how these have changed week to week
Success Criteria
I have hyperlinked Reading Success Criteria that students have created since the start of this term. This is entirely written in student voice with the children referring back to Sheena Cameron's reading comprehension strategy sheets when they get stuck.
I believe that success criteria tie in very closely with POGIL in terms of helping students have responsibility and ownership over their own learning. The following quote speaks volumes about this:
" If learners are to take more responsibility for their own learning, then they need to know what they are going to learn, how they will recognise when they have succeeded and what they should learn it in the first place." (An Intro to AfL, Learning Unlimited, 2004).
Between the learning intention covering the what and the why - and the self created, and peer reviewed, success criteria covering the how students are able to gain insight and control over their own learning - and this is demonstrated both in the PMI chart and the video that are hyperlinked above.
Professional Discussions
When running a programme such as POGIL in a classroom it is important to consider what deliberate acts of teaching I am still doing as a teacher. Recently we were video observed and these were some of the deliberate acts that were discussed:
My focus now is to move away from questioning as the students have the tools and the experience to do that and move towards prompting as my key form of feedback - obviously all strategies are going to need to be applied at different times.
Reflections on Planning
My planning has changed nearly every week that I have been running a POGIL based programme in my classroom. The children contribute to the changes, telling me what they like and what they do not like - and what is beneficial to their learning and what is superfluous. Based on my most recent discussions with my Tutor teacher I will be changing three things:
Writing the learning intention for the week in the format of 'We are learning to... because...' so that students can see immediately what the relevance is and therefore be able to discuss this.
Recording the way that I frame the activity and the learning so that students are able to clearly identify the difference between the two. This is where students have been getting stuck when asked the questions identified earlier - whilst my top students are able to highlight the difference without any problem some of my lower students struggle to and this is the group that I need to be specifically targeting. An example of this is recorded below:
Giving students full control about what they learn and when based on appropriate data. An example of this: We are just beginning an algebra based unit. The students have all recently completed a pretest - the level of which was determined by me from looking at data against knowledge and strategies. The pretest has each page set out in the following format:
Each skill that the children need is recorded at the bottom of the page and once we have marked each page together they select 'not yet', 'kind of' or 'got it'. The students work with other children in their skill level and determine their learning for the next five weeks. They have decided to split their data up into two categories for them to focus on when they are with me: a revise category, based on the problems that they kind of understand, and a learn category based on the problems that they do not yet understand. An example of this is recorded below
This style of planning where students have such a high level of input develops feelings of responsibility, pride in what they have already achieved and a sense of direction and ownership in what they will achieve next. Obviously I still have to make judgements based on their self directed pathways - but planning this way and letting the children access and read their data is very much personalising both the planning and their learning journey.
Overall - when I reflect on the question of "How can I, as the teacher of a year six class, use strategies associated with POGIL to help my students develop independence and autonomy over their learning?" the following things come to mind:
What I have already done and need to continue to do:
- Continue to use POGIL sheets to structure students learning
- Continue to use question sheets
- Adapt my planning to meet the needs of my students
- Use the weebly to make learning interactive and engaging for students
- Allow students to direct their own learning
What I need to do next:
- Provide students the opportunities to have a real contribution to what they are learning
- Use their weebly as a place where all students have the opportunity to view similar problems (for want of a better word) to the ones that they will be working with when they are with the teacher.
- Move away from questioning and towards prompting
- Change how I structure the learning intentions for students - especially in writing and reading.
