Reflecting on a wonderful term

As a teacher it is very important to reflect on what went well and what didn't go so well continually so that you are continually offering your students optimum teaching and opportunities.  Often we ask the children to reflect also on what worked well for them, and where they think their next steps are. One thing that I know that I don't do as often is reflect with the students on a big picture scale, so I made sure that I did this at the end of the term so that we were on the same page going into next term.

It was interesting to see what worked, what didn't work and what we could change from a student's perspective and I was surprised to see so much about the changes between my teaching style and the teaching style of their previous teachers coming through - especially since it took a number of the students a while to adjust to the changes.  What this tells me though is that the students value having the extra clarity about their learning, having the ability to direct their own learning paths and having more defined structure within their lessons, even though it means more work for them.  

In regards to what didn't work - not enough PE and more rewards - unfortunately for the students, they will not be getting more 'rewards' as such but I do wonder if this was there as we have just started a rewards system within the class where the students earn whole class rewards.  PE is changing this term and more PE will be occurring as a result of not having swimming in our PE session time. It was great to see that the students wanted more writing experience opportunities.  The majority of the students that I am working with are still developing an understanding of what the basics are and how these need to be included in their writing and it was clear that this style of writing allowed the students to achieve and recognise what success looks like to them.

Te Toi Tupu - Leading Change Workshop

On the first Monday of the holidays I attended a Leading Change workshop run by Te Toi Tupu.  This was a really interesting day and it was brilliant having the four of us who are working in the leadership team there.  This allowed us to think critically about where we were at as a school and engage in critical reflection.  I have copied in the notes that I made about the things that I viewed as important learning that we went through and they are a very interesting read.  Lots of models that allow us to view the change that we are going through as a school in a new light.

Leadership and Assessment - Effective leadership of change

Leadership Research

During the first week of the holidays I am attending a Leading Change workshop run by Te Toi Tupu. As part of this we were required to read the following document and record three important points, two interesting things and one question.  

See below for attachments.

Four reasons why leadership vs management is a dangerously flawed distinction

My thoughts

Knowledge enables Success

Having settled into my new classroom and gained an understanding of my children I have noticed that there are two large areas of need that require focus.  These are their maths knowledge and their writing - a large number of students are working below and well below the standard.  I have been thinking carefully about how I can address both of these and which one of these is most pressing to address.  

I have completed a mini inquiry around developing maths knowledge during the time when we are doing statistics.  In order to develop my own professional knowledge around this I have read the following research amongst others: 

Using music to increase maths retention

Maths Teaching Knowledge

Making it count - strategies for improving mathematics

As a result of this mini inquiry my knowledge sessions are now varied for the students and include a range of interactive websites that offer explanations, teaching hot spots around certain knowledge areas, interactive games for students, games that students are able to share in with a partner, the development of sheets that allow students to see where their knowledge gaps are and to choose how these can be filled using a variety of different texts and materials and the opportunity for students to use songs and music to help them retain their knowledge.  This seems to have worked so far and is proving successful.  Within the last week of term I will retest these students using summative assessments and be able to use evidence to confirm my observations and formative assessments.

The inquiry that I have decided needs to be largest focus is around writing and develop within these students knowledge around where they are at and knowledge around what tools that they can use to help them progress and achieve their ultimate end goal of working at/above the standard by the end of the year so that they are ready for high school.  Within my class I have students working from between a 2a level and a 4b level with the majority of them sitting around a 3b level.  I have decided to focus this inquiry on these students that are classed as sitting well below as they need to make hugely accelerated progress in order to be where they need to be by the end of the year.

Key findings that I have noticed so far from the students who are working well below:

 - Students are not planning their work

 - Students are not confident editing their work

 - Students are not comfortable knowing when to use basic or complex punctuation

 - Students are still developing the ability to recognise grammatical errors

 - Students do not know what they do not know, and therefore are unsure how to improve.

The one that stands out to me the most is that these children do not know what they do not know - they are not aware of how they can improve and they are not aware of what their errors are.  In order to help students with this, they have been provided with requirements that have them working towards the national standard at each sub-level of the curriculum. They have now identified within their sub-levels the goals that they wish to work on and we have co-constructed success criteria for these goals.  The other findings will be discussed and explicitly taught over the next term across a range of contexts so that they can be understood and applied within a range of contexts - however through having developed goals, students are already far more motivated and are already noticing areas in which they can improve and are wanting to learn.

The challenges around student centered learning - and overcoming them

Inquiry, curriculum integration, thematic units - these words were tossed around interchangeably when I first took up my new role at this school nearly nine weeks ago - however throughout this term we have begun to make changes around what our school curriculum looks like and how it is played out in action.  This was due in part, to the leaving of both the previous principal and deputy principal within a short time period.  As a result of this, lots of questioning is happening regarding the terminology that is used and what it actually represents.  Through discussions and readings around inquiry and curriculum integration we have decided that as a school what we are currently doing is a thematic approach to learning, rather than true curriculum integration - and that true inquiry where it is led by the students is something quite rare within our classrooms and something that has not traditionally happened.  This has aligned with the minimal focus that has been placed around student voice and student led learning that is future orientated due to other huge factors that have influenced the staff at the school.  The students that I am working with came to me with quite a fixed mindset about what they could and could not achieve and it has taken eight weeks for them to begin to be at a stage where they are able to talk about their individual goals and their progressions towards these.

As year 7 and year 8 students, I think it is highly important that these students are introduced to, and confident working within, an inquiry style of learning both within the "core"/national standards subjects and all other subjects that make up the New Zealand Curriculum.

In order for me to provide my students with this opportunity I have done research over a wide variety of areas - regarding what inquiry is, best practice for student centered learning in areas such as maths, reading and writing and the benefits and challenges of true student centered learning.  A lot of this has overlapped with reading that I did last year around the POGIL styled programme that I was teaching and so this has been most helpful to make comparisons with.

I know that as these students do not have a student centered learning background it is important for me to give them appropriate tools so that they are able to understand and talk about their learning in order to be able to have more guidance over the direction of it.  An interesting reading that I stumbled across today The Benefits and Challenges of Student-Designed Learning talks about true inquiry learning (within a high school context) and letting students have complete control about the direction that they take with their learning and how they present their learning.  It emphasises that from a student point of view, whilst it was exciting to have control over their learning at first it became difficult when they did not have any guidelines.  It also discusses the importance of students having goals when directing their own learning and how this was helpful to them.

This has helped me to have confidence that I am on the right track with these students and developing them to be students who can work within an inquiry style of learning.  At the moment there is both clear guidelines about what skills and knowledge they need to be developing, they are presented with a range of ways to do this which is helping to allow them freedom over the style of learning that works best for them and they are consistently setting and achieving mini goals whilst working towards their bigger goal which is allowing them to achieve success along the way.

Communication is Key

This year I have set up a new blog for my class.  Again I have done it on weebly, however I have made a new address so that it aligns with the other weebly addresses at my new school.  A further reason that I have kept them separate is that I think it is lovely for students to be able to look back on and reflect on the learning that they did last year, and so I have left that one open for the students to access - which will be especially helpful for the students who are now in BYOD classrooms.

This year in addition to having the normal features of learning, sharing. go to etc I have included my planning on my weebly so that students and parents are able to access it from home.  The amount of positive feedback that I have received from parents regarding this already is astounding.  They have commented both directly to me and to the principal that having the planning their really opens up the conversations that they can have with their 11 or 12 years old about their learning.  In their words, they have gone from receiving a grunt/very minimal reply when asking about their child's day to having a proper conversation regarding the learning rather than the doing.  I have also shared google docs with the students that have all of their upcoming WALTS based on pre-assessment tasks and games/interactive websites that they know they are expected to look at before they see me for these WALTS.  This has been very successful as it is allowing the conversations to be focused on the learning of the day in depth rather than staying at the lower end of Blooms Taxonomy.

Below is the link to my new weebly:

Room 7 Weebly

New School, New Adventure!

The beginning of a new year brings with it a new school year, which is always exciting - however even more so when it also comes with a new school.  The school that I have moved to this year is a complete contrast to the school that I have worked at as a PRT.  Where my last school was a large, urban school - my new school is a full primary country school with only 120 children!  I was, and am, very excited about working in a small school that has such a tight knit community surrounding it but what I was not prepared for was driving to work this morning and having to drive for a kilometre through the middle of cows!  This was the image I was confronted with this morning.

Nevertheless, cows included I have loved my start to the year.  The students that I am working with are very receptive to learning and have the potential to make accelerated progress throughout the year so that they are where they need to be by the end of the year.  

However, with a new class comes a new set of challenges.  With my old class we had defined what learning looked like, sounded like, felt like - they understood the learning pit and that if they struggled it was normal and a key part of reaching success with their learning rather than meaning that they were on the road to failure. With my new class, I am unsure of where they stand in regards to what they have been taught learning looks like, sounds like, and feels like.  This morning I am doing an activity with them where they will do a bus stop activity, brainstorming in groups what great learners do, what active learners do, what previous messages they have received about learning from their teachers and what is important to reach success in their learning.  I am really excited to find this information out from these students as this will form the basis of how our classroom will run over the next few weeks and how our HPE unit on Culture and Community will progress.  I think the following quotes quite nicely state how as a class we are unpacking the year together and all bringing our learning experiences to create our own expectations for each other.

Self and Leader Review - Appraisal Connector

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. 

Students... A few of my favourite things

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.

Assessment - For and of learning.

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. 

I've got something to say - Gail Loane

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.

To the world you may be just one person, but to one person you may be the world

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.

Video Observations

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.

Art and Creativity

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.

Nicola Bennet - Art in the classroom

Anthropomorphic Images

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.

John Hattie - Success Criteria

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.

Ken Robinson - Inspiration and Food for Thought

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.

Reflecting on Room 16

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.

Feeling prepared and ready to go!

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.

Unit Plans

Astronomy        Explanation Writing        Long Term Plan

As a school we don't do unit plans for reading or Maths - these are done individually as they are very particular to each class.

Class Plans

Weekly Timetable        Weekly Plan - Week 1

Examples of resources that go with plans

Reading
Speeches and follow up activities based on blooms for the follow people:

Bill Gates - Speech and Comprehension work

Malala Yousafzai - Speech and Comprehension work

MLK - Speech and Comprehension work

Kid President - Speech and Comprehension work

Kid President - Static text work

Writing
Explanation plan and written piece exemplars

Maths
Y6 Level Pretest

Closing one chapter - and beginning the next

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.

Tutor Teacher Discussions Feb - June 2015

Team Leader Observations Feb - June 2015

Looking Back

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.

Point England - Room 4 - Student Voice