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.

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.

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.

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

The Learning Pit

Recently I have been doing observations in other schools - I will delve further into this in another post.  One of the schools that I visited was a MLE and was said to be an outstanding school.  As a result of having been at that school and having viewed their learning in practice I was doing some research around MLE when I came across the article Modern Learning Environments – the underlying philosophy to success. On this webpage there was a mention of the 'Learning Pit' - something that all learners must go through in order to achieve success.  I was interested in this concept as it seemed to align with the 4E's that my students now assess themselves on at the end of every lesson.  When researching this further I found both a presentation by the person who created the concept of the 'Learning Pit' and a research article written on it.

Attached are the presentation and the research article:
Presentation
Research article

Within the research article there was a diagram that helped me understand the four stages of the learning pit and begin to understand how these linked in with the 4Es that I ask my students to work with each day.

I will be going through this with my students on Monday and looking at how this works and ties in with the style of learning that they are doing currently.

The Four Stages of the Learning Pit

Stage 1: CONCEPT
The Learning Pit begins with a concept. The concept can come from the media, conversation, observations or deliberate study. So long as most pupils have a basic understanding of the concept, then the Learning Pit can work. Examples of the sorts of concepts that might be suitable can be found later in this article, as well as in Challenging Learning. 

Stage 2: CONFLICT
As soon as a concept has been agreed, the teacher’s responsibility is to create ‘cognitive conflict’ in pupils’ minds. Cognitive conflict arises when people have at least two opinions in their minds, both of which they agree with but that both of which are in conflict with each other. For example, I agree that stealing is wrong but I also think that Robin Hood was a good man; I agree with both statements even though they are in conflict with each other.

Stage 3: CONSTRUCT
Giving students the opportunity and reason to construct meaning for themselves is the raison d’être of the Learning Pit. After they have struggled in the Pit for a while, some of students will begin to make meaning. Some may even have a ‘Eureka’ moment. This is at the heart of the Learning Pit and is explored later in this article.

Stage 4: CONSIDER
The final stage encourages pupils to reflect on how their thinking has changed, been adapted, assimilated and / or constructed throughout the course of the lesson. Thinking about thinking, or metacognition, is a crucial factor in the learning process. The Learning Pit provides a frame of reference to help structure this metacognitive reflection for pupils. 

Hello to Blogging

17 June - Final year of teaching and starting my blogging journey!