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.