Tuesday, 14 August 2018

Teaching students to become reflective

Today I read a blog by Simon Scott who reflected on the impact sharing had on young people and how sharing learning made a difference in writing. I enjoyed the post as he talked about 3 different steps to writing a thoughtful, positive and helpful comment on someone else's blog. If the children could follow the template then it stopped them from writing basic comments like "good work" "nice writing" to a more in depth and thought provoking comment. I like this strategy as it is teaching students to look more in depth as to what has been done well and what they then could do later. I would like to trial this into my learning space as not just a way for students to comment on learning but ways to give feedback and feed forward after their writing. 


The Acceleration of sharing




Sharing has changed significantly in the last 100 years. With sharing changing from speaking on phones and searching through google. To now in the last 10 years instagram, twitter, snapchat and iphones creating new ways to share and be involved in online learning.

In my role the change in sharing has made communicating with whanau and other schools more accessible. It has given me the opportunity to make connections through different media that whanau use and is easiest for them.

From having a outreach facilitator I have learnt some new learning around explain everything and blogging. It has been useful when sharing with my students as it is easy for them to use aswell.

Friday, 3 August 2018

Reflection and Evidence

Professional learning
Use inquiry, collaborative problem solving and professional learning to improve professional capability to impact on the learning and achievement of all learners.


One piece of evidence that I feel strongly relates to one of the Standards is my leadership overview. This year I have taken up a leadership role of leading literacy, etap and sharing my findings and data to the staff and BOT. I was required to prepare for staff meetings and lead teachers through PACT, PAT, Writing AsTtle and assist where needed when they needed help with any of these areas. From being a leader around this area for the 3 terms I have become more confident in front of the staff and I believe because our staff is so approachable and positive this has made presenting and teaching/learning with them easier for me.

I found that I have learnt a great deal from having this leadership role as many of the areas like PACT, PAT and AsTTle I needed to teach myself and find ways around problems that arise. One instance was when I was required to transfer the data from etap on AsTtle. I really had no idea where to start and my first instinct was to ring Elise and get her to tell me or even do it for me. But I decided that as it was now my role, I stepped up and began to problem solve around this. Etap communications I have realised are very fast at replying to any questions and instantly helped me solve this dilemma.

Literacy data has been very exciting to plot and track as I have gone in depth with what different aspects are required and this has made my teaching more meaningful. I found it very interesting to be able to track our target students and look at their progress throughout the year.

Along with teaching and being in charge of literacy I also decided to take up a Mindlab course around digital and collaborative learning. Initially I really enjoyed this course as it was about ICT and different ways of using it in your teaching. But because of the high workload a teacher has, I was ready to complete this course as it was no longer something that I enjoyed. Although I did not feel like I enjoyed it as much as others I still do feel that I learnt a great deal from it. Learning different styles of leadership and collaboration also helped when I was required to present data to the staff.