Reflective Practice

I spent my last day of school at a full day of professional development. I could have spent my last day hanging out waiting for the 3 o'clock bell to ring like most of the students and teachers I know. S o a full day of having to have my brain turned on seemed a great idea at the start of the term.    Not many will disagree with me when I say that it has felt like a long year.  If I ever hear the word 'unprecedented' again it will be too soon.  Yet it is the word that most aptly described what was 2020. Covid came and stayed, plans for Canada in May were then put on hold and I found myself applying for a new job.  And that is why I found myself  sitting on a chair designed for the bum of an 8 year old learning why children (around the world) were struggling to learn to read. The day began with the why...statistics and graphs that were unrefutably indicating we are making a hash up of how NZ teachers are trying to get kids to read.  In my head ther...

Our year 5 and 6 syndicate has been trialling flipped learning or blended learning as a way to increase the engagement of our learners. We all found many successes in teaching remotely during lock down that we, like so many other educators around the globe, have decided to bring the best of that approach to the fore of our teaching strategies today. I learned a lot during lockdown and so did my students. Now we are working together to try and co-create a model that facilitates a way of allowing students to Basically this process is just me working with my 29 Year 5 and 6 students to see what works and what we need to change each week to make our learning better. Our team is working together but before we make this a more collaborative effort we have been given the opportunity to try some ideas that we feel work best for us and our learners. Initially we started with something similar to what I had created for our learning@home. These slides were filled with a variety of images, t...

Time, Twitter and Teamwork I used to complain that I never had enough time. Then, like most everyone on the planet, I quickly found myself with an abundance of it but with a new paradigm to confront.  Online shopping was a waste of time with non-essential deliveries at a standstill, so I turned my attention instead to researching good teaching practice and reflecting on how that might look for my learners. (And quite frankly,  it seemed like a better option than scrubbing the watermarks off my shower screen).  Early on in this process,  I read that I should think about creating a digital brand.  As teachers, we all have our perceptions of who we are in our face-to-face classroom teaching...so it made sense that I needed that personality to come through digitally - and I found that using Bitmojis. They eerily represent you for every imaginable situation, in avatar form.  It was a way of placing me on every piece of work even when I wasn’t in a Google Me...

In February this year our staff had the MOE come and give some staff PD.  It involved  whole school staff groups and focused mainly on prevention and de-escalation strategies.   It was a timely reminder of our responsibilities to ourselves and our students.  There were two sessions. Understanding Behaviour, Responding Safely (UBRS) Session 1: How the brain works.  This was not the most informative session I have ever been asked to attend.   Luckily our school went to a day with kiwi speaker Nathan Wallis (that looked into the developing brain the first 1000 days) in 2018 so most of our staff had been previously exposed to this quick lesson in brain development and anatomy.  It certainly doesn't hurt to hear things again - it wasn't interesting but no one died.  And, it was a good reminder of what we have learned previously.   Session 2: Dealing with extreme behaviour. This session was about how schools c...

I have always used chess and cup stacking in my yearly teaching programme - from nearly the beginning of my time teaching in NZ.  Learners of all ages are keen to get in and learn these “games”. The benefits of teaching chess to young learners is well known. But the benefits of cup stacking perhaps not so much. Cup stacking has many benefits for learning in the classroom.   Researchers have found that it targets specific areas of the body and the brain to increase intelligence, problem solving skills and critical thinking.  It is a fun yet and intense game. “What many teachers and educators may not know is the impact cup stacking can have  on a child’s visual processing skills and reading ability. Because the child is moving their hands so quickly, their eyes must also track the cups and the movement of their hands as they participate in the activity. The eyes naturally cross the midline to accomplish this task. These skills are very importan...

As any teacher will say, it becomes clear (quite quickly) that differentiated instruction for you class is all but impossible.  Trying to create individual learning plans is an incredibly time consuming endeavor and in my experience is a one-way trip to teacher teacher burnout. To implement said plans a similarly mammoth task.  That being said, the kids in my class deserve to be scaffolded as they require when problem solving.  Vygotsky’s ideas around the Zone of Proximal Development and the subsequent ideas of others working in the social learning discipline address the ideas of diversity within the classroom.  “Design learning is all about trying to meet the diverse and variable needs of all students in your classroom.” ( TKI ) “Planning can incorporate students “in the margin” while at the same time benefiting all students in the classroom. Addressing diversity through the UDL lens helps teachers accommodate individual differences through inten...