You're my favourite class, too

For the past two and a half years my school has set aside time every Wednesday morning for Professional Learning Groups. These groups provide teachers with time to work on their inquiry cycle and have professional discussions with others about their classroom practice. I appreciate having the opportunity to develop my pedagogy in this way. As a teacher - as a human being -  the assumptions that I bring to my practice are influenced by a range of different things. The way I teach can be influenced by factors including my world view and the way I was taught (and didn't like being taught). But these influences aren't always going to be conducive to best practice. One of the things that I really like about the inquiry process is that after identifying an issue to address, there is an expectation that I will identify my own learning needs and that my next steps will be evidence based. Utilising the vast array of research that has been done on education is to me a logical thing to...

Over the past few years I have been steadily increasing the use of technology in my classroom, made easier with the school introducing BYOD in the junior school. As such I have been familiar with the SAMR model: Image source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/The_SAMR_Model.jpg I won't discuss the mechanics of the model because there are plenty of people on the internet more qualified than me who have done so (check out Kathy Shrock  here  and the Technology is Learning site  here , as starting points). In many ways I like this model because it provides a stepping stone approach to using technology which is useful for teachers just on the first step of changing their teaching practices. It shows that introducing digital activities doesn't have to involve major shifts in practice but can be incremental. It also shows, though, that ultimately students should not be using a computer to complete the same activities that they would be doing w...

Last night was the second Mindlab session, exploring the links between 21st century skills and the key competencies of the New Zealand curriculum. One interesting idea that was raised was that organisations ‘biological’, I guess in that there are levels of organisation and that they are living, evolving systems. This also means that organisations have the ability to ‘learn’. A t raditional school structure is hierarchical - within my own school we have the principal and two deputies, as well as three teachers who act as Senior Leader Support, followed by layers of deans, HODs, 2ICs... If we take the biological metaphor further, organisations, including schools, must be self-evolving or else they will stagnate. As the culture of an organisation changes, the nature of leadership within the organisation will also change. In schools, this includes how we might define knowledge and the role of teachers in bringing about changes. For my school and others to continue to evolve there ...

Tuesday night was my first session of the Post Graduate Certificate in Applied Teaching (Digital and Collaborative Learning) through Unitec - otherwise knowns as The Mindlab . The focus of the first session was on what is knowledge and the purpose of education.The course notes state: [Students'] familiar means of information aggregation and distribution are not in sync with the education system and students are looking for flexible, more affordable and more relevant ways to gain the knowledge needed to apply ‘as needed’ skills for life-long learning. At heart this challenges the whole notion of what schools do, hence the question we were focusing on: what is education? In a formal sense, education is the systematic transfer of knowledge and information, but informally we are 'educated' in various ways everyday - through what we read and listen to, who we talk to. What we do as educators is inherently governed by what has been done before, because change can be a slow ...