You're my favourite class, too

Having been critical of  teachers befriending students on Facebook , it might seem a little rich for me to now be espousing the values of social media as a tool. However, as a teacher connecting with other teachers, social media provides me with resources to develop my teaching practice. Although my use of Twitter is at best sporadic, when I do venture there I find a wealth of material for the areas I teach. I email these to myself and try to use them into my lessons where possible, making it a fairly productive use of social media. There are also opportunities to participate in Twitter discussions on areas of interest, such as edchatnz or engchatnz , and while I find these hard to follow (I probably need more practice) searching the hashtag is another way to get ideas. Pinterest's visual bulletin format provides snapshots into a range of different teaching resources, which I pin and frankly often forget ever seeing. Not nearly so useful... From a classroom perspective,...

In 2015, a New Zealand teacher was censured by the Teacher's Council for participating in a Facebook exchange with a 15-year student (Daly, 2015). Like many others, my school has a Facebook presence which is followed by current and former students, parents and the community, as well as teachers. Teachers have, at times, used Facebook groups to share curriculum content and messages. I think these are useful tools. However, we are also a small school in a rural area. Many teachers know students outside of school, as neighbours, friends' children or as friends of our own children. Occasionally a teacher will become Facebook friends with a student, usually for these reasons or in response to a request from an ex-student.  Should teachers become friends with students on social media, particularly Facebook?  In this context, social media is not about breaking down classroom walls, but is about personal relationships.  My school does not have any policies specifica...

A New Plymouth councillor has recently been widely criticised for his comments about Te Reo and questioning whether there is value in promoting it. This condemnation is not surprising. We expect the councillor, as someone in a public role, to have greater sensitivity and awareness of cultural matters and their importance to New Zealand. Within the classroom, teachers should show daily their understanding of indigenous knowledge and cultural responsiveness. There continues to be a disparity between Māori and non-Māori students. Savage et. al. (2011) attribute this to the domination of Pākehā culture and western practices in the education system. Culturally responsive pedagogy means contextualising learning to meet students' "cultural forms, behaviours and processes" (Savage, et.al., 2011, p. 2). Likewise, Bishop et. al. (2007) identify culturally responsive teachers as being those who "care for students as culturally located individuals" (p. 11). The adapted...

Teachers want students engaged in their learning and who apply that learning in a real-world context. Isn't that the point - being able to use what is learned in class? Too often, though, what is taught in our classrooms remains firmly within the domain of that subject area and students fail to understand how it applies to their worlds. Last year three departments in my secondary school endeavoured to create a cross-curricular unit for Year 9 classes. The theory was fantastic - we would teach different aspects of the topic and students would present us with an assessment which we would mark individually using our respective curriculum criteria. In practice, it was pretty much an example of what not to do in cross-curricular teaching. Our lessons were out of sync, some teachers didn't follow the scheme, and some didn't do any presentations.  However, the experience did show me how it could be done and I saw that there could be benefits to doing it. We need to show st...