You're my favourite class, too

A few weeks ago I discussed the curriculum innovations being implemented in Finland and their experiences with cross-curricular learning in the context of wider educational trends. It highlighted the importance of providing students opportunities to apply their learning to real-world contexts. This post develops that discussion by exploring how I can utilise my interdisciplinary connections in my classroom. I have many opportunities to form and develop interdisciplinary connections, illustrated in the mind map below: Interdisciplinary professional connections Interdisciplinary connections benefit me as a teacher. I am exposed to differing approaches to teaching and learning. Rather than hiding away with other English teachers, discussions with teachers across disciplines gives me opportunities to consider differing perspectives. Building these relationships establishes a stronger base from which to develop cross-curricular units of work and can address the perennial studen...

I'm the person who can't have games on my cellphone, otherwise I'll spend spare time mucking around on them rather than doing something productive, like, you know, reading. And I do love a game of Tomb Raider . Solving problems, shooting bad guys, exploring exotic locations where the weather radically changes when you come out the other side of a cave. But am I a gamer? Probably not, and certainly not if I compare myself to my teenage boys. That said, the Bartle test on what kind of gamer I am was a nice distraction, and I wasn't particularly surprised by the results: Achiever : 53% (win, challenge, compare) Explorer : 87%  (investigate, create, discover) Griefer : 20% (hack, cheat, heckle) Socializer : 40% (share, comment, help) (Although, realistically, the socialiser bit would probably be a lot lower because I'm not really into that aspect of gaming.) As an educator, how could I tap into the power of games in a few ways. There is always room to pl...

If there's one thing I'd love to make English, it's more hands-on. Imagine it, a classroom where students are busy and happy making things that enhance their understanding of reading and writing... Wait a minute... hands-on English? How? I've had students make resources for me before and create visual images as part of the curriculum, but how can I embrace the maker movement into a subject area often seen as abstract. The make movement puts students in the role of designers, constructing artifacts and applying technology in novel ways. It encompasses 'traditional' crafts like knitting, calligraphy and metal work, along with computer programming and hacking. It's about experimentation and risk taking. Social interaction is a key part of the process, including conversations and feedback from peers. In English, the obvious two ways we create are through writing and visual texts. There are certain rules that students are expected to follow with writing (you ...

Agency is one of those terms often bandied about in school and I admit that it is one that I struggle to define. Reflecting on the term, though, it seems to me that student agency is something that I encourage - albeit intermittently, perhaps - in my classroom. For me, agency is about student taking ownership of their learning. By developing their capacity to do things, giving them choices and control over their learning. There are different ways that I try to do this with my students, and I can certainly see even more ways to be effective in empowering it. I want my students to be more self-directed in their learning. In the past, when I've given students the opportunity to work collaboratively to construct knowledge of a text, for example, I have had concerns about the amount of work some students did, as well as the quality of their work output. I think that this concern has become an obstacle for me, too, because it makes me reluctant to transfer further control for their ...

I've seen growth mindset discussed at various times in forums such as Twitter. The concept interested me so I had done a wee bit of research on what it was, although that was admittedly as far as I went. The traditional view of intelligence was that it is innate and there is nothing you can do about it, no matter how hard you work. I see this attitude reflected at various times in my classroom by students who think that they, for example, find creative writing difficult and so put little effort into producing finished work, or they struggle with aspects of grammar but don't try to figure out the rules and apply them to their work. I have been guilty of a similar attitude towards Maths, and have caught myself making comments along the lines of I suck at it, therefore someone else solve the problem for me. With the Maths thing, though, I've become more conscious of what I say because I have a daughter who I want to encourage into STEM and I realise that how I role mod...

I so absolutely love teaching English. I love that I can (try to) inspire students to appreciate literature and film - the words, characters, feelings, meanings. I love that I can use that literature to show them something new about the world... how we treat each other, how we learn from each other, how we can change the world. That I can show them the impact of change, of being true to who we are, of standing up for what we believe in, of our rights as human beings. Of what it means to be human. All through the texts that I choose. I love I can give my students an avenue for expressing their creativity and ideas. That they can find something that they are passionate about and tell the world about it in their own words. That I can nurture the 'writer within'. And because visual language is a part of our curriculum, the artist within. I love it. I might forget that from time to time because I get tired, have four classes of marking submitted at once, or have to write 1...

I'm having the most entertaining time with my Year 12 class at the moment. Well, more accurately, I'm having an entertaining time watching my Year 12 class. In theory, students have finished reading John Green's Paper Towns (theory because they had very little class time assigned to it reading it and were expected to complete it at home). Instead of guiding them through the novel, as I would usually, I have set the class up with a reading journal and task, and am pretty much sitting back and letting them discover the deeper aspects of the novel on their own. Their end product is to be a study guide which must be made accessible for all other students in the class. I have left it up to them how they do it. We have groups are using Tumblr, Google sites and docs and a wiki. Their reading journal focuses them on the development of character, themes, symbols and relationships in each chapter, on the big questions about identity and interconnectedness, and how the main two...

I'm not really a blogger - I tend to use this for reflections and then only sporadically. I guess the reason why I do choose to do my reflections online, rather than in a private document, is that there does feel that there is a degree of accountability. What I say has to be literate, to have a real purpose, and to stand up to scrutiny. Just as I am drawn to blogging, I've found that my students also like the idea of their work being published for a potential international audience. I've trialled a little bit of blogging with different classes and for different reasons. The most obvious reason to use blogs links to achievement and engagement. There are lots of websites touting the benefits of student blogging, backed by research (see here , here and here ). These benefits include that students like it, helps with reading and writing skills, gives students a voice - not only in writing their blogs but giving feedback to others, and provides them with a genuine audience ...

As our school becomes more focused on catering to the individual needs of our students - such as 'Ready to Work' options for non-academic students (in line with Vocational Pathways ) and an endorsement programme for our high achievers - this is approach is also filtering into my classroom I'm noticing this in particular with my Year 12 and 13 classes. In my Year 12 class, for example, I have two international students whose English excludes them from success in a number of the standards the course offers. The solution is to provide some Level 1 unit standards for one student and ESOL support for the other. I have a student who is in the class but struggles, and in discussion with him, I have offered him an alternative course which is a mix of the achievement standards the rest of the class are doing, and some unit standards. This will enable him to have some success in English this year, so I'm chuffed, and he's chuffed. Then there is the rest of the class. I'...

Last week I was fortunate to have the opportunity to visit three Auckland schools as part of the Big River Learning and Change Network. This was my first chance to see what a modern teaching environment looks and feels like; my school was built in the 1920s and subsequent expansions strongly reflect the time periods they are built in, so the flowing open plans were quite a contrast. I like to challenge myself with my teaching. I take ideas from Twitter, Pinterest and (perhaps) more serious sources and try to use these in my classes as I can. However, the timetable and curriculum approach that Hobsonville Point Secondary School  utilises is far beyond what I envisaged for my classroom. This is undoubtedly because any changes I make to my classroom practice is realistically confined to this space, whereas HPSS has been built through new teaching theories and practices and there is a whole school philosophy. The challenge that I (and my school) face is taking the 21st ideas used by ...

Last year I experimented with using Google Docs for student tracking and goal setting. Each student in the class had their own 'progress chart' set up as a shared document between them and myself. It had term by term goal setting, reflections and feedback, and I entered essay, test and exam results so that they could keep track of their progress in the subject. It had great advantages. I didn't have to keep track of 28 pieces of paper for one. Students could access the material at home (ostensibly so they could also show their parents, who had been told about the chart through email), or whenever they happened to be in the computer lab. They could quickly see how their results stacked up (and it was amazing how often they forgot what they had gotten for an essay), and tally credits. On the not so good side, it took a bit of work to keep up to date and so wasn't actually up to date a lot of the time. Students didn't always constructively reflect on their efforts ...

The last couple of weeks of term means finding ways of surviving. Not only am I tired, but my students are both tired and wondering why they have to work when school is nearly finished. They've had their exams and they know that there is no other assessment to do. Westerns I've developed two new units to keep the kids engaged. My Year 10s are working through a Western study. this genre study explores how Western conventions are used in a range of texts. Ideally (ie, if I had time), this would include a novel extract, short story and comic strip, but as we are so very close to the end, I'm focusing on film. After learning about what to expect in a Western, we watched extracts from two classic Western films ( Stagecoach  and High Noon ). Students used the knowledge they gained from this to assess how Rango is a Western (not too hard once they got passed the hero being a chameleon). Finally,we've just started the Coen brother's adaptation of True Grit . A couple...

I love my Year 10 class. They are full of charisma, opinions, personality and energy. But they hated poetry. I love poetry. I love how writers cleverly manipulate language to create the most expressive phrases and show me the world from entirely new perspectives. We have great (southern) New Zealand poets, and I thought I was introducing them to the students in interesting ways. They didn't think so. Brian Turner's 'Pebbles' seems to me both a commentary on the changing environment, as well insight into a different sense of belonging and perspective: 'We belong in water / untroubled by envy for anything / born to live in the loneliness of air'. I got the students to think about their own knowledge of rivers, and to choose their own interpretation of rivers.We followed this up with a brief comparison with another Turner river poem, 'Audible'. They were able to complete sentences, but as for independent thinking, well... For 'Deep River Talk' by ...

With internal exams finished, marked and entered, I've been turning my attentions to getting my students through their BIG exams at the end of the year. While I'm pleased with the pass rates, I know there's heaps of room to lift more of my students' performances into the Merit and Excellence range. I believe that we can do it! First up (and something I'm really proud of), I've been working hard to create a revision booklet* which covers the key skills that the Year 11s will need to master. These are writing insightful literary essays and reading and interpreting unfamiliar texts. I've found some resources online (and acknowledged these!) but most of the activities I've developed myself. I'm really emphasising the importance of personal voice. I want my kids to write responses which show that they have thought about, learned from and engaged in the texts we have studied. I don't want my class to parrot things we have done in class, and alt...

I've been reflecting on my classroom practices recently (thanks ERO). One of the things I've noticed is that my reflections have become increasingly about the delivery of content as opposed to the management of students. I don't think this is because my management is necessarily any better, but when students aren't working, I guess I'm viewing this as a lack of engagement that I can perhaps do something about, rather than as a specifically management (and what the students are doing) issue. As a teacher, I'm continually trying to devise interesting and engaging lessons which will keep the students interested. The best lessons are usually those which offer a range of activities, and which cater to students with a variety of learning needs. Two techniques which I've found particularly useful are differentiated instruction, which can take many forms; and offering students the choice of activities to do, or a self directed booklet to guide th...

During one of my PRT One courses I was privileged to learn from  the estimable Margaret Ross. Among the great advice and experience she had to offer, the one point that stuck with me the most was the advice to treat every class as your favourite, including those most difficult. I went back to school. My year 10 class was without a doubt (and even excluding my first year overwhelmed perspective) the most challenging of the cohort. I was a first year teacher, and part time at that, and there were times when I just couldn't get them to shut up. I hated shouting. I refused to talk over students, but what that meant, practically, was that I could be waiting a very long time before I could say anything. Forget teaching from the front - there was little tolerance for that approach. The class drove me nuts. So, I after listening to Margaret, I went back to school, took a very deep breath before stepping in the classroom, and went in smiling. They were to be, in ...