Thursday, February 16, 2012

My Mantras About Learning


This week I have been fortunate to work with my team and an Educational Expert from New Zealand who is our school's critical friend.

We've begun the process of articulating our Vision and Beliefs about Teaching and Learning and how we will make it all happen in each part of the school.

It's given me an opportunity to reflect upon these points which I need to remember and have faith in when the going gets tough:

- approach everything in a variety of ways because everyone learns differently
- celebrate and share the wins
- when you introduce a challenge you need to introduce adequate support
- we are all learners
- positive relationships are really powerful

What do you value about teaching & learning?



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Working as One Village - Nuts and Bolts

New school year, new Village, new team and new challenges to provide the best education we can - I love new begginings! They are full of promise and appeal to my sense of adventure and big picture thinking.

Last year I was lucky enough to have a fantastic planning buddy to work with in my 'year' level. By the end of the year, we were using one visual timetable in one Studio to map out the week for the children so they could plan their day. We pooled our resources and ran workshops and focus groups with children from both homegroups according to need and when it came to reporting, we moderated and discussed every child when it came to allocating marks and writing comments. We could be honest and open with questioning each other and evaluating our strengths and weaknesses. We made a great team!

This year my 'buddy' and I are in the same village (building), but working with different year levels. We have two new people on our team and are aiming to continue to work together to pool resources and teach to needs of all children in our care (years 3-6). Fortunately our new team members are willing to follow our lead and take on the challenge of working as one team, one village.

We are in a learning space that doesn't have an interactive whiteboard, or TV screen or enormous 'traditional' whiteboards so we had to re-think how we could do a visual timetable displaying all of the Learning Advisors timetables for the day.

Fortunately we are working in the school's resource ares/mulitpurpose space while we wait for our new village to be built. This space happens to have a large data projector and screen so we have a great reason to try something a little different...

We use Google Apps for Education at our school, which enables spreadsheets, word documents and slideshows to be created online and edited simultaneously by more than one person. Some staff in our Village work part time, so we needed to think provide a template that enabled them to add their plan of action at a time convenient to them, in a location accessible from anywhere with an internet connection.

Our working answer at this time is to use a slideshow each week with a table where every member on staff has their own column to work in for the days they are allocated to our Village.

I chose to use a slideshow presentation format becuase we only need to create one per week and we can show one slide at a time, which means it's not visually overwhelming for the children when they see it on the big screen. As you can see from the image below, each day has 2 slides (morning and afternoon). I added speaker notes with instructions for people who need to revise how to edit the presentations.
The presentation is shared with staff only at this stage and is locked down so only staff members can edit it. Once we have refined the document and are happy with it, we can share the document with the children as "viewers only" so that the children with iPads can access the document electronically as a digital taskboard of sorts and will not have to rely on the large screen all of the time.

It will be interesting to see how it will look once people begin to edit the presentation and add their focus gorups and workshops in, however, the important point here is that we are endeavouring to work as one team right from the word go and develop a culture of teamwork and collaboration in our Village among children and adults. 

I'll keep you posted and let you know how it goes!