Inclusive education

As part of our session on inclusive education we watched a youtube clip which discussed inclusive practices in a range of different schools.  It featured the perspectives of teachers, principals, parents and the students themselves.  Something I found really interesting in this video was a discussion on using teacher aide time - one of the principals discussed using the teacher aide to take the class to give the teacher time to spend one on one with a child with special learning needs.  They mentioned that children can often become isolated if they are often working with a teacher aide - they felt that the presence of an adult deterred other students from working with them.  Another issue raised in this video was that children can become very dependent on their teacher aides, so one school rotated teacher aides through different classrooms at different times to avoid this.   This raised a number of issues I had not considered and will be something to reflect on when I have my own classroom.

GTS 3 Graduating teachers understand how contextual factors influence teaching and learning.
3A: Graduating teachers have an understanding of the complex influences that personal, social and cultural factors may have on teachers and learners.

Reflection on writing learning intentions and success criteria

Today on the first day of the second part of the refresher course face to face we looked at writing effective learning intentions and success criteria.  The question our group focused on was "How could success criteria be developed and used?" We reflected on the fact that success criteria are cyclical, informed by prior knowledge, observation and conferencing, and identified gaps in learning.  We discussed the fact that success criteria could be developed by discussing the learning intention with the students and getting them to co-construct the criteria that would demonstrate that they had fulfilled that learning intention.

Something I found very important from this discussion was the idea that a successful learning intention does not contain the context for the task.  So learning to write about how to write instructions you would write something like "WALT Write a list of instructions" not "WALT Write instructions for how to make a sandwich."  This helped to make success criteria clear for me and is something I will check my success criteria against in the future.

GTS 2 Graduating teachers know about learners and how they learn.
2B:  Graduating teachers have knowledge of a range of relevant theories, principles and purposes of assessment and evaluation.

Unpacking the curriculum - languages

This is a presentation we made as part of one of our first face to face classes - we were unpacking a curriculum area and my group did "Learning Languages."

GTS 1
Graduating teachers know what to teach
1A: Graduating teachers have content knowledge appropriate to the learners and learning areas of their programme.
1C: Graduating teachers have knowledge of the relevant curriculum documents of Aotearoa New Zealand.  

Poppies

I made these poppy wreaths back around ANZAC Day with a class of Year 2 and 3 children at Lincoln Heights School.  As an introduction to the activity I read the class The Eels of ANZAC Bridge and brought in a photo of the real ANZAC Bridge in Kaiparoro.  I also read them Lest we Forget by Feana Tu'akoi.  Both of these stories deal with war from a child's perspective, making the topic relatable to children's own lives.  The eels migrating to Tonga in The Eels of ANZAC Bridge really sparked the children's attention, and the eels in this book mirrored the soldiers going off to war.  I found this a very effective way to give context to the art activity.

Maths lesson observation - 8/9/15

Differentiated learning - writing lesson

This is a template I made for writing narratives, an adaptation of the hamburger model in Sheena Cameron and Louise Dempsey's The Writing Book.  I had been using this with all my writing groups but it became evident that one group found it too challenging.  The syndicate leader had popped in and observed some of my writing lesson and I mentioned this to her - she suggested simplifying the template for the group that found it too challenging.  I did this and found that they were able to cope much better with the task with a simplified model, and they were much more engaged with the task, proudly showing me their completed work.  This demonstrated to me the importance of differentiated learning.

GTS 5: Graduating teachers use evidence to promote learning.
5A: Graduating teachers systematically and critically engage with evidence to reflect on and refine their practice.

Stop your full stops crying - writing lesson observation

My AT observed me for this writing lesson - I took a small writing group (including the four students for my inquiry group) while the rest of the class worked on their narrative writing.  I noticed that many students were talking and not getting much writing done so I projected a 15 minute countdown timer on the whiteboard to give them a sense of urgency.  As noted in my AT's observation here and my reflection, the timer did help to get the children focused, however they got a bit silly at the end, counting down as it reached zero. Overall however I think using the countdown timer was an effective strategy, in conjunction with marking the starting point of 15 minutes in the students' books.  It was helpful for enabling me to see their progress and to get a greater volume of writing done.