Looking back - planning forward
Reflection Our department. The people working in our department at the moment have gelled. They are energetic, sharing, and are willing to try new ideas by pushing their boundaries. They support each other when you need a hand. I am excited to work with them, I get new ideas from them all the time. I published an article in the New Zealand Science Teachers' Magazine. This took a lot more to write than I expected and the editor, Melissa, was enormously helpful. It was about a teaching inquiry project I did in 2014 which was inspired by a young south Auckland man, Joseph Iosefa's, TED talk "Brown Brothers", combined with Carol Dwek's growth mindset ideas, and class of Y11 science students who struggled with learning. Invisible borders and barriers affect all of us and we all need to kick down our borders to find our purpose. In 2015, I took this a bit further and used the ideas of breaking barriers with a growth mindset to tackle students' emotio