Looking back - planning forward

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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' emotions around "doing maths". 
There are amazing teachers in this world.  They know their subject so well.  Hattie says Expert teachers can identify key representations in their subject, guide learning, monitor learning, provide feedback, attend to effective attributes, and influence student outcomes.  BUT Amazing teachers do more than that though.  Amazing teachers nurture the soul of their students.  Amazing teachers feed them lunch if they need to, they feed their knowledge, they feed their courage.  Amazing teachers are champions for kids.

Rita Pierson: Every kid needs a champion: TED talk  I love what this lady has to say.  You can know all the great knowledge about your subject you like, but if you don't form a good relationship, then they wont learn, if they don't believe in themselves, the wont learn.

2016!


Kids need confidence - I want to create a class that creates kids with confidence.  I can take a course on the Carol Dwek website called Brainology.  It will cost me $60USD.  I think that will be worth it.

I want to utilise Office 365 more.  OneNoteClassroom has some great changes such as embedding in Moodle etc, I want to do that as I use moodle a lot and all my resources are already in Moodle.


I want to help other teachers with their - a drop in help centre at lunch time for teachers and students will be good.  I can do this in the library classroom.  Twitter, blogging, Office 365, OneNote.

MakerSpaces.  I dabbled with this in 2015.  The tinkering sessions were less successful than the origami session.  Might be that not having a finished product in the time frame isn't appealing to the kids.  Would like to get some coding in there too...maybe we can do some app building maker spaces.  3D printer would be nice.

I want to continue to work with people who inspire me, doing things for kids that help them.  Words for 2016: brave, fun, laughter, new.

 










Comments

  1. Suemcl1 January 2016 at 22:46

    Sounds like we are on the same path. Looking forward to it! Don't forget some down time... life/work balance!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Andy G1 January 2016 at 23:44

    Think Fong would be up for helping with easy coding exercises especially where only the eg values need changing to get a different but workable result.

    ReplyDelete

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