My Preproom

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 ...

Oh, I am pleased for pivot tables!  They make your life soooo much easier.  I am not an expert on pivot tables or excel, in fact, I am an absolute pivot table beginner.  But this is pretty easy and worth the hour it has taken me tonight to figure out how to solve the problem.  It won't take you this long, because I have the solution right here! My goal : I wanted to analyse the student success data from NCEA results that NZQA offers which is 2004-2014.  I wanted to find out if the changes I had made since becoming HOD of our department in 2007, had long term effects on our student outcomes. I already had many years worth of NCEA data but made sure I had all of it.  I had to edit the format of the data to make sure it was uniform in format.  Problem : to get the averages of % achieved, % merit, % excellence for each subject, for each level, for each year WITHOUT calculating it all by hand.  I figured it was worth spending time ...

I was reading Clair Amos' latest blog (dated 4 Oct 2015)     http://www.teachingandelearning.com/   tonight.  She is talking about a way she combines the NZC Teacher as Inquiry Model on TKI to a design thinking model from Stanford University and putting the two together.  She offers a large collection of resources in her blog post, including how she rolled out this initiative to her staff, but there are a couple of ideas that struck me more than others, maybe this is because it is 10:30pm, but expedience is high on my priority right now.  The first was a recent presentation she gave at a conference and the second was a professional reading she suggested Spiral of Inquiry . At first I thought that the idea of merging the two models: NZC and Design Thinking together was redundant, they both achieve the same end and as I was familiar with the NZC model, I initially didn't think it worthy of delving but two ideas struck me e...

An absolute newbie, that's me.  This blog will contain my thoughts about ideas that influence me as a teacher, passionate student of science, juggler of home and work. So this is the first entry, step one of the challenge. The recent uproar about the OECD report of technology effects in the classroom.  After a long dept discussion about the whole idea, we concluded that most teachers do it poorly because they don't know how to do any better.  More training, more time, more, more.  Always the way.  But then on reflection I was thinking about the crazy busy time teachers have at work.  Hardly a moment to think straight.  Is this just ANOTHER thing to learn, to take into account in our ever expanding repertoire as subject teachers, careers advisors, subject literacy experts, culturally responsive, internally and externally moderated NCEA'ed to the back teeth?  OR is there a way to help us by using technology in kete of strategies for learning?...