Mentoring New Teachers

I was fortunate to be asked to go on the the 4 day trip to Rawhiti Marae in November. I went with about 20 Māori students from Kata O'Donnell's tutor class and 3 other teachers. The purpose of the trip was to familiarise the students with Māori tikanga in a remote settlement on Māori land which is quite different from what they are accustomed to. Activities were run by WaiNot Tourism and featured a forest walk, snorkelling, fishing with nets, cooking pippis on the beach, swimming and jet ski riding. The students were kept busy from 7.45am until about 10pm at night. It was a great way for them to bond together well away from school and to have new experiences learning new skills. What did I learn from This? I learned more about ways of working with Māori students,the importance of tikanga, eating, sleeping and working together. It was fascinating to be in such a remote untouched environment and to see how the students behaved and related differently fro

This year I have done lots of learning at the school through staff PLD, PLuG groups and committees. But I wanted to learn more about digital photography as this is my hobby. I think it is important to have an interest outside of education and a hobby that requires lots of learning and improvement can also add to one's skills and knowledge base. Being a learner oneself and having to struggle is always beneficial to teachers as it reminds you of how difficult learning a new skill can be. The 3-day workshop was held over Labour weekend including a few days prior at Akaroa and taught by an Australian photographer, Ken Ball and 2 NZ photographers, Diane Costello and Murray Noble . We were being taught to forget about all the rules of photography and to try instead to be more creative by combining photography & art ie paint, etchings, transparencies, vellum, camera movement etc. This taught me to be less focussed by the rules of photography and more open to curiosity, trying new

In Term 3 Marc (Literacy Leader) and I decided to put in place a Literacy Action Plan for the school. It was obvious from the asTTle and PAT results and the excel spreadsheets on NCEA data/credits that many students were not achieving. An analysis of  NCEA results and NZQA Assessment Reports on each subject that a colleague and I had done in 2008 had proved that literacy - vocabulary, reading, writing, was a factor for students not achieving the NCEA standards across all subjects. I repeated this for 2016 here: NCEA Examiners'comments relating to Literacy Maths 2016 Level 1 some of the technical statistical words relating to interpretation of time series graphs were not fully understood. Candidates also need to ensure that the specific directions in the question are actually addressed, such as: compare, describe, justify, give statistical evidence, comment on showing numerical working. Level 2 The vocabulary of algebra needs to be understood so that candidat

A colleague & I did some research some years back by analysing examiners' comments on NCEA subjects.  We focussed on why students fail in NCEA? and How students get to Excellence in NCEA. We had a hunch that failure was to do with literacy - subject vocabulary, subject reading materials and subject writing requirements. We also had a hunch that from our experiences with classroom teaching, NCEA marking and working with teachers, that students attain Excellence or Scholarship through demonstrating the quality of their thinking and especially using the Extended Abstract category of the SOLO taxonomy. Analysis of the examiners' reports proved that our hunches were correct. 2016 examiner's reports can be seen here . The examiners descriptively list what students commonly did to be awarded Achieved, Not Achieved, Merit and Excellence. These lists are very helpful, especially for Beginning Teachers and the findings within the lists concur with our hunches of 8 years ago.

In conversation with a beginning teacher recently, the question of pedagogy came up. What is pedagogy? The Oxford dictionary defines pedagogy as"  The method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject or theoretical concept." Teaching as inquiry is an important aspect of effective pedagogy The NZ Curriculum defines pedagogy as: " Teacher actions promoting student learning " There is also  culturally responsive pedagogy. Ako  underpins the Practising Teacher Criteria and is an important component of culturally responsive teaching and learning.  A good way to check if you are including effective pedagogy in your lesson plans & units of work is to use these sentence starters. I create a supportive learning environment by........... I encourage reflective thought and action by............. I enhance the relevance of new learning by.............. I facilitate shared learning by.................. I make connections to prior learn

This video gives much to think about

Teaching as Inquiry is criteria 12 of the Practising Teacher Criteria  which all teachers, including provisionally certificated teachers, need to provide evidence both for appraisal & certification. For this criteria teachers are required to use critical inquiry  to critically examine their own beliefs,  including cultural beliefs, and how they impact on their professional practice and the achievement of ākonga (learners). I found this set of descriptors of good practice for teaching as inquiry in an article "Leading inquiry at teacher level" by Mike Fowler. The inquiry is based on a group of students you teach which could be selected students in one class, a whole class or students from different classes. You look for evidence of what is happening for these student in the classroom by asking these questions: Why are students in my class struggling with....? What are the challenges students are facing in this topic, course? How confident are these students about

John Hattie, currently co-chairing a Science of Learning Centre ,  stated in an interview that " we need to bring back ‘learning’ as our focus (more than ‘teaching)’.  What does it mean to learn, which learning strategies are optimal (when, how, and where), how do we assess and evaluate how a student learns (wow, we have so many measures of achievement but how many measures of learning do we have!), and how do new advances in the science of learning help make the difference." Yesterday 2 engineering students from University of Auckland spent the day showing students how to work with robots - how to code them, how to test the code on the maze, and how to improve the code so the robot could get through the maze. I observed them working with a Year 10 class. Knowing nothing about using robots in education, I was astonished to see what a difference it made to the students' learning. Instead of working on individual devices they naturally collaborated in groups and when the