Mentoring New Teachers

Mahi = work kotahitanga = working together ERO: " Mahi tahi (or mahi ngātahi) describes the unity of a group of people working towards a specific goal or on a specific task, often in a hands-on fashion.   In the school context, mahi tahi describes the business of working together collaboratively in the pursuit of learner-centred education goals. ....." At Tamaki College, staff are working together to raise student achievement in NCEA. I am on the Change Committee which meets every few weeks. We are a group of innovative educators who try to find different ways of approaching the challenge. We discuss and work on this sitting around the table eating brain food and then take it back to our respective PLuG groups for the group to share strategies and ways of working that have helped reach the achievement goals for priority students. It seems to be working because the list of priority students has become shorter as students go from no credits (red) to some credits (gree...

There has been much discussion around dropping NCEA Level 1 or reducing it to 40 credits in order to focus on bringing students up to the required levels of Literacy and Numeracy in order to be able to succeed in NCEA Level 2. Hobsonville Point secondary school had already dropped NCEA Level 1 before the Ministry review took place. They saw the focus on credits and constant assessment as limiting deeper learning as there was less time to explore topics of interest and less time for learning.   " International studies have confirmed that a credit-focused educational model promotes superficial learning, not the quality stuff that sticks with us" (Stuff June 2018). Fairfield College and  Rototuna Senior High School have also dropped NCEA Level 1 but Rototuna gives the students some experience of sitting an external assessment ie not everything needs to be assessed. Students at all 3 schools will still do Level 1 courses but not assessed for NCEA leaving more time for lear...

Ensuring all students achieve success Last Night I attended a lecture by Christine Rubie Davis on High Expectation Teachers. She was talking about her findings from a recent research project. What I took from this talk was that high expectation teachers: use flexible student grouping (according to activity) and a variety of learning experiences. Use assessment information to set goals for each student and support the student to achieve them through high expectations. Students have autonomy over their learning through setting goals and selecting activities to work on – for example with " must-do, can-do” options. It is essential that: expectations for each student are appropriate. teachers provide the scaffolding learners need in order to progress (Vygotsky). the impact of teaching practice on student learning is monitored in an ongoing way. teachers take action to change their practice if it is not having the desired effect. Low ...

Digital Intensive I learned some basic things that will make my life easier this week. Gmail - Put Gmail on compact settings and then I  seem to have half as many emails to attend to! Put a pink flower theme into my Gmail and I feel a lot calmer when writing and answering emails I don't like the way Gmail nests conversations because I sometimes miss new emails so I can use "conversation view off" and "new mail notifications" on. The problem is we get into the habit of just doing what has already been set up rather than looking at other possibilities. One Tab I now have the OneTab icon on my computer " Whenever you find yourself with too many tabs, click the OneTab icon to convert all of your tabs into a list. When you need to access the tabs again, you can either restore them individually or all at once. When your tabs are in the OneTab list, you will save up to 95% of memory because you will have reduced the number of tabs open in Google Chr...

AKO featured in the Practising Teacher Criteria - in fact it underpinned those criteria in that the word ākonga was used throughout " to be inclusive of all learners in the full range of settings, from early childhood to secondary and beyond, where the  Practising Teacher Criteria  apply. Ako, on he other hand, " is a teaching-learning practice that involves teachers and students learning in an interactive dialogic relationship". These words don't feature in the "new" Standards for the Teaching Profession but come through in "seek and respond to feedback from learners" (Standard 2); "engage in reciprocal, collaborative learning - focused relationships....." (Standard 3) Kia Eke Panuku   Teaching and learning roles are interdependent, fluid and dynamic; students and teachers are able to learn with and from other learners ( ako ). This aligns well with the idea of peer tutoring and peer assessment used in Assessment for Learning  a...

This week we focussed on our pepeha . I do have Māori heritage and know my ancestral line but have not been brought up as Māori. I have developed my pepeha using screencastify (see read more)

Digital Intensive 2 I can't believe that a week has passed since the last digital intensive. Today we were looking at Google Forms, Google Sheets and Google maps. We began this session with the history of Manaiakalani around Learning and the pedagogy of "Learn, Create, Share". Research underpinning this came from John Hattie's constructivist and metacognitive approach, Russell Bishop's culturally responsive pedagogy, the global study for the Ministry of Education that showed acceleration can be achieved through inquiry driven exploration and the use of the Google platform. We learned how to set up a Google form with many available options that would give us data that we can analyse either as baseline data, feedback data or exit data. I created a Google form with questions around the new Education Council standards and sent it out to 10 teachers - have had 3 responses so will send again. I had recently attended a workshop on these and will be using th...