Mentoring New Teachers

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...