Mentoring New Teachers

Hattie (2012) “teachers need to change to far less talk and much more listening”  Visible Learning for Teachers (p. 80).  “Teachers talk between 70 and 80 percent of class time (p. 80) Student engagement is higher when teachers talk less, this is especially true for at-risk students  Only “5-10 per cent of teacher talk triggers more conversation or dialogue engaging the student” (p. 81)  Research shows that “when highly effective and other teachers were compared, the former had more general class talk and less directive talk” (p. 81) How do we light the fire within students to express their thinking? Dr Aaron Wilson and Jacinta Oldehaver in their research in Talking about Text (TaT) worked to change traditional patterns of teacher dominated talk in the classroom and found that achievement rates in TaT classes were higher than in previous years and also higher than students in non TaT classes because of the changes in teacher talk. They found that ...

I have just been re-reading the notes I took at the Education Council (EC) workshop on the new standards at the beginning of this year. Provisionally certificated teachers (PCTs) are always worried about having enough evidence and what to record. I currently mentor 7 PCTs, 3 of whom are coming up for certification this year. What the EC has said is that they do not want voluminous portfolios of stuff and that they want to shift the emphasis from the showing of evidence to improvement of practice done through discussion and documentation. Teachers engaging in “learning talk” analyse, critique and challenge their current teaching practices to find and/or create more effective ways of teaching. ( Annan, Lai & Robinson 2003) The current situation is that ERO will audit the documentation for certification of teachers recently certificated. They are looking to see that the school has a robust system well founded in evidence. They will be looking at the level of support and inducti...

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...