Mentoring New Teachers

There has been much talk about reviewing NCEA . NCEA was implemented in the 2002-2004 and has been changed, upgraded and the like over time to make it more equitable. But NCEA is a qualification based on given standards not a true reflection of a students' strengths and capabilities. NCEA is supposedly an assessment of what students can do. But we know that there are students that do amazing things outside of NCEA but these abilities do not count. Unfortunately NCEA has led to some degree to over-assessment, credit counting (if it doesn't give me credits, it doesn't count) and extraordinary pressure on schools, teachers and students. NZAI was set up this year to look at quality assessment across the education system. Schools came together in seminars across NZ to look at positive ways of assessing student progress. Avonside Girls' High School suggested integrating learning across multiple standards to minimise the NCEA effect using connected learning across m...

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 a...

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...